A perfect Sunday with... Chrissy Williams
Watching squirrels fight jackdaws, escaping from Nazis and the ever-amazing Jessica Fletcher
Every week, a top writer, artist, actor or creator reveals how they’d fill their perfect Sunday, sharing their favourite comfort reads, movies, food… anything that would make their weekend great.
Today, it's the turn of Chrissy Williams, writer of Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best.
Chrissy's perfect Sunday… brunch
There's a world in which my perfect Sunday brunch involves sitting by a big open window, listening to birdsong as the sun streams in, eating a cinnamon roll and drinking a nice cup of tea. It would make a nice change to the current state of affairs: watching a squirrel fist-fight the big gang of jackdaws in our garden, spilling coffee all over myself, then screaming in pyjamas and old mascara, "EGGS! EGGS! EGGS! ALL I WANT IS EGGS!" like I'm drag queen Ginger Minj in the Drag Race season seven John Waters tribute. (That's a pretty specific reference, but I believe it to be accurate.)
Chrissy's perfect Sunday… read
I recently read Heather Parry's Orpheus Builds a Girl and could not put it down. Horrifying, compelling, and based on a grotesque true story. It's a story about love - and scientific research - after death, and a fundamental objectification of women. Would highly recommend.
I've just started The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which is the true autobiographical story that inspired The Sound of Music. Did you know the film was based on reality? I did not. Apparently, the real flight from the Nazis was far less dramatic than the film version (I'm imagining Rodgers & Hammerstein approaching it like the producers of Three Men & A Baby: "Maybe the main plot isn't enough? Maybe we need do cocaine dealers and an unpredictable lift in the third act?") but Maria Trapp's (her actual name!) writing is charming, and the story also goes into what happened to the family in America and beyond, which is fascinating and human.
Chrissy's perfect Sunday… comic
Actually, last weekend (I was out of my house, so not distracted by jackdaw street fighting) I read through a brilliant poetry comic by Peony Gent that I picked up at Thought Bubble last year. It's called In a Plum: A Walk Through Thought. It's a really interesting meditation on time, language, relationships, and experience, told in art, words, conversation, collage. I really enjoyed it.
Chrissy's perfect Sunday... TV binge
Honestly, I would gladly spend all day every day rolling back through every episode of Murder, She Wrote. Angela Lansbury is so appealing and kindhearted - it's cosy, but so broad and interested in different types of people.
I also love how ludicrous and adorable all of Jessica Fletcher's different modes are. There's "morning jogger who stumbles over a body" Jessica, "pretending to be drunk to get information" Jessica, "playing her own English cousin Emma who lives in London" Jessica, "helping her niece's husband who has been forced to become a drag queen" Jessica - it's a wonderful show, and has surprisingly not aged badly (with the notable exception of that one episode about VR, which was not good at all).
Chrissy's perfect Sunday… podcast
I try to listen to as much of The Comedian's Comedian with Stuart Goldsmith as possible. Stuart does really frank craft-based interviews with different comedians about their gigs, backgrounds, creative processes, and comedy as a whole. It gets really personal and interesting really quickly, anything from unpicking why one particular joke doesn't work, to talking about being bullied at school. And he always asks everyone at some point "Are you Happy?" which opens the door to really engaging and vulnerable answers. I steal a lot from comedy when I do my writing. Essential and hilarious listening.
Judith Mel
Chrissy's perfect Sunday… album
I think my Desert Island go-to will always be Joanna Newsom's Ys album. The lyrics themselves are beautiful and poetic, and the songs are incredibly textured and complex yet somehow organic. 'Sawdust & Diamonds', for example, is a dreamlike elegy filtered through a sort of dark, magical, childlike bucolic landscape of lust and donkeys. She sings about the worlds we create and inhabit, the greater worlds we cannot comprehend, friendship, love, loss, pain, all that good stuff. Plus she plays the harp like a motherfucker. It's music that can give me goosebumps just thinking about it.
Chrissy's perfect Sunday… treat
To eat a creme egg when nobody's watching.
Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best is on sale on 9th April from Image comics.
"In a world where old and infertile women are deemed useless to society and abandoned on an island, Golden Rage documents their golden years of making friends, baking dessert, and fighting to the death. Mother Knows Best builds on the first Golden Rage miniseries for a glorious new adventure, described as 'Battle Royale meets The Golden Girls'."
Chrissy Williams is a poet, editor and comic book writer, whose writing has been featured on BBC radio and television. She co-edited Over the Line: An Introduction to Poetry Comics with Tom Humberstone, about which Alan Moore said ‘I really can’t recommend this venture highly enough’. Her debut comic was Golden Rage (Image Comics), and the new miniseries Golden Rage: Mother Knows Best will be out this year.
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