the most compelling first page

High praise for my book Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim: "This has to be the most compelling first page of a book I've ever read." Thanks so much for reading.

Amy Fusselman Quote

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"The parental gaze returned me to a quote I had read a few years earlier, by British child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, in his 1971 book Playing and Reality, in a chapter on adolescent development. Although my kids weren’t yet adolescents when I first read it—two of the three of them are now—it has remained one of the most significant things I have read in my parenting life:

“If you do all you can to promote personal growth in your offspring, you will need to be able to deal with startling results. If your children find themselves at all they will not be contented to find anything but the whole of themselves, and that will include the aggression and destructive elements in themselves as well as the elements that can be labelled loving. There will be this long tussle which you will need to survive.”

In all my parental discussions up to that moment—with teachers, principals, pediatricians, and other significant figures in my parenting work—I had never before heard a peep about the desirability of dealing with “startling results” such as these. The parenting canon as I had seen it seemed rife with experts whose sole aim—I am thinking now of the brightly-titled mega-bestseller 1-2-3 Magic—was to keep the parent secure in his/her domain of wizard-y control. That as brilliant a psychoanalyst as Winnicott should have stated that a death-defying “tussle” is an essential aspect of parenting whole children—and serves as a sign that one has parented well rather than poorly—is a concept I have held onto tightly in part because I have heard it expressed so seldom."

- Amy Fusselman, On the Parental Gaze


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The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information at Rosendal Teater (Trondheim, Norway)

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PME-ART are soon on our way to Norway to perform The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information at the Rosendal Teater on January 21, 2026. We have now been performing this work for fifteen years and it is always a pleasure to bring it to a new city.

A turntable and a pile of records. For each record we have at least one story at the ready. These stories have come from hearsay, internet research, books, magazines, friends and our personal lives. One after another, we put on the records and tell our stories about them, each story growing out of the last and into the next. The audience can casually have a drink, stay for a while, come and go, exploring the way music – and the stories that surround it – infiltrate our personal and social lives, affecting our ongoing understanding of love, work and how we think society should operate.

Every time we do The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information we tell stories we’ve told before but in very new ways, plus a few stories we’ve never told before to keep us on our toes. Like John Peel famously once said about The Fall: “Always the same, always different.”

The following day (January 22) we invite the public to bring a song of their choice and tell a story about it during the Bring your own Record/Listening Party.

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Bonus:

Watch at short video of The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information being performed at the Musée d’art contemporain – La Triennale québécoise, 12 octobre 2011.

You can also read A letter about The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information from 2011.

Plus an excerpt from my book Authenticity is a Feeling about The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information featuring anecdotes regarding The Fall, Pavement and Parenthetical Girls.


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Favourite Political Novels

Someone on social media asked for people's favourite political novels (their recommendation was Comrade Papa by GauZ, which I now need to read.) It got me thinking, and I came up with this list (since, as everyone knows, I really do love lists):

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 – Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien
Diego Garcia – Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
American Abductions – Mauro Javier Cárdenas
ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines – Sesshu Foster & Arturo Ernesto Romo
I Hotel – Karen Tei Yamashita
M Archive – Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Clandestine Occupations: An Imaginary History – Diana Block
The Unseen – Nanni Balestrini (translated by Liz Heron)
The Vanquished – César Andreu Iglesias (translated by Sidney W. Mintz)
Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow – Michiko Ishimure (translated by Livia Monnet)
American War – Omar El Akkad



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