My first memory of reading
I loved an illustrated book called Story Number 1 by Eugène Ionesco. It showed a louche home from the 1960s where the mother and father have a great life and are always hungover. Her maid, Jacqueline, brings them every morning on a huge tray on which, sandwiched between ham, eggs, coffee and postcards, her little girl squats.
my favorite book growing up
Crazy about dancing as a child, I got hooked on ballet shoes. There was something about show business as a remedy for refined poverty that was very appealing. One afternoon I found Noel Streatfeild in the phone book and called her.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I read Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless when I was 14, having heard someone describe it as “edgy romanticism. The topic was alarming: sadistic sexual harassment in an Austro-Hungarian military academy for boys, but I was transfixed by the quality of the writing. I felt I was in the hands of a genius.
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The writer who changed my mind
Henry James explained my life to me. As long as I remember everything I’ve ever thought and everything anyone has said to me, his commitment to depicting the entire landscape of human consciousness makes a lot of sense. His concern with how to be good in the world, without taking on too much of the taint that comes with the word “worldly,” soon became a focus. I also love its fidelity to perceptions that have a tentative quality: the comment you thought you heard but wasn’t actually uttered, or the moment when you’re sure someone has caught you thinking about something you didn’t even know. million years you would think. …
The book that made me want to be a writer
When I got out of elementary school, the principal gave me a copy of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout. Inside he wrote: “I hope one day to see a book of his writings on the shelves of a bookseller.” I was knocked out.
the book i reread
I am always reading John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, cheering him on, despairing of him, entering his strangely refined sensibilities as I absorb all the pain and chaos of his days. It conjures the sharpness and wonder of living on the very edge of things, life in your teeth, with Shakespeare as your lifeboat.
The books I could never read again
I read Saul BellowThe novels of my 20s and their intense vivacity and wild, heroic range have stayed with me. I think they would now seem sexist to me and Bellow’s troubling attitudes towards race would cause me dismay.
The book I discovered later in life.
Set primarily in Harlem in the 1920s, Jazz by Tony Morrison is a complex, surprising and richly textured novel that draws you so strongly into its world that you feel like you’re living in the thin-walled flat next door.
my consolation reading
I go back to slaves of loneliness by Patrick Hamilton, where Miss Roach’s brave and restrained adventures in the Rosamund Tea Rooms, a rooming house in a small English town in 1943, delight and horrify. The writing is sublime, the subtle wartime evocation meticulous, and Miss Roach is a queen.
the book I am currently reading
Memoirs of Annie Ernaux The years it has generous lyrical precision and encompasses not only his life, thoughts, and hopes, but broader currents in France from 1941 to 2006. Ernaux writes brilliantly about times of great scarcity, both emotional and material, but also about revelry and swooning. of the celebrations. .