In Defence of Leisure

This poetic, graceful and original book not only demonstrates the richness and relevance of Marion Milner’s work today but also offers many insights into the choices we make - or fail to - in love, leisure and work. Singh helps us to understand how we inhabit our lives, and how we can start thinking about inhabiting them differently. An illuminating and thought-provoking book that will appeal to a very wide audience – Darian Leader, author of Is It Ever Just Sex?As Etta James sings, “at last!” This book announces at once that Marion Milner finally has her great champion and that the psychoanalytic project has a great new interpreter: Akshi Singh. Singh’s verve and intelligence radiate from every page. Accept this invitation to experiment, to live a new way, full of creativity and attention – Hannah ZeavinIn Defence of Leisure lilts beautifully between whispering diaries and the chant of a manifesto. Akshi Singh has crafted an exquisite, open-hearted celebration of desire, friendship and lives imaginatively lived. Yet she never shies from questions of risk, of where to put our anger, or of what we concede in exchange for love. Untangling security - so often pernicious and compromising - from care, Singh insists on a wide horizon, full of freedom, for everyone – Marianne Brooker, author of IntervalsIn Defence of Leisure is an astounding, generous, and quietly exhilarating contemplation of love, grief, and the enigma of discovering one’s own desires. Through vivid and exquisitely rendered vignettes of relationships, domestic life and family scenes, Akshi Singh situates us in the very spaces where desires are forged and our wishes are bottled up, diverted or allowed to take flight. I was deeply moved and awed by Singh’s ability to hold and distil the shifting ground of thought and feeling, and infected by her commitment to the unsolved difficulty of living and loving – Daisy LaFarge, author of PaulIn Defence of Leisure is elegant, invigorating and beautiful. I could barely read a single paragraph without wanting to take a photo of it to share with friends. In this book Akshi Singh writes on some of the biggest questions I trouble with – how to live with a ‘kind of hope that has risk at its heart’ and how to truly know my own desires. I feel renewed and accompanied by Singh’s tender self-explorations and insights as she considers those questions, grateful her book has given me the chance to see her mind at work and more hopeful that my continued experiments in both leisure and pleasure bring me closer to liberty – Amy Key, author of Arrangements in BlueI loved this carefully thought and deceptively light touch account of seeking and finding leisure, written through and alongside the work of Marion Milner. The prose radiates recreation, at once defiant and joyful – curious, expansive and open to unexpected turns. A delight. – Helen Jukes

Akshi Singh is an associate editor at Parapraxis and deputy editor at Critical Quarterly, and is the editor of a special collection of Critical Quarterly presenting new writing on Marion Milner. She collaborates regularly with the Derek Jarman lab, and writes for the London Review of Books. Singh moved to the UK from India to study for a PhD in psychoanalysis and literature with Jacqueline Rose. She is currently training to be a psychoanalyst at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research.