Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue
Episode 7
Amy Key is a writer based in London. She is the author of Arrangements in Blue (Jonathan Cape, 2023), chosen as a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, Independent, Irish Times and Granta and shortlisted by Foyles for their Non Fiction Book of the Year 2023. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe (Salt, 2013) and Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe, 2018). Her essays have appeared in the collections At The Pond (2019) and By the River (2024) published by Daunt, as well as Granta, Vogue, The Observer, The Poetry Review, Independent and elsewhere. She writes the substack So Glad I’m Me.
Find Amy on Instagram @msamykey.
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TRANSCRIPT
[Full transcript coming soon. Find a version of this on the Zencastr site].
The rhetoric that you must love yourself before you can expect anyone else to love you can feel like a terrible burden. I know I've felt in a double bind: one of self-loathing, as culture tells me I will not be loved until that is overcome, and then one of dispossession, because I've listened to too many songs that tell me I am no one until somebody loves me. In that framework - the war between self-love as reali-sation and being loved as self-realisation - I lose on both sides. While self-care - in a superficial sense - can come easy, self-love can feel as remote a possibility as romantic love. If romantic love isn't a key that will unlock my esteem, and self-love feels threatening in its difficulty, I still need to find a shape for my life. Not just for my daily routines of care, but for what I'd like to see, feel and experience in my future.
Joni's songs never tell me I'm nobody because I don't have romantic love. I'm grateful. She doesn't preach that it's only love that will make you. I find comfort in her own uncertainty about what move to make. To stay or leave, whether to dwell on what love takes from us or its gifts.