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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

There’s an anecdote I sometimes wheel out to strangers or dates to convey the sort of child I was, a morbid and sensitive one with a streak of prurient proxy-sadism In my hometown there is a huge bookshop with a cafe and I often went to read books for free for as long as I could get away with, books for adults, books about things I wasn’t yet allowed to know about When I was eleven years old I picked up a copy of American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis and spent eight consecutive Saturdays reading it in rapt horror When I came to a passage in which Patrick Bateman electrocutes a woman’s breasts and her fat splatters onto a window – an image which has remained lodged near the surface of my mind ever since – I burst into nervous laughter and then almost immediately began to cry    Ellis has remained an ambient presence in my life ever since Often, how I relate to him has to do with how readily I am able to engage with irony, a variance which determines everything from how I write to how I speak to how I make friends By the time I was 20, I’d read everything he wrote I was going through a strange phase, compulsively social and dependent on my friends for any sense of meaning in the world, and yet plagued by the certainty that the way we talked and joked together was preventing actual connection I felt profoundly isolated Once I asked my father if he had ever found that irony created a barrier between himself and his peers, and he responded ‘I don’t think we knew what irony was’ But I did I lived in it and it had poisoned me, made me bitter and lonely and inauthentic I was undergoing a spiritual crisis, and decided I hated Ellis I would put all my faith in total sincerity I would invest in earnestness I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), with its pleas for authenticity, honesty and disavowals of snide criticism, and

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Interview

Issue No. 18

Interview with Eileen Myles

Maria Dimitrova

Interview

Issue No. 18

I sat across from Eileen Myles at a large empty table in her London publisher’s office a few hours...

fiction

January 2014

The Dispossessed

Szilárd Borbély

TR. Ottilie Mulzet

fiction

January 2014

The Dispossessed is Szilárd Borbély’s first novel, although he has been active – and widely acclaimed – as a poet,...

feature

September 2012

Existere: Documenting Performance Art

David Gothard

Jo Melvin

John James

Rye Dag Holmboe

feature

September 2012

The following conversation was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in May 2012. The event took place...

 

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