Naomi is joined by writer and psychoanalyst Akshi Singh. They speak about the kind of associations that prompt more writing in the margins versus the moments of significance that are less immediately available in words; teaching oneself to write dialogue in a novel; how a listener can fade into listening; the problems we're embroiled in while reading; how the carrying-on of one version of a life can involve the repression of one's own thoughts and wishes; and psychoanalysis, friendships, and diaries as spaces where speech and writing can create new experiences of thinking.
Akshi Singh is a writer and psychoanalyst. Born in India, she lives in Glasgow. Akshi is the author of In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner (Jonathan Cape, 2025). She works across genres, writing memoir, criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her writing on psychoanalysis, art, and politics has appeared in
Granta,
Parapraxis,
The London Review of Books,
Art Review and elsewhere. She has a PhD in literature from the University of London. She was previously a Wellcome Trust funded postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and Lecturer in Global Migrations at the University of Glasgow. She is Associate Editor at
Parapraxis magazine and Deputy Editor at
Critical Quarterly.
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Marginalia: an autobiography from
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