There was a brief window of time, when I was about nine years old, when I became obsessed with one dinner alone. On my sixth day of asking for – and getting – yam and eggs exclusively, my mother laid down the law. “Too much of any one thing is a bad idea,” she said. Of course, as an adult, I realise this isn’t strictly true. For example, I have learned that a) one simply cannot have too much sleep, especially as you edge closer to 40; and b) ice-cream and cheese are absolutely worth the pain of lactose intolerance, so just accept your fate and have some lactase pills handy. I will grudgingly concede that the modern pastime of TV bingeing, so diametrically opposed to my mother’s teachings, is generally a bad idea.
I’d fallen into a bit of a play-reading spiral in the last few weeks: Nottage led to Albee, which led to Shepard, and then the alternate universes of Payne. “The joy of repetition really is in you,” sang Hot Chip on Over And Over. And it is. But there is a secondary type of joy to be found in breaking out of a repetitive cycle. So I put down the play I was rereading (Tennessee Williams, because I am a cliche) and picked up a book of short stories. Heads Of The Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the kind of collection that makes you shake your head in delight. Her voice is fresh-laundry-clean: I have not read anything like it in years. The prose is cunning. It appears simple, but the overall effect is powerful. Her stories feel simultaneously like the poke of a stick and a comforting balm; a smack followed by a kiss. I’m so into it.
Reading plays begat reading short stories, which may beget reading novels again. Who knows? The joy of repetition.
