Womankind February 2019

Telling someone to “grow up” is often taken badly. No one likes to be told that they’re acting like a child. But to ‘grow up’ is part of the constantly evolving human condition. We always should be, in a sense, growing up. Psychologists prefer to call it gaining ‘personal authority’, which means taking charge of your self, your health, your behaviour, your destiny. So rather than relying on the consent or approval of others, or waiting for other people to reveal a pathway forward, you instead understand that the choices you make are your responsibility. You are the gatekeeper to your own life. For some, this feeling of ultimate freedom over the course of one’s destiny can feel too overwhelming; it’s easier to resign yourself to a fate that’s ultimately…

Antonia Case: Antonia Case is the Editor-in-Chief of Womankind and the Editorial Director of New Philosopher. In 2016 she was awarded the AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media, and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the Stack Awards in 2016 and 2017. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes for The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, New Philosopher, and Time magazine. Jacqueline Winspear: Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the New York Times bestselling Maisie Dobbs series, which includes In This Grave Hour, Journey to Munich, A Dangerous Place, Leaving Everything Most Loved, Elegy for Eddie, and eight other novels. Her standalone novel, The Care and Management of Lies, was also a New…

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”— Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss “A year from now you will wish you had started today.”— Karen Lamb THE GIFT OF FRUGALITY In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea, retired film director Charles Arrowby had an epiphany. He immediately left his life in the city, and purchased a remote house by the sea. Arrowby wanted to live simply, with few possessions and distractions and to learn to cook simply, just enough food to keep the body healthy. “Inspired simplicity,” he notes, “is the essence of good eating.” “When I was young,” Arrowby declares in the novel, “I was idiotic and conventional enough to think that I had to entertain people at well-known restaurants.…

Dayma Crespo Zaporta I cannot remember when it started. In the beginning, he drank a glass or so on holidays and on special occasions. By my teenage years, he had became a full-blown alcoholic. One day he was happy, the next he was a different person: glum, threatening, and highly strung. He was sliding downwards. He was no longer my father. It’s hard to fathom why such an educated person would fall into alcoholism. He is a mechanical engineer, highly intelligent. Before my mother divorced him, he had even built a farm on the roof of our house with ducks, pigs, and chickens. I remember the sheer terror on my mother’s face, her cries that went unanswered. She kept silent about it to avoid a scandal in the neighbourhood. At…

A few years ago, during an interview with a well-known artist, I asked a question about his method. He gave me a wink. “I’ll answer if you take your top off,” he said. I didn’t feel threatened: although I was far younger, and in many ways less powerful, he wasn’t my boss. What’s more, I had the tape recorder. I still do. My experience was before the advent of #MeToo and I shrugged it off. The truth is, I liked the artist: he was fun, mischievous, open, and talented. He was also a different generation - one where, rightly or wrongly, such comments were considered outrageous but not dangerous. In all other ways during the interview he treated me with respect and decorum. I took it as a misjudged joke…

When did you start painting, and what attracted you to art as a young person? From my earliest memories, I’ve always enjoyed drawing and making things from whatever materials I could find. Wire, cardboard, sticks, and cans were always easily accessible and the ground was always available as a drawing surface. The first real paintings I made were watercolours of insects from a guide book. What is the best advice you received at art school, and what’s the best advice you can give others? My high school art teacher once told me that artists think differently, and the rest of society eventually catches up after about 10 years, so it should not concern me if not everyone immediately understands my work. That has stayed with me over the years and…