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

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I love reading them and also it feels like such an intellectual achievement when you’re exhausted with a child to have read something literary for 30 pages - you’ve done something and it feels good. Like with most collection there were some stories that I enjoyed more than others but as a whole I really enjoyed and was captivated by this one. As that passage suggests, it certainly has the keen eye you'd expect from an acclaimed stand-up (see also: the women's partners all being "The type of thirty-eight-year-olds who run a techno label"), but laughs are in short supply. Some of them are downright upsetting and they all address uncomfortable issues with style, tension and resolve.

Why she chose to waste her time on a load of short stories (especially frequent ones that are more like short events than actual, structured stories) instead of a real story is beyond me.The pandemic seems to have turned half of Britain’s best-known comedians towards literature, and after Osman, Boyle et al we now have a debut collection, Because I Don’t Know What You Mean And What You Don’t, from the woefully underexposed Josie Long. I found the stories here daring, funny, refreshingly frank, miraculous and, despite all the misshapen characters, refreshingly uplifting. 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.

But how does she feel instead about the fact that these stories are fixed, unchangeable from now on? Everyone has experienced loss, unrequited love, a bully, and more importantly their own internal doubt - perhaps not in excess as the poor characters involved in Long's short stories. the collection's standout story for me, follows the survivor of an abusive relationship after her abuser moves into her neighbourhood almost two decades later.After a break to study English at Oxford University, she had her Edinburgh fringe debut in 2006 with Kindness and Exuberance, a show that Chortle described as “utterly amateurish…this is a good thing”, disarming audiences with homemade badges, handwritten programmes, shambolic ukelele songs, and jokes about her supervillain persona Deceptive Shrimp. It was affable rather than acerbic; and if I had a criticism it would be that there was a whimsical “nice to be nice” vibe about it all, to quote both Dylan Thomas and the chief in M*A*S*H. Peppered with the acclaimed comedian's trademark warmth and wit, the stories collected in Because I don't know what you mean and what you don't feature quirky, richly drawn characters and delightfully unpredictable plotlines.