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In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner

Author(s) : Akshi Singh

Reviews and Endorsements

In 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 Intervals

I 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

In 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 Paul

In 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 Blue