A chilling novel in which motherhood is as terrifying as murder
Naomi Booth's third novel, Raw Content, sits intriguingly askew within this genre, drawing on rather different cultural and historical horrors. Grace has recently given birth to Rosa after a casual relationship with Ryan, a musician she met in London, and the pair are gamely making a go of things in Grace's cramped one-bed flat in York. Inevitably, Grace is more claustrophobically consumed by her baby who, as is common to these sorts of novels, is described in a sort of shell-shocked poetry as alien, even aberrant, 'catastrophically small… a dark sea-fish… a cawing pterodactyl of an infant'.
Nor can Grace escape the mythic forcefield of her native Yorkshire in which she grew up – a landscape of 'derelict furnace chimneys and sawtooth roofs' where 'children lay buried under gorse and heather in unmarked graves'. The Ian Brady and Myra Hindley murders in the 1960s, which did so much to invoke fear in modern parents, seep with a kind of viral stealth into Grace's emotionally scrambled state, heightening her awareness of her daughter's tender skin. This is a novel that finds an awful beauty in the fragility of the body, and the shocking vulnerability of the child.
Perversely, though, the Moors murders are one of the quieter strands wrapping around Grace's brain, thanks to her career as a legal publisher. She has spent years notating, among other crimes, instances of appalling child abuse, the rigour and calm the profession demands at stark dissonance with the job in hand. Then there's her now retired police officer father, who worked to prosecute child abusers before an instance of 'institutional failings' torpedoed his career. And compounding her conviction of childhood as innately defenceless and imperilled is her estranged mother, who abandoned Grace and her sister Isobel – a now untethered, pill-popping adult whose chaotic visits provide welcome relief for the reader – when Grace was nine, for reasons that are never fully explained; perhaps because, you sense, they're inexplicable.
David Peace and Gordon Burn have both explored in fiction the legacy of serial murderers on landscape, community and popular culture in Yorkshire and beyond. I'd argue Booth's novel loses something in comparison for being exclusively concentrated on the individual and yet, at the same time, so diffuse in its references to a more generalised history of child abuse. Throughout Raw Content Grace is convinced she will harm her baby, as though her personal and cultural inheritance is destined to play out through her. It's a potent idea, yet it's played out primarily in the abstract; it's also a delusion on a par with the sort of self-sabotaging thoughts experienced by many young mothers and Booth's novel feels boxed-in by framing it as something commonplace and explicable. Booth can write – her prose is often exacting and surprising at the same time – but I wish this novel had built with greater ambition on its initial dark promise.
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3 days ago
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Some artists become timeless because their work transcends eras, resonating with new generations long after their time; others are immortalized because their lives — and careers — ended far too soon. Jeff Buckley, whose ethereal voice and singular 1994 album 'Grace' earned him cult status before his accidental drowning at the age of 30, occupies both categories. Nearly three decades since his passing, audiences now have the opportunity to rediscover Buckley. In 'It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley,' filmmaker Amy Berg excavates the life and legacy of the singer, drawing on rare archival material and the intimate recollections of the women who knew him best, including his mother, Mary Guibert, as well as his former partners and bandmates. 'I don't think that there's any one version of the Jeff Buckley story ... but this is the one I chose to tell,' says Berg, whose efforts to make this film — the first to involve the cooperation of the singer's estate — were more than a decade in the making. Speaking with Reuters from Los Angeles in the run up to the film's August 8 release, she discusses why Buckley's voice still resonates today, the challenge of disentangling myth from man, and what his story reveals about the pressures of stardom — and whether we've gotten better at recognizing when young artists need help. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Reuters: To start, can you tell the story of how this film came together, nearly 30 years after Buckley's death? Amy Berg: I was very moved by his album, 'Grace.' It came at a time when music was very grungy and heavy and aggressive and very male. I heard this album and it just opened me up. I had all the feels. I loved 'Grace,' I loved Jeff Buckley. And then just a couple of years later, he passed away while he was making his second album. I've stayed with this album — it stayed with me, I should say — and just watched how his popularity has actually gone up. It seems like every generation, he has a whole bunch of new followers, and it's kind of an unusual phenomenon to just have made one album and be bigger today than he was back in the '90s. I've been wanting to tell his story since then. A couple of projects have been done on Buckley's story. How does this one differ? There has only really been one BBC special that was about him after he died and there was a scripted film that was made about his father (folk rock musician Tim Buckley) that he had a small role (in), but the estate didn't participate in that. So this is really the first time they've ever participated in a film. There are a couple of projects, I believe, that almost happened, but didn't. So this was the only official documentary about Jeff. You've explored the lives of iconic musicians before — I'm thinking, in particular, of your documentary on Janis Joplin. What draws you to these stories? I wanted to make the Jeff Buckley film back in 2010. I didn't get the rights at the time. I was up for the Janis Joplin gig and I went in and met with the family, and I think I did that film as an answer to not being able to make the Jeff Buckley film at the time. But it's good that it happened that way because I learned a lot making the Janis film, about the process of making a music documentary. There's just so much to it. It's dense. There's just a lot of rights involved. There's archive. You have to scour for material. And you have to take on the responsibility of making sure that you get it right because the person is not around to justify or verify things. It was fascinating to hear Buckley narrate parts of his life throughout the film. What kind of source material were you working with? I started reviewing the archive in 2019, which was an interesting moment. It was towards the end of Trump's presidency, but there was a big women's march movement and the language was very specific. And as I started listening to Jeff speak, I noticed what a feminist he was and I noticed that he had this cultural language of our time back in the '90s. He really was tapped into something before his time because the music business was so patriarchal at the time. That really spoke to me, and so I decided to tell the story through the women in his life ... and to try to understand who he was to them, because I just thought that was the right way to tell his story. You mention how Buckley's fame has only grown since his passing. How did you navigate telling the story of the myth versus the man? That was definitely something that I did struggle with because I had a certain impression of him, and I did not want to make a hagiographical film. I wanted to make an honest film and I wanted to show him as a human with all of his tricky, complicated personality. I just wanted to make sure that I got him right and I showed him with warts and all, let's say. What most surprised you about him that you didn't know before taking on the project? When you hone in on a musician and that's like your favorite musician, you kind of put them on a pedestal. So I think at that point, everything I learned about him was humbling. I expected that the relationship with his father was going to show up in the way that it did, but just the fact that he would buy his father's CDs, cassettes, listen to them, then break them and throw them away — I mean, he was really kind of conflicted by how to embrace his legacy. So that was surprising. In terms of the theme about trying to become a man, there are so many stereotypes about musicians being babies and never growing up and I was pleasantly surprised that he was really pushing himself to find that balance. Buckley seems to belong to a pantheon of young artists whose untimely deaths amplified their mystique — Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, among others. Did you observe any parallels between Jeff's story and theirs, the different contexts notwithstanding? In Jeff's case, (his drowning in the Mississippi River) was a mistake. He didn't stick a needle in his arm, but he was being impulsive and he jumped in the water and it wasn't a safe place to jump in. The artists you're talking about, their careers were just getting started. There's not a lot released on them, so it's like every inch is being sucked up of their legacy, any possible outtakes or demos. Jeff did one studio album and his second album, which I think is excellent, it is not the album he would have put out, obviously. It was demos that were turned into an album (posthumously). But that's all there is. And so, of course, it's going to amplify the kind of legacy and the mythology around his death because it's just too young, too soon. Reflecting on artists whose lives were cut short, there's often a conversation about the pressures of fame and the signs of emotional distress that may have gone unnoticed. Do you think we've gotten any better at recognizing and responding to those signs? Do we take care of them enough? I mean, in the Amy Winehouse documentary, which was excellent, I thought that moment where she was about to go sign her record deal and she just got accepted into a rehab facility that she had applied to and chose not to do it and then sang about it. I mean, she might've had a totally different life. So it's just those missed moments. Asif (Kapadia, the director of "Amy") did a great job in that film to highlight the disconnect with her family. And with Jeff, I do believe that that played into it, for sure. I think missed moments at the end where he was really struggling and he didn't have the resources to stop and find help. I think that would have changed the scope of his future, of course. I know he was reaching out to those around him because he needed help. So whether or not that actually affected the moment that he jumped into the river, I think is a separate conversation. He did not commit suicide, obviously, but I think that he needed help and he was surrounded by a music scene that was very fast-paced and he was trying to slow things down. What are you hoping audiences, especially those who may be unfamiliar with Buckley, take away from this story? I'll throw this to a friend of mine, Alison Klayman, who's also a documentary filmmaker. She went to see it at Sundance, and she called me after and one thing that she said stood out to me. She said, "I just want to go make art after watching this film." And to me, that is the best possible gift that Jeff could give to audiences is to go find your own creativity and express it, because that's all he was. What's the story behind the film's title? It is a beautiful line from "Lover, You Should Have Come Over," but also it's a beautiful sentiment about this film that really has gone on forever for me, for the team that worked on it, and for him and his legacy. So that seemed like the right title.
