…are you reading now?
Louise Gluck’s Winter Recipes From The Collective. I’m not a voracious reader of poetry, but I have a few poets whose books I keep very close, and she’s been one of them for years. These austere, melancholy poems seem perfectly poised for the moment we’re in, with their haunted dream landscapes and long perspectives on the past. The sadness and pessimism that comes with good writing can be a strength and a joy. It’s the fake cheer that makes me desolate.
…would you take to a desert island?
What should I do? It’s a joy and I love it without reservation — and it would last a long time while I waited on my island to be rescued. I know all the characters in it — Natasha and Andrei and Pierre and Marya and Nikolai, all of them — as intimately as if they were flesh and blood friends and family. Their lives and their love story is one of the most captivating stories ever. But I wonder if it won’t be too heartbreaking, reading about that whole rich world of human interaction when I’m marooned all alone? Is it going to increase or decrease my loneliness?
Tessa Hadley (pictured), would bring War and Peace to a deserted island, because it would be there for a while before being rescued.
…first gave you the reading bug?
My first book was about Mrs. Small and her small Smalls. It brought out the joy in reading. The book’s title or author are not known.
But it’s my earliest reading memory: I can conjure the illustrations in my mind’s eye now, black and white and blue line drawings, very stylised, the characters with round heads like cutout dolls. Ever since then I’ve preferred books about small people.
Stories that described the everyday were what hooked me from the start. I loved stories about people having breakfast, children playing at school or eating with their friends. Of course, it’s even better if the everyday also includes a mystery.
Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden was one of my most significant reading experiences — so much of the way my imagination works stems from being with Tom and Hatty in that garden. I didn’t care for folk tales or fairy stories when I was a child. These stories were not something I was able to enjoy intellectually, so it took me a while to get used to them.
…left you cold?
Because I’m passionate about certain women writers of the first half of the twentieth century — Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Taylor — it ought to follow that I love Virginia Woolf too. But for one reason or another I don’t quite. Her sentences don’t leap off the page for me; I seem to feel her struggle in them, and her disabling self-consciousness. Even in Jean Rhys, so personally anguished, there’s such a hearty appetite for the writing itself, for getting the truth of life down into the words.
- Free Love is published on January 20 by Jonathan Cape at £16.99.