THE COLUMN<
THE COLUMN BY ELEANOR JAMES
Exhausted mother and wife Margot runs a successful anonymous column, chronicling her daily struggles parenting teenagers, dealing with her husband and caring for her dying mother. As the column grows in popularity and the nation clamors to know more about its mysterious author, Margot battles with whether to reveal her identity. The judges described Gooding’s story as ‘beautifully written’, ‘original’ and ‘unpredictable.’
You can read an extract from the story below.
ELEANOR JAMES
Eleanor James grew up in Birmingham in a slightly eccentric, creative household where dreams were encouraged. Now a Manchester-based People & Culture professional, her fascination with what makes people tick spills into her fiction. She’s a record-collecting, vintage-loving mum who loves getting lost in a story.
The Column
Margot finds it endlessly ironic that her fictional self is now better at being her than her actual self. No one knows this, of course; that’s the point. But she can feel it now some time has passed. She can sense the quiet hum of people thinking they know her. She can sense it in the familiarity with which she’s discussed on endless TikToks and YouTube videos and even daytime TV shows. People share the column and quote the best lines from it – which sound way more decisive out loud than Margot has ever felt. Even she might buy into this character she’s created, if she wasn’t living it. Just the week before as she’d watched the terraced houses of the suburbs merge into the brick warehouses and apartments of the city centre from the train, Margot had heard strangers discussing her latest piece, their voices warm with recognition. A man in the group said, She really gets it. Margot is still mulling over what it is.
Margot doesn’t tell anyone about the column. Not her mates, Jules and Jen, not the kids, not Sean. Definitely not Sean. She writes it at the kitchen table after the house goes quiet, the dishwasher ticking behind her like a heartbeat. Sean knows she’s writing something, but he no longer asks what that something is. Margot cannot decide whether she is grateful, or resentful for his lack of interest. Probably grateful as it’s given her plenty of fodder for the column, which Sean will hopefully never read. She tries her best to funnel these contradictions from her brain down through her fingertips and into the words that appear on her laptop screen very late at night. She hits ‘send’ and watches tonight’s column disappear from her inbox. The subject line: ‘late piece, sorry’. The features editor will read it at 6am and reply. Amazing Margot, this piece is fearless.
Margot wishes she was fearless.
The column has a title she hates but cannot improve: The Shit Sandwich, though the newspaper substitutes the ‘i’ in shit with a star, of course. Someone, an aunt perhaps, had warned Margot about the ‘shit sandwich decade’ years before she found herself in it, trapped ridiculously between needy teens, needy – and dying parents, and her own body slowly giving out on her; the triple kick-in-the-teeth of an autoimmune disease, her thyroid packing up and the shitmess of her hormones. She tried to avoid the M word. It was far too fashionable and if Margot hated one thing, it was to look like a try-hard.
Other shortlisted stories:
The Brunel Prize Winner
Rowan is a poet and tree surgeon living in East London. His work has recently been featured in 14 Magazine and Acumen. His poem ‘Wild Ghazal’ won second prize in the Shelley Memorial Project’s 2025 competition. He is currently working on a new pamphlet of compromised, radical ecopoems.
