Casual Contempt

Happy 2nd Book Birthday To Me 🎂

It’s an odd thing, book writing. It’s fickle, a subjective business - a constant of hitting out into the darkness, always in motion. At the end of writing the first book, I was vehement - expressing that “I never want to do such a thing again!” I can still hear my relatives laughing at such an overly dramatic proclamation, knowing full well that I would find it impossible to stay away for long. That’s how the trouble began I guess.

Asides from the research of the writing, you learn more about yourself that you realise at the time of creating the backbone of a book. I smile if I ever see The Autism Friendly Cookbook in bookshops - such as recently in Brighton’s Waterstones - but this is incredibly constraining by dint of an aftermath I had not accounted for.

Emma Gannon

over at

The Hyphen by Emma Gannon

recently wrote a brilliant essay about the expectations placed on female authors - and how they have to ‘sell’ their private lives as promotional material, just as a given. (Read it here.) That becomes an automatic expectation - that they are the sum of that one effort, and open to prying eyes.