And I expect a lot of readers will come to this for Long's voice and viewpoint, and will be more than satisfied. I’m sending you this newsletter because I’ve written a short story collection and I am incredibly excited to say that it’s coming out next month. In the final story, “I Don’t Know”, which is a slightly zany take on parenthood, the narrator says “Enough will be alright to keep going.

Although – and I always read every page – the acknowledgments end: “thank you to every landlord, misogynist, prick and Tory who inspired the villains. As well as gigging all over the UK, Eleanor has provided tour support for Josie Long, Tony Law, Frankie Boyle, Stewart Francis and Lost Voice Guy. Long gives the reader a glimpse into a wide range of lives, touching on the doubts, insecurities and anxieties, and poor self esteem experienced by women and girls. I got one done in 2016 - I was at a friend’s house and sat down one evening and wrote a story really quickly and was like ‘oh this is going to be easy, I can get it all done in a week’ then didn’t do another one for four years.A series of narrators entertain us with blast from the past exes, friends who are a bit rubbish, dysfunctional relationships, teenagers who believe they are witches and an admin/surveillance job that has the reader guessing if we’ve moved into a parallel universe.

But luckily my very dear friend [novelist] Nikesh Shukla did a few sessions of mentoring to just build my confidence up and help me get started. The stories were mainly the soft thought provoking type, with a lot of interiority and reflection, not too much on the comic front. But all the same, and perhaps despite that cover, I was expecting a collection of her short stories to be, broadly speaking, cheerful. Its 16 stories offer rich, breathlessly paced narratives of sexual obsession or late-night parenting or annoyance with an egg-obsessed lockdown-era neighbourhood WhatsApp group, each told from the perspective of a different person. I really hope this isn't the end of Josie Long's writing career and that there's more where this came from!This book is rife with people who exploit the desires of others to believe certain truths – for personal gain, but also just to avoid detection. I also think there’s quite a lot in it about political and climate anxiety and how hard it is to parent in the climate crisis so there’s definitely a bit of political anxiety and opinion, but I would hope as well that all of them have a bit of love towards the characters too, that it’s quite a loving book. It was affable rather than acerbic; and if I had a criticism it would be that there was a whimsical “nice to be nice” vibe about it all, to quote both Dylan Thomas and the chief in M*A*S*H. It's heavy, and it's raw, but it's also a beautifully written reminder that everyone has their own shit to deal with, whether they choose to share it or not.