on Ella Frears

I Shook My Head

Renters across the UK will be familiar with Goodlord, the online ‘property technology’ platform which removes what little human interaction there had been in the administration of tenancy. When Ella Frears’s own lettings agent demanded she make a Goodlord account, she was filled by ‘a strange, chilled anger’. So she did what any goodly bureaucratic subject must: she wrote an email.

This memoir-novel-poetic sequence’s sing-song rhythms carry narrative into all sorts of knotty and depraved scenarios. From its opening ‘Dear Ava’, Goodlord: An Email spools out memories, anecdotes and jokes about the various spaces the speaker has rented over the years, from The Big House of dreams through student halls, a basement flat and various house shares to artist residencies in museums and houses and gardens between periods of sofa surfing. Spaces stack up while the narrative hurtles towards Boatswain’s Clench (a comically unappealing name) and the events that unfold there on her first artist’s residency. Frears is a master joke teller and Goodlord is funny as hell, unceasingly bawdy and oftentimes candid, but also capable of classic romcom, as in her arrival at her Boatswain’s Clench residency: fresh from the city with her ‘suitcase, miniskirt, / impractical boots with a little heel’, scuttling along ‘through the forest, along the river, down the road’ for miles to her accommodation. Fresh from years of cramped and tormenting living conditions, she predictably has no idea what to do with herself in the idyllic little studio she’s been gifted for eight weeks: her focus settles ...