The Guardian view on coming-out tales: from A Boy’s Own Story to What It Feels Like for a Girl; The Guardian, June 8, 2025

 Editorial, The Guardian; The Guardian view on coming-out tales: from A Boy’s Own Story to What It Feels Like for a Girl

"Each of these coming-out stories is rooted in a specific time and place. They are about class as well as sex, the salvation of books and music as well as romance. They are about loneliness, desire and a longing for escape – being a teenager, in short. Despite heartbreaking scenes of abuse and pain, they are also bursting with excitement. One of the conditions of youth is that one’s “own story” feels like the only story. This is why the coming-of-age narrative endures.

In our digital age of toxic masculinity and intolerance, these memoirs call for truthfulness and compassion. They are reminders of the fragility of progress. “If gays have gone from invisibility to ubiquity and from self-hatred to self-acceptance,” White wrote in his last book, The Loves of My Life, published in January, “we should recognize we’re still being pushed off cliffs in Yemen – and from the top fronds of Florida palms, for all I know.”"

‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology; The Guardian, November 24, 2024

 Introduction by Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian; ‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology

"Greek myth is not a stable thing. There is no such thing as a canonical, “original” version of a Greek myth. The stories that remain to us – the material of classical plays and poetry, and of visual culture from pottery to pediments – are already elaborations and accretions. In the ancient Greek and Roman world, stories were adapted and remade to serve the needs of the moment. The Greek tragedians often took the germ of an idea from the Homeric epics, and built an entire plot from it. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for instance, is in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey: both are stories of a warrior’s return from war, but with entirely different outcomes. Euripides’s subversive play Helen proposes that the entire Trojan war was fought not in the cause of a real woman, but of an illusory, fake version sent by the gods, while the “real” Helen of Troy sat out the siege in Egypt.

Seen in this light, as novelist Pat Barker points out below, the modern appetite for working with (and maybe sometimes against) Greek myth is a part of a long continuum, rather than an innovation...

Stephen Fry on Ithaka by CP Cavafy (1911), a poem inspired by The Odyssey

Author of Mythos, Heroes and Troy, a trilogy of books retelling the myths of ancient Greece

The Odyssey is the beginning of human modernity. Suddenly, the greatest qualities a warrior could have were cunning, intelligence and curiosity, but also a sense of home – Odysseus is constantly striving to get back to his wife and son. There was something new in that. This idea of “nostos” – of returning home to the hearth after your wanderings – has been very powerful in the Greek imagination ever since.

Early last century, there was a wonderful Greek poet living in Alexandria named Constantine Cavafy. I found out about him by reading EM Forster, who met Cavafy in Alexandria and recommended him to WH Auden and others. One of Cavafy’s greatest poems is about Ithaca, the island which Odysseus spends 10 years trying to get back to. The poem is about this journey, this yearning to find the place that we think of as home, but Cavafy tells us that it’s not worth anything. You must strive for it, he says, but you’ll find it isn’t the place itself that’s the destination, it’s the striving, it’s what you learn on the way. It’s the gorgeous things you find and the people you meet and the experiences you have. So you must aim for Ithaca and simultaneously know it’s not worth getting to, because it will have nothing to give you. That’s how the poem ends, in Edmund Keeley’s terrific translation: “Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey./ Without her you wouldn’t have set out./ She has nothing left to give you now.”

I think it’s a very brilliant and moving poem, even in translation (I’m sure if you were fluent in modern Greek it would be even more astonishing). It’s an example of what the Greek myths can give us in terms of retellings. All the JRR Tolkien books are nostos stories, stories of returns home – The Hobbit is subtitled There and Back Again. It is the most mythic, primal, elemental story that we have. As told to Killian Fox"