“People need their history. It gives them strength.”

My dad’s recent death has left me played out: I suppose no seventeen year old expects their father to walk out the house and never come back. It’s made me feel separate from the rest of the world – like I’m watching it through interrogative one-way mirrors. The similarities between JFK and my dad’s deaths, though, and the way my mum and I, and Jackie have tried to deal with it, gave…

“The Lord don’t like dark places.”

Some films take on meanings far beyond what they discuss, simply due to the circumstances surrounding them. This was the film I was supposed to watch with my dad on the evening of the nineteenth, before he unexpectedly died from a heart attack, at fifty-six years old. He was a healthy and enigmatic writer with a comedian’s ability to see life as the tragedy as it is, and to walk out smiling.

I say…

When I was five years old, having tea and lemonade on the hill near my house, a glider plane came ten feet from hitting me - it had fallen off course, and was trying to land. The wind funneling under its body was so great, and the sound so enormous that the scream my mother made still haunts me, twelve years later. This film is that feeling, personified. Children caught in the glare of something insurmountable, unrecognizable. Something that chills…

“The whole school is rolling fake dice / You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.”

As somebody known among my friends as the “indie” girl: the girl who thinks listening to The Smiths is some kind of accomplishment, and reading Sylvia Plath deserves a reward, Taylor Swift seems like a difficult person to slot into my persona, despite her being my favourite musician for the last six years. To the audience of the uncomprehending, she’s the girl who’s dated…