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UH HUH HER
An unnamed, female narrator travels through school, then art school, then art school teaching jobs, finding or fashioning "the selves of herself" via encounters with PJ Harvey, the ghosts of Ann Quin, Susan Sontag, and a mansplaining Analyst that she first encounters in her grandparents' garden. Both a love letter to creative life, and a requiem for all that is lost in its pursuit, UH HUH HER asks is it possible to record—and retain—our experiences of being on the outside? Or can such stories only exist within the institutions that shape them?
204 pages, Paperback
First published July 30, 2024
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September 7, 2024
and sipping overpriced tea and looking out across the river, I see the selves of myself already here. Under the Thames Ann Quin’s words are starting to bubble up we can feel them mingling with PJ Harvey’s voice which is throbbing inside us, wiggling between our toes; we are tongue, womb, armpit, feet. Some of us have already started slipping off and climbing down the bank of the river and some are already in the water… we can feel it cold on our skin, the shiver of our nerves.
UH HUH HER is the debut novel Rachel Cattle, an artist, writer and co-founder of the publishing project JOAN, this book itself published by MOIST (see below). It is also the latest book from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club which raises the fund that support the UKs most exciting annual book prize as well as showcasing a collection of books from the vibrant small independent press scene, including JOAN (June 2024) and MOIST (August 2024).
Written in a distinct style - part essay, part prose poetry, part (fictional?) memoir - this is a fascinating and lyrical insight into an artistic lifestyle:
Do you see yourself as a writer or an artist? The analyst asks. I don’t answer, we’re distracted by the magpies having some kind of altercation above us. I’ve thought about this question though, envy artists who pursue one form through their … dislike the word career … when did this become something to aspire to. I’ve always seen art is integral to how I live, how I feel in the world. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong
Soft and quiet almost not there at all
The magpies make a huge squark and fly off
The novel's title, and that of the chapters, taken from works by P.J. Harvey, one of two key touchstones alongside Ann Quin, with other reference points including Claire-Louise Bennett (and, perhaps, inevitably Louise Bourgeois):
And somehow, we guess…we’d started making connections, about sound, about art, what a book might be. Maybe it was something to do with an embodied directness - how words being typed or handwritten were touch and gesture. We think reading Pond by Claire- Louise Bennett when it came out had started to make us think this…and then Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and we went backwards and forwards with books…something sonic and gestural was flickering on the periphery. But Jean Rhys was the first conscious moment. A friend had given us a copy of Good Morning, Midnight one of Jean Rhys’ early novels written in the nineteen- thirties – four books published before she was lost to the world only to resurface by luck and chance thirty years later with Wide Sargasso Sea; scraps of writings collected over years in carrier bags under her bed.
People had thought she was dead.
When we found this out, we wondered how many other novels and stories must have lain un-discovered under other beds throughout time although for us art has little to do with making discreet objects and everything to do with conversation, friendship, ways of being in the world; we often think of it as ephemeral so it doesn’t matter so long as some gets through.
As the above two quotes imply, this is art as a lived experience, as a way of being, not art for commercial purposes or indeed overly theoretical. A sort of alternative alter-ego of the narrator is provided by the figure of The Analyst, a man she originally meets at a garden party, who explains theoretically what she experiences viscerally and knows instinctively, beginning with Leonara Carrington's The Inn of the Dawn Horse (coincidentally for me the second book I've read in a week where this plays a key role, after American Abductions). As he artsplains her thoughts go back to her first engagement with art:
In Leonora Carrington's work, The Analyst says, where Creaturesses abound, the horse stands in for the imaginative potential of a woman or girl. The Creaturess embracing the female, queer and marginalised is brought out through intuitive, improvised processes aligned with the haptic, gestural and sonic, and centred around instinctive drawing and writing practices.
The purple felt- tip, I figure.
Yes, he continues. The Creaturess encapsulates the imaginary realm within ideas of pre-language, the primal, animalistic and intuitive and this imaginative potential also exists within Julia Kristeva’s notion of the pre- linguistic Chora (a space dominated by perceptions, feelings and needs, close to the pure materiality of existence) and of Women’s Time (a non- linear space and time of predictions and echoes backwards and forwards simultaneously as disruption to patriarchal lineage and a coming together of a ll waves of feminism), and Hélène Cixous’ call for an écriture féminine found within her text The Laugh of The Medusa, (a call to a pre-symbolic stage, stepping outside of the patriarchal realm of language and starting anew by writing the body).
I start to wonder how I’ve spent so many years of my life on the other side of these kinds of one sided exchanges, being told what I already know while my mind whirls.
I keep counting…I’m on sixteen types of daffodil…
The Creaturess, The Analyst continues, is also aligned to the process of discovery within confessional forms of writing seen within contemporary female autofiction. From Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Argonauts, through Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Stevie Smith’s Novel On Yellow Paper and back to Jean Rhys’ Voyage In The Dark, these texts becoming an interconnected resource.
He hasn’t actually read any of these books, I reckon.
It dawns on me, here in the garden, how I hadn’t really had an inkling when I started out with the beautiful set of coloured felt-tips which sat in a row which I coveted and kept in their clear plastic packet always trying to save the original order but so on losing it...
Impressive and a book I'd love to see on the Goldsmiths Prize list.
The publisher
MOIST exists both to put a dampener on the mainstream 'literary' gatekeepers and to juice up the tentative fumblings that occur on the fringes.
Inspired by the North American DIY publishing traditions that grew out of art, music, and LGBTQI+ scenes, MOIST publishes works of literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry in series of threes. Each of these ‘seasons’ are loosely based around a common theme, and acknowledge a diverse range of lived experiences, educational backgrounds, and cultural reference points. This shouldn’t be read as a euphemism for poverty porn or ‘bake-off blandness’ however, but as a preference for formally innovative, emotionally immediate books, and a vibe that is as much global as it is local.
UH HUH HER is the debut novel Rachel Cattle, an artist, writer and co-founder of the publishing project JOAN, this book itself published by MOIST (see below). It is also the latest book from the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month club which raises the fund that support the UKs most exciting annual book prize as well as showcasing a collection of books from the vibrant small independent press scene, including JOAN (June 2024) and MOIST (August 2024).
Written in a distinct style - part essay, part prose poetry, part (fictional?) memoir - this is a fascinating and lyrical insight into an artistic lifestyle:
Do you see yourself as a writer or an artist? The analyst asks. I don’t answer, we’re distracted by the magpies having some kind of altercation above us. I’ve thought about this question though, envy artists who pursue one form through their … dislike the word career … when did this become something to aspire to. I’ve always seen art is integral to how I live, how I feel in the world. Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong
Soft and quiet almost not there at all
The magpies make a huge squark and fly off
The novel's title, and that of the chapters, taken from works by P.J. Harvey, one of two key touchstones alongside Ann Quin, with other reference points including Claire-Louise Bennett (and, perhaps, inevitably Louise Bourgeois):
And somehow, we guess…we’d started making connections, about sound, about art, what a book might be. Maybe it was something to do with an embodied directness - how words being typed or handwritten were touch and gesture. We think reading Pond by Claire- Louise Bennett when it came out had started to make us think this…and then Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and we went backwards and forwards with books…something sonic and gestural was flickering on the periphery. But Jean Rhys was the first conscious moment. A friend had given us a copy of Good Morning, Midnight one of Jean Rhys’ early novels written in the nineteen- thirties – four books published before she was lost to the world only to resurface by luck and chance thirty years later with Wide Sargasso Sea; scraps of writings collected over years in carrier bags under her bed.
People had thought she was dead.
When we found this out, we wondered how many other novels and stories must have lain un-discovered under other beds throughout time although for us art has little to do with making discreet objects and everything to do with conversation, friendship, ways of being in the world; we often think of it as ephemeral so it doesn’t matter so long as some gets through.
As the above two quotes imply, this is art as a lived experience, as a way of being, not art for commercial purposes or indeed overly theoretical. A sort of alternative alter-ego of the narrator is provided by the figure of The Analyst, a man she originally meets at a garden party, who explains theoretically what she experiences viscerally and knows instinctively, beginning with Leonara Carrington's The Inn of the Dawn Horse (coincidentally for me the second book I've read in a week where this plays a key role, after American Abductions). As he artsplains her thoughts go back to her first engagement with art:
In Leonora Carrington's work, The Analyst says, where Creaturesses abound, the horse stands in for the imaginative potential of a woman or girl. The Creaturess embracing the female, queer and marginalised is brought out through intuitive, improvised processes aligned with the haptic, gestural and sonic, and centred around instinctive drawing and writing practices.
The purple felt- tip, I figure.
Yes, he continues. The Creaturess encapsulates the imaginary realm within ideas of pre-language, the primal, animalistic and intuitive and this imaginative potential also exists within Julia Kristeva’s notion of the pre- linguistic Chora (a space dominated by perceptions, feelings and needs, close to the pure materiality of existence) and of Women’s Time (a non- linear space and time of predictions and echoes backwards and forwards simultaneously as disruption to patriarchal lineage and a coming together of a ll waves of feminism), and Hélène Cixous’ call for an écriture féminine found within her text The Laugh of The Medusa, (a call to a pre-symbolic stage, stepping outside of the patriarchal realm of language and starting anew by writing the body).
I start to wonder how I’ve spent so many years of my life on the other side of these kinds of one sided exchanges, being told what I already know while my mind whirls.
I keep counting…I’m on sixteen types of daffodil…
The Creaturess, The Analyst continues, is also aligned to the process of discovery within confessional forms of writing seen within contemporary female autofiction. From Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Argonauts, through Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Stevie Smith’s Novel On Yellow Paper and back to Jean Rhys’ Voyage In The Dark, these texts becoming an interconnected resource.
He hasn’t actually read any of these books, I reckon.
It dawns on me, here in the garden, how I hadn’t really had an inkling when I started out with the beautiful set of coloured felt-tips which sat in a row which I coveted and kept in their clear plastic packet always trying to save the original order but so on losing it...
Impressive and a book I'd love to see on the Goldsmiths Prize list.
The publisher
MOIST exists both to put a dampener on the mainstream 'literary' gatekeepers and to juice up the tentative fumblings that occur on the fringes.
Inspired by the North American DIY publishing traditions that grew out of art, music, and LGBTQI+ scenes, MOIST publishes works of literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry in series of threes. Each of these ‘seasons’ are loosely based around a common theme, and acknowledge a diverse range of lived experiences, educational backgrounds, and cultural reference points. This shouldn’t be read as a euphemism for poverty porn or ‘bake-off blandness’ however, but as a preference for formally innovative, emotionally immediate books, and a vibe that is as much global as it is local.
July 21, 2024
I should've like this one better. All ingredients are there: PJ Harvey and lots of other music that I (used to) listen to, hyper-self-reflexivity, art history/theory - it's all really there. But it barely held my attention. There's no bite that I'm used to from queer novels, no urgency. I need to think more about it.
July 24, 2025
Uh Huh Her was like wandering through someone else’s dream, the dreams of a woman as tries to find her path as an artist; the people, memories, objects and art(ists) that make up a person. The pages—a playful sort of stream-of-conscious mish mash of fiction, memoir, essay, poetry on the creative life—are haunted by PJ Harvey and Ann Quin, along with others such as Susan Sontag and Louise Bourgeois.
After Danielle Dutton and now this, I have no other choice but to pick up my next Ann Quin next (I’ve chosen Three).
-‘a few marks across a page or just scribbling the date, the way the image on a book cover, PJ Harvey filling the air, my pencil hovering
but mostly reading aloud Ann Quin because it was as much about her words, I realized, hour upon hour listening in to her gaps pulling at my hair with frustration then diving in, rolling naked through sentences, head legs torso glitching in all blue back back and forth, words dancing rolling and lapping, blue black drawing back then no! no! blue black rolling and smashing thinking of Ann gone into the sea
BOOM! Ann Quin was gone’
-‘The garden opens out inside me like a stage. It is small and big I think, and everything possible exists here.’
-‘and this afternoon searching for myself in the bookshop as if the writing might be transformed into the object The Garden, The Creatureness it needs to be by other people’s words’
-‘Sometimes I long for Ann Quin to come by and carve up all my words with her writing blade, lead me by the hand back toward so many ex-somethings that were almost nothings’
After Danielle Dutton and now this, I have no other choice but to pick up my next Ann Quin next (I’ve chosen Three).
-‘a few marks across a page or just scribbling the date, the way the image on a book cover, PJ Harvey filling the air, my pencil hovering
but mostly reading aloud Ann Quin because it was as much about her words, I realized, hour upon hour listening in to her gaps pulling at my hair with frustration then diving in, rolling naked through sentences, head legs torso glitching in all blue back back and forth, words dancing rolling and lapping, blue black drawing back then no! no! blue black rolling and smashing thinking of Ann gone into the sea
BOOM! Ann Quin was gone’
-‘The garden opens out inside me like a stage. It is small and big I think, and everything possible exists here.’
-‘and this afternoon searching for myself in the bookshop as if the writing might be transformed into the object The Garden, The Creatureness it needs to be by other people’s words’
-‘Sometimes I long for Ann Quin to come by and carve up all my words with her writing blade, lead me by the hand back toward so many ex-somethings that were almost nothings’
August 20, 2025
The beginning was beautiful but then just got drawn out
June 30, 2024
Rachel Cattle's UH HUH HER is about the life of an unnamed artist and writer in London examining her choices, her work, her life...what art is, who an artist is, what defines both art and/or the artist. Such questions are asked and (perhaps) answered through encounters, virtual or actual, imagined or conjured, conjectured, with such female artists as Leonara Carrington, Doris Lessing, Ann Quin, Louise Bourgeois, Susan Sontag. And, of course, PJ Harvey, given that the book takes its title from one of Harvey's albums. In turn, each section of the book is titled after a PJ Harvey song, mostly from Uh Huh Her and White Chalk. Arguably, the book is not really about PJ Harvey's music, even if Cattle occasionally writes about her performances and quotes lyrics from songs like, for example, 'Sheela-Na-Gig.' Rather, Harvey assumes something of the symbolic role of the 'creaturess' (as Cattle refers to them) which appears in a number of Carrington's works—a figure symbolising externalised potential, this (female) creature as a symbol of the imagination, artistic possibility...but also embodying the notion that imagination is something separate (from the self) and (therefore) pursuable...
I'll admit the PJ Harvey connection, as a fan of her music, was what initially spurred my interest in reading Uh Huh Her. But even if the book isn't really about Harvey, I did find the narrator's (self-)investigations into art and the creative impulse interesting and compelling, relatable. I also thought this book wouldn't seem out of place on Semiotexte's booklist—Chris Kraus and her book I Love Dick are mentioned a couple of times, for example—and, as I read, I was reminded (not in a bad way) of such other Semiotexte authors as Stephanie LaCava, Joanna Walsh, or Lynne Tillman—writers writing about art, film, other media, in their attempts to parse identity and one's place in the world, in relation both to others and what they create.
"I'm trying to demonstrate something to myself about the nature of my own creative world as a collection of activities in flux enacted through its processes something I could never quite name and what did it matter but it feels like it does matter." (p152)
Perhaps I am of an ideal readership for this book, given its subject and my own creative/career path, and others might find it tedious or solipsistic...or even overly challenging in its form and structure, with its experiments in layout and spacing, mixing stream of consciousness prose with concrete poetry, and engendering a certain ambiguity over what is fantasy and what is actual, what is real and what is invented. But I found this experimentation—as the narrator examines her person and life through her collected/created objects, words and artworks (her own and others'), music and sound, memories and dreams (and the conflation of the two), wondering whether one might be the sum of what one procures...or produces (or both/neither?)—made Uh Huh Her all the more engaging and, in a way, realistic and relatable.
Thanks to Moist Books for the advance reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.
I'll admit the PJ Harvey connection, as a fan of her music, was what initially spurred my interest in reading Uh Huh Her. But even if the book isn't really about Harvey, I did find the narrator's (self-)investigations into art and the creative impulse interesting and compelling, relatable. I also thought this book wouldn't seem out of place on Semiotexte's booklist—Chris Kraus and her book I Love Dick are mentioned a couple of times, for example—and, as I read, I was reminded (not in a bad way) of such other Semiotexte authors as Stephanie LaCava, Joanna Walsh, or Lynne Tillman—writers writing about art, film, other media, in their attempts to parse identity and one's place in the world, in relation both to others and what they create.
"I'm trying to demonstrate something to myself about the nature of my own creative world as a collection of activities in flux enacted through its processes something I could never quite name and what did it matter but it feels like it does matter." (p152)
Perhaps I am of an ideal readership for this book, given its subject and my own creative/career path, and others might find it tedious or solipsistic...or even overly challenging in its form and structure, with its experiments in layout and spacing, mixing stream of consciousness prose with concrete poetry, and engendering a certain ambiguity over what is fantasy and what is actual, what is real and what is invented. But I found this experimentation—as the narrator examines her person and life through her collected/created objects, words and artworks (her own and others'), music and sound, memories and dreams (and the conflation of the two), wondering whether one might be the sum of what one procures...or produces (or both/neither?)—made Uh Huh Her all the more engaging and, in a way, realistic and relatable.
Thanks to Moist Books for the advance reader's copy in exchange for an honest review.
September 24, 2024
I'm in the right age range, I've had enough sympathetic personal experiences that jive with the music and culture tossed around in this book, and I consider myself very open to and in fact a fan of novels willing to extend out beyond traditional notions of narrative, however, this one missed me pretty hard. The prose is fine but the characters, to me, felt like caricatures sometimes so broadly drawn I had to roll my eyes. Without sympathetic characters or any meaningful structure I could hang onto I got a little lost in this novel which quickly started to feel like so much navel gazing. By page 150 I couldn't wait for this to be over and by page 190 I thought it never would be (it's a 200 page book).
A book like this is necessarily a very personal project and I would not be surprised to hear others gush about it. I wish I were that person. It's an all or nothing concept for a book and if you are the type of person who can't read PJ Harvey song titles without hearing them sung, if they infect you with greater significance just by their mention, it's possible this would be a very meaningful book for you. For me? I wish I'd spent the time reading Ann Quin directly. Hopefully enough reviewers enjoy this to make my experience a minority one.
A book like this is necessarily a very personal project and I would not be surprised to hear others gush about it. I wish I were that person. It's an all or nothing concept for a book and if you are the type of person who can't read PJ Harvey song titles without hearing them sung, if they infect you with greater significance just by their mention, it's possible this would be a very meaningful book for you. For me? I wish I'd spent the time reading Ann Quin directly. Hopefully enough reviewers enjoy this to make my experience a minority one.
August 7, 2024
There are times when one can relate to a novel. As a generation Xer on the later side (1978) I’m pleased to see a new crop of authors dig out the past. UH HUH HER. those who don’t know it’s named after a 2004 PJ Harvey album.
The book Uh Huh Her is a kind of memoir where the narrator speaks about her time in art school to art teacher. It’s fragmented as between the life experiences there are visits from PJ Harvey (the chapters are named after her songs) and novelist Ann Quin, plus diversions into the art of recording songs off a radio and the joys of a stuck discman. Then to add more to the mix there’s sections about art theory and the analyst, who gives constant advice .
In a way the book moves like some sort of manic dream – there are dream sequences too – but despite the collage feel, the narrator’s life story does emerge. I guess the art (in all forms) is life/life is art message is prominent.
UH HUH HER is a playful novel and even though it throws a lot of cultural references at the reader, there is a fun aspect to the onrush. It’s a particular book but a rewarding one.
The book Uh Huh Her is a kind of memoir where the narrator speaks about her time in art school to art teacher. It’s fragmented as between the life experiences there are visits from PJ Harvey (the chapters are named after her songs) and novelist Ann Quin, plus diversions into the art of recording songs off a radio and the joys of a stuck discman. Then to add more to the mix there’s sections about art theory and the analyst, who gives constant advice .
In a way the book moves like some sort of manic dream – there are dream sequences too – but despite the collage feel, the narrator’s life story does emerge. I guess the art (in all forms) is life/life is art message is prominent.
UH HUH HER is a playful novel and even though it throws a lot of cultural references at the reader, there is a fun aspect to the onrush. It’s a particular book but a rewarding one.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews