Shows / The Obsessive Diary
The Obsessive Diary
I write a diary and publish it. What could possible go wrong...
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Episodes
The Obsessive DiaryLive with Eleanor Anstruther
Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with…
The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Essie Fox
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The Obsessive DiaryElectric Wuthering
It was a train ride to Gladstone Library which began with a complicated shifting of luggage and repacking awkwardly in the back of my car in an echoey London…
The Obsessive DiaryStress calls
I’ll be honest with you. I’m pre-pub stressed. Alisa Kennedy Jones and I jumped on a zoom last night and I said, “I’m apologising in advance for how annoying…
The Obsessive DiaryYoot
So he’s been arrested. I might have been the last person in the UK to hear this, my day being spent well away from ticker-tape streaming breaking news and…
The Obsessive DiaryLive with Eleanor Anstruther & London Writers' Salon
Thank you Angie Browne, Billy Bumbo, Lindsey Trout Hughes, Isabel Peralta, Kristin Austin, and many others for tuning into my live video with London Writers'…
The Obsessive DiaryWho By Fire - in conversation with Mary Tabor
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The Obsessive DiaryThere Will Be This
On the tube yesterday it struck me, this splintering of reality, so many versions, one for every passenger moving along the platform. It wasn’t always that our…
The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Erica Drayton
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Petra Khashoggi
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Diane Woodrow
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The Obsessive DiaryIncreasingly, there is poetry
Increasingly, there is poetry. From Andrea Gibson‘s every time i ever said i want to die, to Sherman Alexie‘s Black Box. Yesterday I met with the man who chose…
The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Kelly Thompson
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Susie Mawhinney
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Clover Stroud
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The Obsessive DiaryYes
I’m tired. It’s been a lot. It’s only January. And then I speak to my friends in the states and the grief and rage comes in pins through their faces on the…
The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Marlon Weems
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Elizabeth Day
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Matthew Long
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Sally Reid
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The Obsessive DiaryBecause Creativity - it’s not about the money, with Eleanor Anstruther and David Roberts
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The Obsessive DiaryIn conversation with Geraint Anderson
Be a winner! Pre order Geraint Anderson ‘s latest book, How To Con Friends And Manipulate People This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with…
The Obsessive DiaryThe Handbook on 18-25
“Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems,” said my friend on the phone last night. We’re in the era of 18 - 25 when they’re not kids anymore…
The Obsessive DiaryThank you
Dear Everyone, These last three months have been hail stones, this diary an entry of sorrows and however much I’ve wanted to turn up with ta dah! a break in…
The Obsessive DiaryAnd so it goes
And so it goes. I seem to have drawn to a halt. It’s winter. Hibernation is obvious. Christmas was incredibly loving in the arms of my Somerset family. They…
The Obsessive DiaryHappy Christmas, everyone
Throughout the funeral I saw her swooping over fields, laughing, arms outstretched, doing double backflips; that was the Jeanetta I knew. Elegant and social…
The Obsessive DiaryOh Christmas
I’m not sure when my dislike of Christmas set in. Was it as a child? I don’t think so. I remember the excitement and routine, the stockings and tinsel on my…
The Obsessive DiaryTendrils
I have the sensation of roots being pulled from my heart, dead roots that have been cut off from their source, no longer alive roots but tangled entanglements…
The Obsessive DiaryLonging
When I was a very small child I witnessed a terrible violence. Its flashback was the domino which set off all the others, it was the key waiting to be fitted…
The Obsessive DiaryWriting courses with Kit de Waal
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The Obsessive DiaryEnough
I’ve been thinking about necessary family estrangement and what happens when relationships breakdown. I’ve been thinking about last chapters and what they look…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE with Heather Bartos
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The Obsessive DiaryNumbers
First off, thank you all for showing up with such incredible kindness, generosity and love since I published “Shattered”. I was conscious of the delicate line…
The Obsessive DiaryShattered
It’s been useful having the memoir to republish over the last month because in that time two relationships have shattered. That makes three this year, if death…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE with Abby Ross
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The Obsessive Diary65. Recovery Is For Another Book
It’s funny to think that within days of the black box opening I headed off to the Venice Biennale, that most surreal and picturesque of places which on a…
The Obsessive Diary64. A Matter Of Survival
Bad things happened in the basement of that house. It’s taken a long time for me to say that. The pictures of my childhood never made sense, why I was so…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE with Annie Macmanus
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The Obsessive Diary63. Gremlins
I’m going to tell you a fairy story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who saw something. She happened upon a woman in a bath who was drinking a glass…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE with Marlon Weems
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The Obsessive Diary62. We Drove Them Wild
At the heart of addiction lies trauma. It’s an answer to the question, How can I live with such pain? My love affair with needles was a problem-solver and like…
The Obsessive Diary61. When Crazy Met Crazy
It’s now that the shaman overplays his hand. You’d think cutting the brakes on my car and locking me out of my house would have done it. Or throwing a party…
The Obsessive Diary60. Thin Crazed White Girl
The same word, written over and over, all over the hotel bedroom wall. And he was gone. In another version of this story I apologised to the hotel staff, paid…
The Obsessive Diary59. The Island
I’m not sure what happened except we’d been up for a week under an eclipse and instead of going to bed about a hundred of us decided to carry on. The island…
The Obsessive Diary58. Crack Daddy Wanted
That was the kind of party it was. A thousand people on a plot of land in Zambia, gathered for an eclipse. We’d flown to Jo’burg with hand luggage of toy guns…
The Obsessive Diary57. Invincible
There is a version of this story where you stayed in the jungle, and I came back to England and our relationship remained three addictive magical months in a…
The Obsessive Diary56. The First Needle
We left the party and moved in together. It was that simple. There was a house which two beautiful Japanese boys had found; I had been staying there with the…
The Obsessive Diary55. A Party Out The Back Of Mullum
Do you remember? A party out the back of Mullum, a lake, an Australian night. I was high and you were wild or was it the other way round. I’d dumped my willowy…
The Obsessive DiaryLIVE with James Geary
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The Obsessive Diary54. Three Other Memories
Here are three other memories I carried unbroken and unquestioned. Every night I would slide down the banister of the tall, cold house, curving polished wood…
The Obsessive Diary53. Like Keyser Söze, Was Gone
When I was three a man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a…
The Obsessive Diary52. Buckle Up
He went to Mexico for the summer to see his teacher leaving me in charge of the sweat lodge altar. I cleaned and lit and waved incense and genuflected but the…
The Obsessive Diary51. A Blank Wall Of Silence
There’s a blank wall of silence in my mind when I try and think back, to capture the essence of what it was like to live and work with a boy from Kent who…
The Obsessive Diary50. The Shaman
It’s going to be all right. This story that has been going from frying pan to fire has a happy outcome in the end. I feel the need to tell you that because…
The Obsessive Diary49. Doormat
A black fly buzzes about the kitchen as I write, small and annoying. It circles me, persistent and I’m not surprised. That was him, single-minded and obvious…
The Obsessive Diary48. The Egg Man Cometh
I had painted myself into a corner the day he arrived. Returned to the farm after a year away I no longer knew where I fitted into this thing we’d started, a…
The Obsessive Diary47. I Am Coming For You
I woke this morning with that Richard Wilbur quote spinning round my head: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.” I have…
The Obsessive Diary46. A Day In The Life Of A Cult
That motherfucker. He smashed my brain. I’d moved to a flat in Tottenham with other students, a place we could watch our thoughts, police each other and go…
The Obsessive Diary45. Drama School
It didn’t say cult in the brochure. It said, We will make you the best actor ever, or some such s**t because he was full of grand claims, the man who ran it…
The Obsessive Diary44. Lordy Don't Leave Me
There was a song we used to play, the words had her name in them, Lordy don’t leave me, the Carpenter listened to it over and over. Her name was Lourdes, she’d…