Because I Don't Know What You Mean and What You Don't

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Even if they’re recorded, “they’re just gone, they go… [Whereas] I do feel excited about the prospect that maybe in ten years people might read [these] and be talking about them,” she says. I think thething that unites all of the narrators is a kind of intensity of feeling and perhaps an overthinking quality.

In the final story, “I Don’t Know”, which is a slightly zany take on parenthood, the narrator says “Enough will be alright to keep going. I got one done in 2016 - I was at a friend’s house and sat down one evening and wrote a story really quickly and was like ‘oh this is going to be easy, I can get it all done in a week’ then didn’t do another one for four years.

From a comic mastermind comes this brilliant collection of comical, refreshing and often brilliantly relatable stories. The lack of autonomy for the narrator in stories such as the Kafkaesque “Just An Informal Chat” and the quietly heart-breaking “Grandad” is another recurring theme.

Added to that has been a rising political consciousness that’s made her one of the UK’s loudest left-wing voices – alongside Stewart Lee, who was an early champion of her work – in a comedy scene that often ducks away from controversy. Because I Don't Know What You Mean And What You Don’t is due to be published next year, with publishers Canongate saying: ‘Each tale paints a life in miniature and offers an escape chute from the catastrophes of modern life. It worked in my favour a bit to have people think I was unusual and not just neurodivergent,” she says, “and it was nice for me to feel that, too. Long’s diagnosis makes up a large part of her current stand-up tour show Re-enchantment, as does the birth of child number two; something from which she feels the work has benefitted.

I've been a Josie Long fan for years, and when I learned that her first book was going to be a collection of short stories, rather than a my-life-in-twelve-lessons-memoir-polemic (as we've seen from so many comedians over the last decade or so), it felt so right: Long's work on Book Shambles and Short Cuts, alongside the Radio 4 plays and micro-budget films she's made, feel suited to this genre, and certainly influenced by it. By the age of 24 her first full-length Edinburgh Fringe show had won her a Best Newcomer Award and the 41-year-old has been a staple of the capital’s Festival scene ever since with this year’s Re-Enchantment continuing its UK tour with gigs in Aberdeen and Inverness later this month. These are probably best not read all together, as I did, as at times I forgot which story I was reading. I couldn't tell if there was a thread between the stories and I might have benefited from an introduction to set my expectations.

This is a brilliant collection of stories, expertly told and with fascinating, fully realised characters. And then there’s another one about a kid in a violent home where it’s mostly hidden and in my life I had experiences of living in a stressful environment, shall we say, and writing it had a kind of nightmarish quality for me. There are also times you want Long to imbue important moments with more detail, and slow the pace, so the reader can really feel what's being portrayed.

The "neighbourhood pandemic WhatsApp group" story is memorably odd - at first I thought I was reading about a future egg-shortage dystopia, because who goes on that much about a single egg? From her new home in Glasgow, the much-loved standup insists there’s much more to life than sweating on the Central line and doing hand-to-hand combat with the city’s cost-of-living crisis. I would love to see the ideas and characters in this story expanded into a novel in their own right - I was fascinated by what their back-story was, and would have enjoyed a longer, more satisfying narrative arc than the short story form allows. On the other end, cold and brazen was by far my least favourite which follows a middle aged dad who wants to get in with the younger generation but is a creep and just ugh I didn’t care for him nor the story in the slightest. So, “Forgetting” uses quotes from the activist Jonathan Moses, “The Patron Saint Of Lost Causes” is prefaced by a snippet from Greta Thunberg, and another uses Instagram messages from two sources, both about coercive control.