Josie Long: ‘I want to foster a radical spirit’

‘This was the first book where it was written by another woman [I read] and when I read it, it didn’t just, it didn’t just affect me, it dragged me into the emotional world of the novel. And then when I’d finished it, I was still there. It to me felt the most powerful book I had ever read.‘

‘I felt like it was really helpful in not just understanding but also beautifully summarising what is important in terms of trying to be useful to political struggle. She says that hope isn’t like, blind optimism, saying that everything’s fine, hope is an axe to knock down the door to allow you to take action.’

‘She’s interested in understanding and connecting with radical thinkers and activists, looking back at people on top of it. She wants to go back in time and inhabit those places in this book. So it’s just one of the most interesting, bold, enigmatic, beautiful books I’ve ever read in my life.’

‘She’s kind of like a mystic poet really, she likes to think about life and death and nature. And it’s very much about a person listening and in community with nature, it’s not somebody kind of telling you how they know all about it.’

‘It’s about people who have been the prize pony of their school or of their high school or whatever. There’s one about someone going to Yale and about, playing all the games right to try so hard to get into these rarefied establishments […] And for me, it’s about how class intersects with race, definitely, and intersects with gender and all kinds of other things. But that was the level that I felt like, oh, I really do understand certain parts of this.’