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The Obsessive Diary

The diary of a literary obsessive

I write a diary and publish it. What could possible go wrong... eleanoranstruther.substack.com

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63:10

LIVE with Annie Macmanus

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/20

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

2:57

63. Gremlins

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/20

I’m going to tell you a fairy story. Once upon a time there was a little girl who saw something. She happened upon a woman in a bath who was drinking a glass of wine and the woman’s expression said she saw it too but she carried on drinking her wine. The little girl knew she was going to die so she took what was most precious inside her and gave it to the Gremlins who lived in the hollow of roots beneath the trees that grew on steep cliffs behind her father’s house. And then the bad things happened

69:58

LIVE with Marlon Weems

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/19

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

3:09

62. We Drove Them Wild

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/19

At the heart of addiction lies trauma. It’s an answer to the question, How can I live with such pain? My love affair with needles was a problem-solver and like all dysfunctional relationships it began with the explosive belief that I’d found the one, and ended with my world reduced to a pinprick. For three years I travelled back and forth to Australia using crystal meth and cocaine to make life feel better and for a while it worked. I was stick thin and unapproachable but to a degree I was happy. My

3:14

61. When Crazy Met Crazy

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/18

It’s now that the shaman overplays his hand. You’d think cutting the brakes on my car and locking me out of my house would have done it. Or throwing a party while I was away called Going Ape that he’d advertised with fliers all over the local town. Or his misogyny. Or megalomania but don’t forget context; I’d come out of India, Israel, commune, cult, and Centro Maya was just another chapter in an already overloaded book. And he’d got inside my head because even the most poundshop shaman knows enough

2:34

60. Thin Crazed White Girl

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/17

The same word, written over and over, all over the hotel bedroom wall. And he was gone. In another version of this story I apologised to the hotel staff, paid for the paintwork, got in my red car, drove to Jo’burg and flew home alone and none of the terrible happened and neither of the brilliant either. There was nothing to stop me. He’d likely be dead but what did I care. I’d tried. He and his toy guns and broken foot and magic marker could meet their fate and I’d be safely on a plane out of there

2:58

59. The Island

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/16

I’m not sure what happened except we’d been up for a week under an eclipse and instead of going to bed about a hundred of us decided to carry on. The island was a narrow strip of land in the Zambezi River, the only way to it by canoe. We left our vehicles on the banks, I don’t remember what gear we had, I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a tent but someone must have lent us one because you spent a lot of time in it. There was a bar, and a dance floor picked out by lights and DJ, speakers marked the

2:22

58. Crack Daddy Wanted

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/15

That was the kind of party it was. A thousand people on a plot of land in Zambia, gathered for an eclipse. We’d flown to Jo’burg with hand luggage of toy guns because scaring the s**t out of people at parties was what you were into. We’d hired a car, ripped out the seats and turned the back into a bed and driven from South Africa through Botswana to Livingstone. God knows how we found the site; these were the days before mobile phones and satnav, we probably had a piece of paper and a map. I don’t

2:55

57. Invincible

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/14

There is a version of this story where you stayed in the jungle, and I came back to England and our relationship remained three addictive magical months in a house in Possum Creek and none of the terrible happened and none of the beautiful either. But that isn’t this version because when my visa ran out and I had to leave I returned to a boy from Kent who was still trying to take over my home – remember? The shaman is still there, still cracking eggs, some other poor mug hauling sweat lodge blankets

2:39

56. The First Needle

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/13

We left the party and moved in together. It was that simple. There was a house which two beautiful Japanese boys had found; I had been staying there with the Israelis before I came to the party on the lake. I told you about it and we drove out, found a window open, climbed in. It was wooden floors in a jungle, brightly coloured rugs under eaves, dripping leaves in an Australian storm, tree frogs and kookaburras calling. It was clean and bright and beautiful and furnished and empty and we took it

2:42

55. A Party Out The Back Of Mullum

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/12

Do you remember? A party out the back of Mullum, a lake, an Australian night. I was high and you were wild or was it the other way round. I’d dumped my willowy friend with the ankles she was ashamed of soon after arriving in Sydney and jumped in with a bunch of Israelis who had a camper van going north. She was furious, she said she’d offered me her friendship on a silver platter, a phrase I found funny not sobering. It didn’t make me sorry. The Israelis called me hefty or some such word which is

56:21

LIVE with James Geary

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/11

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

3:22

54. Three Other Memories

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/11

Here are three other memories I carried unbroken and unquestioned. Every night I would slide down the banister of the tall, cold house, curving polished wood beside stone, and when I reached the dark ground floor, I’d slide all the way up again. But one night I didn’t. I waited, my legs dangling, waiting as I had outside for him, and realising slowly that with him the magic had gone. I remember dismounting, my pyjamas and bare feet, and having to walk the stairs instead, up and up in the pitch-quiet

3:14

53. Like Keyser Söze, Was Gone

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/10

When I was three a man turned up to live in the basement flat with the woman who’d escaped the Czech revolution. She, a refugee, had been given a job and a home by my mother, he was her husband, not Czech, probably Australian or from New Zealand. It’s likely she married him for Commonwealth residency, I’ve spoken to other Czech refugees who knew her and that is their best guess. Our home, the tall, cold house in London, was a place of many rooms and many lives; bohemian, socialist, crowded, wealthy,

3:24

52. Buckle Up

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/09

He went to Mexico for the summer to see his teacher leaving me in charge of the sweat lodge altar. I cleaned and lit and waved incense and genuflected but the candles turned black. He said it was an attack, he was always in battle with dark forces. I wrote my first novel over those six weeks, a story of a girl who goes to India and loses her mind. When he returned, I put it in a drawer. We went to Italy to run a sweat lodge on the shores of a lake near Rome. We went to Wales to collect more basalt

3:14

51. A Blank Wall Of Silence

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/08

There’s a blank wall of silence in my mind when I try and think back, to capture the essence of what it was like to live and work with a boy from Kent who called himself a shaman, who’s still out there, working. I’m exhausted by it. I don’t know where to start. Is it enough to say that we ran sweat lodges every three weeks, hordes of naked crying people crawling in and out of a pitch-dark dome in the mud while he intoned and chanted and spat water, hot rocks hissing? How we stood about afterwards,

3:03

50. The Shaman

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/07

It’s going to be all right. This story that has been going from frying pan to fire has a happy outcome in the end. I feel the need to tell you that because from here on in it gets darker and the oh no what’s next can be exhausting. So remember as we dive and the air becomes stifled and the pressure builds that there is a lowest point, and when we get there, we’ll turn around and start coming up for air. We will survive. On his website he says he ran a clinic at the address of my farm; just a line in

3:06

49. Doormat

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/06

A black fly buzzes about the kitchen as I write, small and annoying. It circles me, persistent and I’m not surprised. That was him, single-minded and obvious. Of all of them he was the worst, not because his delusion was any greater but for his intent. The others – the people who had crossed my path and abused their power – were convinced, if they thought about it at all, that they were doing me good as well as themselves. But he knew he wasn’t. He was shooting fish in a barrel. That night by the

3:02

48. The Egg Man Cometh

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/05

I had painted myself into a corner the day he arrived. Returned to the farm after a year away I no longer knew where I fitted into this thing we’d started, a commune in Surrey, everyone else getting on with it but I was lost. I’d set about my bedroom floor with white gloss, a fresh start, and forgotten to leave a way out. Barefoot, dripping paintbrush, my back against the wall, he appeared in the doorway and introduced himself. He didn’t say, I am the egg man, but we came to know him as that. Many

2:54

47. I Am Coming For You

The Obsessive Diary ·

2025/11/04

I woke this morning with that Richard Wilbur quote spinning round my head: “Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.” I have to remind myself that these are not a fluke, these daily posts that I get up and write every day. These episodes have been churning for decades. But here’s the thing, it’s only now when I string them together that they tell a story that I didn’t know. They’re no longer isolated fragments, they give context to each other. I didn’t know quite

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