How I met Roughcut and lost all my good sense
Part Two
Hi all:
I shared last week that I am posting edited and carefully curated versions of my long deceased mother Joan McElroy’s memoirs, discovered on typed out sheets with white out corrections in folders in her belongings, which I still haven’t completely excavated. She was a remarkable and difficult woman, who lived a truly unique life.
I remember when she read Quentin Crisp’s book The Naked Civil Servant in the eighties and loved it so much she wrote him a letter asking him to dinner. He agreed and she threw one of her hundreds of well attended dinner parties, never more than ten people, because our trestle dining table which was housed on the wall in the hall, but was brought down for parties, fit just ten. I must have been in my early teens, and I was lucky enough to be on the guest list. Everyone needed to be comfortable and well cared for when they came to dinner at our apartment. My mother was a brilliant host.
The writing I’m sharing now is about the seven years my mother lived in Jamaica in the nineties. She was particularly conscious of class differences among the people she lived amidst (including her own elevated position as a “rich” white English woman), and the extreme poverty so many Jamaicans lived in. But she also approached the community of Lucea, where she lived, with a sense of humor. My mother’s hobby was people.
This series is for paid subscribers only, but I will continue to have a second post focused on tarot for all subscribers later in the week.
If you would like to become a paid subscriber and catch up on episode one, you can upgrade your subscription here: