Cover Design by Emma Ewbank. Photograph © Nathan Landers

text by Poppy Baring

Ivona and Vlaho personify the often-felt but never easy human experience that is being so close but ultimately, impossibly, and frustratingly out of reach from the ideal happy ending. Told by Ivona, Slanting Towards the Sea depicts a heartbreakingly intense and oh-so-tangible love story set against the lapping Croatian sea. Passing between their youth and budding university relationship, following through a childless marriage, and divorce brought about by wider family pressures, this story tells the effects and sadness of love and longing.

Touching on themes like death, infertility, employment, and numerous other relatable life events, Lidija Hilje writes this story openly, never skimming a subject but revealing it in sharp focus. As Ivona attempts to find her feet in her homeland, she is continuously hit by attacks that seem to throw her off balance, wether it’s adoption difficulties or visa frustrations, only in the end does she realise that the life she has remained attached to has not fully served her.

This is a book that you never want to end, one that is a joy to go back to and which feels like you are zooming into a summer romance. Describing the life of Ivona and bringing readers along as the characters discover hidden and complex parts of themselves, Hilje writes with vivid imagery of Croatia's changing seasons, where we can feel the stillness of a night at the height of summer or picture the hush of the olive grove that comes “seeping into your soul if you make your self still enough”.

While Ivona moves through the chapters of her life, which remains tethered to her ex husband’s, Marina (Vlaho’s wife and mother of his children) and Asier (Ivona’s new love, the first in nine years) provide sounding boards to her actions and inner-voice. With the potential she holds looming over her head and her ageing parents keeping her in her childhood home, our protagonist tries to claim a life of her own, free from concealed resentment.

The story ends with a poignant statement about parent and child relationships. Vlaho’s life is revealed to be “a sum of his countless confessions to others,” and in the end, he makes a decision in the hope of changing a pattern of choices that goes back generations. Slanting Towards the Sea is Hilje’s debut novel, but it feels as though it has inhabited our bookshelves for years, collecting watermarks from summers past.

Lidija Hilje. Suzy New Life Photography.

Sheree Rose is the kinky grandmother I never had but always wanted. Featured in the seminal and groundbreaking 1997 documentary SICK alongside her late partner, supermasochist Bob Flanagan, Sheree was the woman behind the curtain acting as Bob’s Domme and a massive force in helping him achieve greatness through performance, poetry, and promiscuity. All smiles and as candid as it gets, she gleefully divulged the breadth of her sexual awakening and the hardships in getting there. She is a punk, a pervert, and a pioneer — a true libertine — warm hearted yet strict and opinionated, which is why I was initially drawn to her. She is most written about in the context of Bob (“an exotic endangered species,” as she calls him), and while that relationship was undoubtedly important to her and performance history, Sheree stands alone as a remarkable and fascinating woman who waxes poetic on the state of femdom, feminist practice, and sex in the contemporary time — “out of the bedroom and into real life — explicit not just implicit.” On September 11th, we met at the ONE Archives at USC to discuss her role in the BDSM and D/s scene in Los Angeles during the 70s and 80s, the importance of choice, questions about male sexuality, and our shared love for guiding slave boys into the matriarchy. Click here to read the full interview.

text by Poppy Baring

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