HeyJaredElisabeth Hanscombe’s Substack
Life writing as artefact, memory, imagination and finding a voice.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 11
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
The choices we make (opens the original)
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‘Modern life is like a thief on a moped who snatches your watch.’ Jeanette WintersonTime is like an elephant, trunk, ears, tail, huge body and all of it remarkable from whichever vantage point you examine the beast.Thanks for reading Elisabeth Hanscombe’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.<input class="button primary" t
The guilty child (opens the original)
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You won’t get free of the past. It creeps up on you when you least expect, in a whiff from a kitchen in action, from snippets of conversation overheard in public toilets, from the rumble of a tram across its tracks.Life is filled with hints of days gone by and as Siri Hustvedt writes, the past is always in the present, and features in our responses to anniversaries.Thanks for reading Elisabeth Hanscombe’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.</d
My tent of sensory deprivation (opens the original)
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‘Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion’ Haruki MurakamiBoredom, pure and simple, but Murakami refers to something else, meaningless exertion, day after day of doing the same thing without understanding its significance.Thanks for reading Elisabeth Hanscombe’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.<input class
The desire for revenge (opens the original)
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‘Cruelty is just a conduit of pain,’ writes Brandon Taylor when detailing a tussle between two men, one white, the other black. Lovers, who each underestimate the other’s grief and distress. Each accusing the other of focussing entirely on their own pain.Cruelty, Taylor goes on, ‘conveys pain from one place to another from the place of highest concentration. In the same way heat moves. A system that enables one to shift the pain to something entirely different.’Th
Sad souls sent to Limbo (opens the original)
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When I first read the writings of Melane Klein and came across her notion of infantile envy I baulked. The idea of envy to me then was akin to original sin, that black stain splattered across our souls like a birth mark, which we can only overcome through Baptism, or maybe further up the line, confession, if you’re lucky to live long enough to be able to verbalise your sins.Babies who died without baptism were sad souls sent off to Limbo, which was not such a bad place really. It held all the tr
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