Look! We Have Come Through!

Reviews

To be able to meet the world unillusioned but undismayed is what Lawrence did for Lara Feigel, and it is what she hopes he can do for us as a result of her bracing and honest book. Each chapter homes in on a major topic and Feigel has something fresh to say in every case … Some of the sharpest, shrewdest discussions I have seen of Lawrence for a long time. Refreshing and unexpected … The case for reading, and for thinking hard and seriously about the role of reading in a world characterised by fracture, is powerfully made. A perceptive book … a critical biography but also a pandemic memoir – a story about how an author can inform and change your life … Part of the attraction of the book is Feigel’s candour: the charting of her ups and downs as the seasons pass. If she weren’t so attuned to Lawrence, it would feel ickily self-absorbed. But she writes insightfully about his central themes, and though she torments herself unduly by taking his wackier theories too seriously, her intensity and intimacy are engaging. A lovely, urgent, serious book, making me think about Lawrence and life all over again. Through an intimate engagement with a brilliant, ever-provocative writer, Lara Feigel navigates the pandemic and a storm-tossed year in her own life as woman and mother. By turns troubled, tender and bold, this absorbing book brings Lawrence's vivid talent and ideas close, testing them against the pressures of the contemporary. Lara Feigel wrestles with Lawrence, resents him, adores him and even tries to learn from him, all while Covid rages; it makes for a daring and unconventional bibliomemoir that might change the way you feel about sex, motherhood, work, illness and faith. A fiercely intelligent engagement with Lawrence, half memoir and half critical biography, in which Lara Feigel comes in at a series of oblique angles to reach some startling judgments. I was highly impressed. Feigel’s Lawrence is an untimely, urgent teacher of life and its passions. Agile, surprising and compulsively absorbing, Look! We Have Come Through! is the perfect tonic for the cynical, jaded spirit of our time. Both an analysis of what makes Lawrence so troublingly intoxicating, and an account of what happens when we succumb to the writers we admire. Clear-headed, yet also strangely intuitive, what makes Lara Feigel’s writing so seductive is the way she seems to absorb Lawrence’s influence so deeply into herself that he becomes her own. Praise for Free Woman: 'A fascinating mix of literary criticism, cultural history and memoir … Highly enjoyable An extraordinary meditation on what it means to be a clever, engaged woman … A classical, precise use of language … Most compelling … Physically and intellectually intimate The most intriguing and certainly the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read Ironic, beautiful and rather moving Free Woman is not a biography, but the same artistic process is at work: as a biographer, you think you are going to possess your subject, but they always end up possessing you. It’s fertile ground, and Feigel a fine explorer. Free Woman has taken on the formidable Doris for a new generation … Feigel has the gift of converting complex thoughts into coherent sentences that delight Expand reviews