Joanne Harris

Flashes from the archives of oblivion.

[joannechocolat]

In Praise of the Battered Paperback

Old books are the heart of my childhood. While I was growing up, we had more books in the house than we had furniture. The walls were shelved in hardbacked books; there were books under the beds, on the floor; stacked under a tablecloth to make a coffee-table. I spent my pocket-money on books, working out how many I could afford to buy with my weekly allowance. If I went onto the market, I could buy second-hand paperbacks by the yard for the price of a can of Coke, and although my mother disapproved of paperbacks in general, I read these avidly, in any genre from science fiction to romance; from spy novels to hardboiled mysteries.

Pulp fiction has had a mixed reputation over the years. Despised by the kind of reader who feels that only hardbacks are “serious,” mass-market paperbacks are often assumed to be less worthwhile, even trashy. And yet the books I loved the most were all mass-market paperbacks. Books with split spines, held together with tape; books with creased covers, bent pages. Books that have been read in the bath, swollen to three times their size. Books jammed into back pockets, or sneaked into bed with a flashlight. Books that have been re-read a dozen times, as familiar and as comforting as a favourite pair of sneakers.

Some people never re-read a book. I have never understood this. Much as I love discovering new things, I am a great re-reader of books, especially when I need something friendly and unchallenging. And I am a great believer in exploring different media: the rise of e-books and audiobooks have made books more widely accessible, especially to those who find the printed page a challenge. I have a Kindle, which is very useful when I’m travelling, although I’d never take it to the beach, or try to read it in the bath. And of course, I own plenty of hardbacks, too. But hardbacks are seldom comforting. Hardbacks may be beautiful, like carefully chosen objets d’art: but they are often too large to large to handle easily; too precious to be carried around. Hardbacks are teachers, professors, role models, even idols, but paperbacks are equals; friends. Paperbacks are always there at the best and worst of times. In times of plenty, buy them new: in times of need, buy them cheaply from market stalls and charity shops. As a child, I loved Rider Haggard’s jungle epics; Willard Price’s Adventure series; Enid Blyton’s mysteries. As an adolescent I discovered Stephen King, P.G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, John Mortimer, Ramsey Campbell, Georgette Heyer. I still have a whole shelf of these authors, books that I like to read in the bath: I know them almost by heart, which means that I can pick them up or put them down at will. And it means that however tired I am, or how many life challenges I am facing, my friends are always waiting to help relieve the pressure, like a pair of comfortable shoes.

When I’m signing at festivals, I love the well-read copies best. The copies that have been passed on from parent to child; the ones that have travelled all over the world. People sometimes apologize for not bringing a brand-new copy, but I take it as a compliment if theirs is battered and distressed. When I was 21, Roger Zelazny came to sign in a fantasy bookshop in Leeds, I handed him (rather nervously) my copy of Nine Princes in Amber, and he smiled and said: “You’ve been reading this in the bath, haven’t you, hon?” It was the nicest thing he could possibly have said. Because books are meant to be loved, not displayed; not stored in plastic wrappers.

Of course, the rise of the e-book, with all its shiny new innovations, may mean the slow death of the paperback. That doesn’t mean the death of the book: books remain books, whether they come to us in physical or virtual form. But in the tale, the offer of “new lamps for old,” turns out to be a bad bargain. It’s hard to find magic in hardware. And a physical book can be read and passed on: an e- book is only ever on loan. Our libraries of e-books will die with us, unlike the books we hope to pass on. Yesterday, at my mother’s house, I found her going through a pile of old books that had belonged to my father. Some dictionaries in German; some books on gardening and history. And a little stack of paperbacks with lurid pulp-fiction covers: my father always had a love of spy thrillers and Westerns. “I don’t know what he saw in those,” my mother said. “They’re terrible.”

Perhaps they were. But I took them home, each one neatly marked with his initials on the inside flap. Some are in German, some in French (as if my father needed the excuse of improving his language skills to read the things he really enjoyed.) And they smell of tobacco, and autumn leaves, and the pages are filled with memories. And yes, perhaps they’re terrible. But they are also marvellous; little slices of vanished time. My father died of Alzheimer’s, leaving the unfinished paperback he’d been trying to read for over three years on his bedside cabinet, as if he hoped I’d finish it. And yes, this year, perhaps I will. Until then, it will live in my shed, where I keep all my favourite things. I think my father would approve.  

[myakmyak]

I finished reading "Chocolat" today, and decided to draw the main character in honor of it.

[ratbeef95]

[myjetpack]

My cartoon for this week’s New Scientist.

Tom Gauld is a cartoonist and illustrator. He makes weekly cartoons for New Scientist and The Guardian and occasional covers for The New Yor

[myakmyak]

I finished reading "Chocolat" today, and decided to draw the main character in honor of it.

[joannechocolat]

[joannechocolat]

You wanted to know what she looks like? Here she is: Vianne's Chocolat; available from all Blue Diamond Nurseries from May 22nd. And she smells gorgeous...

[art-tnt]

[trochaic-mutant-ninja-tetrameter]

🎶You deserve to get paid! Let them know that!🎵

[joannechocolat]

Naming the rose

I wrote this about the weird and emotional journey that is finding and naming a new rose. I hope you like it...

“It’s funny, how far a glass of champagne can sometimes lead.”

It’s April 2025, and I’m standing in a muddy field in Hereford. The line you just read has been spoken by an attractive blonde woman wearing a lapel microphone. I too am wearing a microphone, and a few feet away, another woman is filming us both and recording our conversation. “Sorry, can we try that again? I loved the line about the glass of champagne, but I don’t think our CEO will like it.”

We start the conversation again, this time without the champagne line. We’re talking about roses. One rose in particular, a new variety to be launched in less than a month at the Chelsea Flower Show. That’s where this story begins, I suppose, at last year’s Chelsea Flower Show, where I’d stopped by for a glass of champagne in a tent where a group of people were helping launch a new rose into the world. Turns out that a rose launch is not unlike a book launch: there are guests, photographers, champagne and of course the rose itself, which, like a novel, represents many, many hours of hard work behind the scenes from people who may not attend this day of celebration.

Except that of course, this story began many years before all that. Stories have a habit of grafting themselves onto old stock, creating new growth, new narratives from something that . And this one goes back to Barnsley in the 1930s, to a man who never once drank champagne, or came to the Chelsea Flower Show. But my grandfather was a gardener. The son of a family of coal miners, he longed for a garden of his own, and his father reluctantly allowed him to cultivate a strip of land alongside their house as long as he grew food for the family. But Granddad was a romantic. He secretly loved flowers. I have a photograph of him in his garden, aged about eighteen, surrounded by giant cabbages. And cunningly placed among them, taking hardly any space, are roses, heads modestly hidden beneath the spreading leaves of the vegetables.

Those roses. I don’t know what colour they were, but I do know they were scented. He used to say that a scentless rose was like chips without salt and vinegar. The back of his house was given over to fruit trees, rhubarb, vegetables. But the front was all roses; all scented; in every possible colour. And all the roses had names, because each one was a story. I often used to wonder how the roses had been named; pored over his catalogues; sometimes made up stories about the most evocative. Jeanne d’Arc. Old Blush. Ispahan. Albertine. Sometimes I tried to make rosewater by cramming petals into a jar: the results were never very satisfactory, but it never stopped me trying. But what I really wanted was to have the chance to name a rose: to tell its story to the world through leaves and shoots and flowers. It was a little girl’s fantasy; but when I came to mention it that year, at the Chelsea flower Show, the lady I was talking to handed me that glass of champagne and said: “We can make that happen.”

The lady in question was Heidi Towse, from Blue Diamond Garden Centres. I’d met her through my cousin, Jill, who had invited me that day. My grandfather would have loved that: he’d never been to Chelsea, but he’d always wanted to go (I suspect that to him, travelling as far as London for a flower show seemed too much of an indulgence.) But picture the excitement of fulfilling that little girl’s fantasy: my grandfather died long before I could show him the novels I’d had published, but I suspect that naming a rose would have impressed him more than all of my books put together.

There followed a lot of e-mails about what kind of rose I wanted to name; what colour, what scent. (A scented one. Of course. My grandfather would have accepted no less.) The colour was more of a difficult choice: I have a kind of synaesthesia that means that I smell colours, and so the colour of a rose often smells very different to its actual scent. But by then I’d decided what my rose’s story would be. It’s a story you probably know, about a woman called Vianne Rocher, and the village in which she opens a shop. I wanted to name my rose after her, to acknowledge all she has meant to me over the past twenty-six years. And so I decided upon a rose of a very particular shade: a kind of dusky, damask red which, to me, smells of chocolate. And after some discussion with the German nursery, I decided on a name.

Of course, I hadn’t seen the rose at that point. I’d only seen it in photographs, but I was assured that in the spring I would get to see it grow. The roses begin their journey in a German nursery, Rosen Tantau. Then they travel to Britain, where they are prepared to meet the public. Which is why I’m in Hereford today, at one of Allensmore Nurseries, one of Blue Diamond’s suppliers, in a muddy field in which thousands of tiny rose bushes, no more than three of four inches long, are lined up in the deep red soil. These are the stock onto which my rose will be grafted: they will be kept over winter and sold to the public the following year. They don’t look much at the moment, but, like stories, they will grow, making roots and buds and leaves. By summer 2026, this whole field will be awash with the with the colour and scent of these roses, named after the heroine of my new novel, Vianne: the origin story of Vianne Rocher on her journey towards Chocolat. And on May 22nd, when my novel launches, my rose will launch alongside it, at the Chelsea Flower Show, and at Blue Diamond garden centres all over the country. I visit a part of the nursery where almost 500 rose bushes in pots stand waiting in neat rows. These will go on sale next month; in June they will be in flower. Jeff, who manages the nursery, insists on giving me one to take home. I bring it back with me on the train, swaddled in a waterproof bag. I mean to plant it by the shed that serves as my garden office. Next year, I may be able to smell its flowers from my window.

The rose has such a powerful role in literature around the world. Legends are built around it. Poets from Shakespeare to Sappho found inspiration in its scent. And over and over we see it as a symbol of the heart – just as the ancient Mayans saw the cacao bean as a human heart. In fact, chocolate and roses are often seen together. Both are symbols of romantic love. Both are laden with stories. And, I hope, my rose will bring all those stories together in one flower, which to me will smell of bitter chocolate and rose, and maybe grow stories of its own in flower gardens all over the world.

It’s funny how far a glass of champagne, or a taste of chocolate, or a seedling, or a story, can lead. All have their own narratives. All in their way are transformative. All are the product of long months of work by many individuals. And all are celebratory, speaking to the part of us that longs for something magical, something that grows beyond what we previously expected.

The name of the rose is Vianne’s Chocolat.

My Granddad would have understood.

[joannechocolat]

Burn the library, or walk inside. Either way, it's your choice.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you can't have missed the escalating riots all around the country - riots which the media keep referring to as "protests", in spite of the fact that no-one involved seems to agree on just what they are protesting against.

Dragging strangers out of cars, burning down public buildings, throwing stones at ambulancemen, setting fire to hotels in a deliberate attempt to burn the people inside alive - and maybe scoring a new phone or pair of trainers on the way home - has nothing to do with "protest."

It certainly has nothing to do with the brutal murder of three little girls, although that was used as a springboard by online agitators, claiming that the murderer was an immigrant (he wasn't, and even if he were, attacking other immigrants because of what he did makes about as much sense as torching a Wetherspoons in Manchester in protest against Myra Hindley.) Nor does it have anything to do with Asian grooming gangs in Rotherham, although that's the most recent excuse I've heard: those grooming gangs were dreadful, but these criminals do not represent the Asian community any more than do the white leaders of grooming gangs (which by far outnumber them).

So, what the fuck is this about?

Well, it's the illegal immigrants, they say. Coming into our country, taking our jobs, raping our girls, yadda, yadda, yadda. Except that it isn't. Brexit has made it increasingly difficult for foreigners to work here, which is why so many European doctors and nurses have already left the country, putting still yet more pressure onto our dying NHS. And refugees - let's call them that, given they're neither immigrants, nor here illegally - aren't allowed to work while their application is being processed. As for "immigrant crime", a phrase that these people have borrowed from Trump - it represents a tiny proportion of crime in the UK, which by the way has risen sharply as the riots have escalated, because the police just don't have the manpower to fight on two fronts at the same time.

And add to this the fact that the principal agitators - people like Yaxley-Lennon and Farage - don't even live in this country, I think it's pretty clear that whatever motivation these burners of libraries, looters of shops, and goose-stepping Nazi cosplayers claim, it has nothing to do with "British values" or "taking back the country", and everything to do with doing whatever the fuck they want and blaming it on someone else.

Why do I care? Because I was born in one of these communities. I still have family in Rotherham, in Barnsley. I live less than fifteen miles away from the heart of these riots. I've done events in the libraries and universities that have been attacked. And by the way, isn't it weird how thugs always target libraries and places of learning on their way to robbing their local Lush, or Greggs, or Shoezone?

It's almost as if the agitators know that education is the key. That reading brings us together; teaches us to question what we read on the internet; crosses cultural boundaries; reminds us we're all human. And in disaffected communities like Rotherham, with a high degree of poverty, access to these ideas is very dangerous in the eyes of a far-right movement that wants to take power.

Already, 14 years of austerity, cuts and corruption has brought the country to its knees. By cutting education and the arts, Tories have reduced the access of these underprivileged communities to critical thinking and new ideas. Brexit has done further damage, as well as cutting us off from our allies. After the event, it is now clear how much Russian misinformation played its part in that process, just as it's playing a part right now in spreading its racist rhetoric via supporters like Farage and the fake accounts that amplify him. Now they're no longer in power, the far-right is doing its best to do as much further damage as possible to our society, urging people to "take control" by destroying anything else that can help them out of poverty.

Why? Because poor people are easier for the far-right to control. Poverty and crime are linked; just as illiteracy and crime are linked. And both of those things are linked to hate; to racism and mistrust of anyone who seems different.

But here's the thing. There's always a choice. Not everyone who grows up poor becomes a criminal. Not everyone who missed out on a good education becomes a racist. I grew up in a poor neighbourhood. There were some racists there, and some thugs, but most people were decent and honest. Most people were happy to co-exist with people of different cultures. I was one of those people; my family was different. Sometimes people even told us to go back home where we belonged. Most didn't. But of course, were were white. We looked like them. There's an obvious reason why brown and Black people in particular are being dehumanized and blamed for what's wrong with the country now.

And it's ironic, how people react when someone calls them racist? "But we're just ordinary people, with ordinary concerns."

"I'm not racist, I'm just (insert your bullshit reason here)."

And yet, here we are. Racism is ordinary. And if you do racist things, if you blame all brown people for what one brown person did, if you judge people by the way they look, if you make assumptions about whole groups of people, then you're a racist. And if you spout Nazi slogans, do Nazi salutes, walk with Nazis, repeat Nazi propaganda, then you're a fucking Nazi, mate. Live with it, or change. Your choice.

Because the choices we make today affect what comes tomorrow. And although poverty isn't a choice, being a decent person is. Your choices can help your children break the cycle of despair. Or they can keep your kids stuck in the same rut. To put it another way, you can take your kids to the library and let them learn to think for themselves. Or you can burn the libraries down and take them to watch you and your mates trying to set fire to some terrified refugees in a hotel instead.

Either way, your kids get to live with the choices you make today.

Right now, you're deciding their future.

Your choice.

[joannechocolat]

Two Boxers Walk Into the Ring...

No-one can have missed the absolute scenes on social media, both before and after the boxing match between Imane Khelife and Angela Carini, from which Carini withdrew after just 46 seconds, having received a blow to the face.

Social media had already been abuzz with unfounded claims that Khelife was a man, largely based on her athletic (and to Westerners, “masculine”) body type. (The same rumours had also been spread about Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting; also a woman, assigned female at birth, who got into boxing to protect her mother from domestic violence.) From this explosion of misinformation came increasingly wild claims from all the usual suspects: that she was trans (in spite of coming from a Muslim country where transitioning isn’t allowed); that she had “self-identified” as a woman in order to win (again, not possible in Algeria) plus some quite ghoulish speculation about her sex organs, her medical history and the type of puberty she might have undergone.

But here’s the thing.

Khelife is not trans. There is one trans boxer at the Olympics, a trans man called Hergie Bacyadan, who for some reason has gone almost unnoticed in this desperate attempt to prove a conspiracy that just isn’t happening. Imane Khelife was assigned female at birth, has a passport confirming it, and has spent her life as a woman, fighting against her country’s patriarchal ideas of what women are supposed to do. Not only this, but she is an ambassador for women and girls, who originally took up boxing to protect herself from those who disapproved of her interest in sports.

She was disqualified from the 2023 women’s world championships because (according to a Russian source that becomes less and less trustworthy the more you look into it) tests apparently showed some kind of unspecified anomaly, which may have been either elevated testosterone (quite possible in a woman) or the presence of XY chromosomes, once more altogether possible for a cis woman.

Nor does her condition (if she even has one) mean she is automatically likely to win against her opponents. In 2020, she made it to the quarter-finals of the Olympics, where she was defeated by Kellie Harrington, and she has been boxing on the international circuit for years without any of her wins or defeats gaining much attention.

Until now.

But her fight against Angela Carini on Thursday made her a magnet for some truly disgusting hate, largely, it seems, from the kind of men who enjoy threatening women, whatever the reason or excuse. In fact, there were distinct parallels with this and the recent anti-Muslim riots in Southport after the murderer of three little girls was falsely rumoured by agents of the far-right to be a Muslim immigrant.

Let’s be clear. Even if the attacker had been a Muslim immigrant, this violence would have been completely unacceptable. But the mob just wanted the opportunity to scapegoat and attack a community, in exactly the same way that the people attacking, threatening and objectifying Imane Khelife wanted the chance to attack a woman for not conforming to their idea of what a woman should be like.

In this context, it’s hard to see the rage and violence levelled against her for this victory as anything other than misogynistic - and racist.

It’s also hard to understand why in a sport like boxing – where the whole point is to hit your opponent – a person should be criticized for following the rules of the sport. It’s almost as if excellence is allowed in men’s sports, but in women’s sports, it’s automatically viewed as suspicious. And Imane Khelife isn’t the only athlete of colour accused of “being a man” because she defeated a white woman. Serena Williams has spent her career fending off accusations that she “was born a man” both because of her muscular physique and her excellence in her field. Caster Semenya, who has naturally elevated levels of testosterone, has been likewise demonized. It’s almost as if the people driving this toxic narrative believe that only men can excel in sport.   

And as for the argument that claims that elevated natural testosterone levels in a woman is “an unfair advantage,” don’t all elite athletes have some kind of physical advantage? Do we dismiss basketball players for being unusually tall, or weight-lifters for being unusually muscular, or runners for being lean and light? Why do we celebrate Michael Phelps for his genetic advantage, but penalize Caster Semenya for hers? Women have fought so very hard for the chance to participate in sports that were once seen as the sole province of men. Now, when they dare to excel in them, they are accused of secretly being men, or of not being “proper women.”

This isn’t any kind of feminism I recognize. The feminism I believe in is about breaking down barriers, not setting them. I personally dislike boxing (both for men and for women), but I respect any individual’s choice to compete. And attacking a woman boxer for winning a boxing match is as misogynistic as claiming to “defend” her opponent by painting her as a victim. Both athletes chose to compete. Both accepted the risks. Both have had their Olympic moment ruined by people who don’t care about sports, or the facts, or even women. This isn’t feminism. This is the worst and most patronizing kind of prejudice, and it actively hurts women – all women, but especially women of colour and those who do not conform to traditional ideas of what a woman should look like, what sports she should enjoy, or how she should behave.

Women fought for years for the right to make their own choices, to have their own identities outside of the stereotypes set by the patriarchy. Questioning those choices - those identities - isn’t progress.

 Supporting women doesn’t mean protecting them from themselves.

It means not setting limits on who a woman wants to be.

[joannechocolat]

On Turning 60

When I was a child, someone told me: “Every life is a story.” I used to wonder what mine would be like; what adventures I would have. My favourite stories were from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, which my grandfather used to read to me:  thus I imagined my own story as a forest adventure in which I would run wild with my friends, and pick fruit by the wayside. I never imagined growing old, just as I never imagined the adults around me ever being young. And death, if I thought of it at all, was a monster that kept to the shadows, and never dared to show its face outside of the scariest stories.

I was four years old when I first encountered the monster. It was in France, when my great-grandmother died, having been taken suddenly ill as she and I were playing a game. I still remember that suddenness, and my mother’s tears, and the whispers of “not in front of the children”, and the various well-meaning relatives trying in their different ways, to explain to me why I shouldn’t be sad, how at sixty-five, Mémée was old, how death was completely natural, and that she was watching us from above. These stories varied considerably, from the fanciful to the macabre. Even at four, it didn’t take long for me to understand that the grown-ups were as much in the dark as I was about the whole affair. Children are analytical. They process information according to what they have been told. And at four, I concluded, both with certainty and a singular horror, that Mémée’s story was over, that death happened to everyone, and that I had more or less sixty years of life before it happened to me. For years after that, I would lie awake at night and think of the monster waiting for me in the dark, and tell myself that sixty years was a very, very long time, and that this suffocating fear would pass with age and experience.

Now I’m approaching sixty. At sixty, we’re meant to examine our lives, and think about mortality. And yes, it seems like a very long time. It also feels as if no time at all has passed since the night my great-grandmother died, and I first encountered the truth that lives at the heart of all fairytales. That was when I decided, with relentless, childish logic, that if death was the ultimate monster, then perhaps I could only hope to keep them at bay with stories.

And so I began to tell stories, first to myself, in secret, and then to anyone who would listen. Of course it took me a long, long time to understand that what I was really doing was trying to make sense of the world. In a universe of chaos, stories give a shape to our lives. They teach us to believe in love; to mistrust what is too easily won; to know that every stranger could be a deity in disguise. They teach us that happy endings exist; that kindness can sometimes bring reward; that life, like so many of the stories we read as children, is a journey through the woods, where anything can happen.

This is the advice I’d give my younger self, if I could. Life is like a story with a beginning, a middle, an end. It is not always as structured or as ordered as a story might be, and some are longer than others, but the journey is ours in part to direct. We can choose the paths we take, the places in which to linger. We can choose the people we travel with, the ones we make a part of our lives. Choose wisely, I would tell my younger self at the start of my journey; not everyone who seems friendly is a friend. True friends are not easy to come by; always cherish the ones you find. And bear in mind that the journey matters more than the destination. We live in a world where everything seems focussed on the future; events to plan; deadlines to meet; months and seasons flashing by. Time seems to accelerate as we get older; and yet there are ways to slow it down. We don’t have to rush through everything in order to rush through something else. We can exist in the moment. Stop. Pick the flowers. Feel the sun. Remember we only pass this way once, and that every step is a privilege.

These woods are filled with obstacles, and challenges, and wonder. Not all paths through it are easy. Stay curious, I would tell myself. Never stop asking questions. Wear your achievements lightly, and don’t be afraid of failure. Failures are a sign you tried; markers on the road to success. And as a teacher of 15 years, one thing I have learnt is this: There are no teachers, just pupils. We are able to learn from every angle, every stage of our lives. Elders may speak from experience, but some of the most important things I have learnt have been from younger people. Bringing up my son has been the lesson of a lifetime; I learn new things from him every day. So take your lessons where you can, and pay them back to others in kind. And don’t be afraid to make mistakes: mistakes are part of your story too, every one a lesson learnt, every one a challenge.

Nor should you fear the changes that time imposes on us. Change is what drives your story. Sometimes it brings grief and loss; sometimes, unexpected joy. And don’t be ashamed of the signs of age: in a world in which youth is prized far above experience, it’s all too easy to feel diminished by wrinkles and imperfections. But your body is a living map of everything you have experienced. Everything leaves marks on you. Childbirth; laughter; damage; grief. Be proud of those marks. They are proof that you have lived. When I look at my face now I see the faces of my family. I see my mother, my grandmother. I carry their stories inside me, coiled as tight as DNA. And I have told them again and again, just as they were told to me. We process the world through stories. We learn to live through stories. Through stories we connect with the past and understand where we came from. I mostly know my great-grandmother from stories my mother told me. The story of the day she died; her life in rural, wartime France; her recipes; her sayings; her jokes. Through stories, my son can know her, even though they never met. And of course, you know her too: she was the prototype for Armande, the fierce old woman in Chocolat. Through stories, people can live on, and be loved and understood. This is one of the things I have learnt on my journey through the woods; perhaps the most important thing: Remember to tell your stories.

Now, after many stories, I’m reaching that part of the forest where monsters lurk in the darkness. Three years ago, I had a brush with a monster I called Mr C - an aggressive kind of cancer, which luckily was found early. I survived that encounter, thanks to the care and vigilance of the NHS, but one of the lessons it taught me is that life is fragile, and precious, and short - much shorter than we imagine. Over the past few years I have lost too many loved ones to Mr C. One of them was my grandfather. Another was my oldest friend. Some were writers: Iain Banks, Jenny Diski, Graham Joyce. I have carried their stories with me, just as I carry the stories of my parents and grandparents. I hope my son will do the same. We stay alive through stories.

But right now, at sixty, I don’t feel old. I doubt anyone who loves stories really ever does. I remember Ray Bradbury telling me, at 81, that when he looked in the mirror, he saw a ten-year old boy with inexplicably white hair. And he was still writing–furiously, sublimely - till the day he died. I can relate: time is speeding up, and there are stories left to tell. I sometimes find myself trying to calculate how many I’ll have time to get down, especially as they’re still popping up like mushrooms all around me. I am more conscious of time passing by. I feel the change of the seasons in a way I didn’t before. But my walk in the woods has been beautiful. I have fulfilled my greatest dreams. I do what I love for a living. I’ve travelled the world, and had many adventures, and met many interesting people. I’m married to someone I love, who loves me. I have a son who makes me proud, and who I love more than words can say. I’ve faced down monsters, and survived. I’ve learnt a lot, sometimes the hard way. But as the French author Jules Renard (a favourite of my grandfather’s) once said: “Aim to die with regrets, not remorse.” I think I’m on the right side of that. And in spite of what I thought at four, approaching sixty is nothing to fear. There are still unwritten chapters to my story to be lived; places to discover, new things to learn. I mean to explore all those things, and more. I want to climb mountains. To travel through space. To see the depths of the ocean. Some of those things I may never know except in stories, but books are the way in which we live our many alternative, possible lives. I feel I’m just beginning to understand what matters to me; to find my equilibrium in this vast, bewildering world. For so many years, being sixty felt like the end of a journey. Now I see that it’s only another clearing in the woods. Maybe I’ll sit here awhile. Enjoy the sunshine. Pick the fruit. But soon I’ll be on my way again, picking up stories wherever I go. Because no story ever ends, not really. It just travels somewhere else, picked up by another storyteller. So, to whoever picks up my story, good luck with it. Maybe give me a wave. But for now, I think I’ve seen a path at the end of the clearing. It’s new, and therefore exciting, and promises adventure. I think I’ll follow it awhile; see what fruits are growing there. Stories flourish along these paths. Let’s see which ones I can find. After all, that’s what I do. And those monsters won’t defeat themselves.

[joannechocolat]

Your writing scratches my brain,,,it's been like atleast 5 years since I first read runemarks and I still think about it. I have no idea how you do it but you're amazing :]

You are also the reason I annoyed my mom with a bunch of norse myth facts, thanks for that 🚶‍♂️

I’m delighted to hear it! X

[joannechocolat]

Omg you're on Tumblr???

Lollipop Shoes rewired my brain. And I LOVE the first cookbook. I should maybe check out the other ones 😅

[excuse the fangirling but omg omg omg I love when writers are on Tumblr]

I'm so glad you liked it! x

[joannechocolat]

Content Warning: contains scenes of graphic kindness; wokery; tolerance; profanity.

A few days ago, I posted a little Twitter poll, asking readers (and authors) what they thought of trigger warnings. I followed this up with a short thread, outlining my own thoughts on this, and how they have changed over the years.

The Daily Mail immediately seized the idea, and without contacting me, or asking for further clarification, published an article quoting my words, under a headline that was both inflammatory and untrue: Trigger warnings should be put on EVERY book to make readers feel 'safe', Chocolat author Joanne Harris says.

Predictably, this caused a frenzy of reaction from Daily Mail readers and Twitter trolls, including accusations of censorship and “pandering to moronic snowflakes”. Several people (who I suspect, have never even picked up one of my books) swore never to read them. One charmer wrote: “Fucking pathetic. What a dick the author must be.”

I don’t blame the writer of the article; most clickbait headlines are added by someone else - in this case, by someone who couldn’t even be bothered to read the article, let alone my original thread. It has since been quietly changed, presumably in response to my comments, although once again, without any communication with me. But as a result of these comments (and some more polite ones from people asking about the poll), I think it’s time I made it clear, both where I stand on trigger warnings, and why the public perception of them, fuelled by culture wars debates, is both skewed and inaccurate.

First, the result of my poll: about 35% of the people who answered were in favour of some kind of content warning. About 30% were against, and the rest were undecided, curious about the result. To me this suggests that most people are generally positive or undecided on the subject. From the comments, it seemed to me that many of the people who were against trigger warnings were afraid they might lead to censorship, or spoilers, or editing of the classics, or stopping people from reading the classics, or authors losing the right to free speech.

But here's the thing. Trigger warnings are nothing to do with those things. Here’s why people have been misled, and why it matters to put things straight.

First, this expression; “triggered.” Like “woke” and “snowflake” it has been weaponized to mean something like “upsetting the libs.” Reader, that's not what it means. The concept of triggering only applies to someone with PTSD or some kind of serious psychological trauma. That makes it irrelevant to politics. Anyone can have trauma. Anyone is potentially vulnerable to mental illness. And that’s why trigger warnings exist; to warn people who might suffer a relapse, or some other kind of serious harm, if exposed without warning to certain images, scenes or narrative strands. Some of the obvious ones might be sexual violence; graphic images; mental illness; eating disorders; suicide. I’m sure there are lots more. But we’ve had content warnings (if you prefer) on films for decades without any resistance, and TV shows routinely flag up scenes with flashing images, etc. that might trigger (that word again) an epileptic seizure in anyone susceptible.  

And yes, it makes sense. I mean, why would you want someone to have a seizure if you could just warn them against it? Who but a sadist would argue that people with epilepsy should be forced to have seizures, or that having regular seizures will make them more resilient somehow, or that people afraid to have seizures should just stop watching films and TV altogether, or that warnings against flashing lights would somehow spoil other people’s enjoyment of the show? And yet those are all things that people have said to me recently about content warnings.

To me content warnings in books are like content warnings on packaged food. Most people don’t read them, unless they have a special interest or need to know. Why do they need to know? There might be any number of reasons. Maybe they’re vegan, and want to avoid eating animal products. Maybe they have a religious dietary restriction. Maybe they have a mild allergy to peanuts or to shellfish. Or maybe it’s a more a serious allergy that could even result in their death. Either way, details are useful. Content warnings in books are the same, except that instead of triggering a physical attack, certain things trigger a mental one.

I'm not talking here about things that might simply cause offence. I sometimes use profanity in my books; I sometimes write about topics that people may find challenging. That's not going to change. I won't add content warnings for swearing, or nudity, or paganism, or LGBT issues. None of those things cause trauma, though I'm willing to believe they may in some cases cause offence.

But mental trauma is just as real as any physical injury. It’s not just “in your head”. It requires adjustments in the same way that any other condition may require adjustments - whether that's a wheelchair ramp, or subtitles on TV, or studs on the pavement to help the blind.

And yet, the culture wars narrative – led by a right-wing media - is leaning increasingly towards a “survival of the fittest” mentality; repeatedly encouraging able-bodied people to question disability, white people to question racism, rich people to question poverty, and urging those who have never experienced mental trauma to dismiss the needs of those who struggle with it daily. Empathy and kindness are presented as political gestures, earning “woke points” (whatever they are), rather than the elements of basic human decency. And of course, people who talk about “decency” in the context of nudity, LGBT issues and profanity often see no problem in labelling themselves “anti-woke”, or sneering at the “Be Kind brigade”, or making dismissive judgments about the lives of people they will never know. Somewhere along the line, somehow, basic human kindness has been reframed as a tool of the left, and those who hold right-wing opinions are encouraged to reject it.

Well, fuck that. People are better than this. Some people need content warnings, and it’s not up to you or me to decide whether their need is valid or not. That’s why, from now on, I’ll be adding including content warnings to my books, and to my author website. Ignore them or not, as you choose.

But to those who are offended by the concept of inclusion, here’s a trigger warning just for you: Contains tolerance; scenes of moderate kindness; depictions of graphic wokery. Read my books at your peril. Or don’t. Isn’t freedom marvellous?

[janesexyway]

[commandtower-solring-go]

It should also be recognised that Lucille Ball helped advance the medium of television as a whole by, more or less, inventing the idea of reruns. This was, in large part, what drove the success of non-serialised shows such as Star Trek, but also paved the way for extremely popular television genres like the sitcom

[joannechocolat]

Hello! I just wanted to say that I've recently reread the Runemarks books (with the exception of Testament of Loki, which I'm reading for the first time!) and finding endless reasons why child me loved these books, and why adult me loves them even more. They're infused with such hopeful magic, and have kept me afloat during my first Christmas without my mother — I feel like they found me again at just the right time. Thank you so much for writing them and sharing those stories and characters with the world! (I'm sad to say they spent some not-inconsiderable time in storage after we moved house, but I'm very pleased to say they now have pride of place on my bookshelf once again!)

I’m so very glad you’ve enjoyed them. Happy reading in 2024!