My earliest reading memory
The Little Engine That Could. My mom used to read it to me at night and then one day I could read it myself. I read it over and over in bed, the story of a valiant little train making it over the mountain when all the bigger ones refused. The thrill of that never got old. I must have been four.
My favourite book growing up
I was really into Judy Blume. Obsessed. My very favourite, theone that made me think about being a writer for the first time, was It’s Not the End of the World. It’s told in the first person (which was a revelation to me) in the voice of a 12-year-old whose parents are divorcing. The dialogue is funny and sharp. It was the opposite of going through the Looking-Glass: Blume helped me see at age nine how all the drama and craziness and humour and meaning is right here in everyday life.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I read Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle, Winesburg, Ohio, when I was 14 or 15 for a high school class. Like George Willard, I lived in a small town and was an observer. Like him, I saw a lot of bizarre behaviour and wanted to get away. I think it was a book in my youth that really solidified my desire to be a writer, that made me feel it wasn’t a weird thing to want to do. And the writing in that book made me ache to do it even more.
The writers who changed my mind
I went to grad school for creative writing having written a lot of pithy, voicey, minimialist short stories, and as soon as I got there two things happened: I met my dear friend Laura McNeal and I read Virginia Woolf for the first time. The writing of each of these women changed mine. I’d been skating on the surface before. I came out of that programme a very different writer.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I have to go back to Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World. I very distinctly remember being on my twin bed reading that book and deciding to be a writer. I thought I would write for kids, books exactly like hers. It still surprises me that that’s not how it turned out, that I have not written one book for kids. Yet.
The author I came back to
I was assigned Pride and Prejudice over the summer I was 16 and I hated it. I could not get past the first 20 pages. I picked it up again when I was heartbroken and perhaps wanted to feel even worse, but it was a revelation. I have read all of Jane Austen’s books many, many times now. I always return to them, Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice a bit more than the others.
The book I reread
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner is another one that I didn’t appreciate in high school but have gone back to several times over the course of my life and find so much more there each time. The voices, the beauty and exploration of language, the depth of the family struggles, the grappling with race, mental illness, the legacy of the south. Most of American history, past and future, can be found in that book published in 1929.
The book I could never read again
Oh, don’t make me say it. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. How I swooned over that book as a teenager. But I think it’s best to let that saga of a priest falling in love with a little girl remain vague in my memory.
The book I discovered later in life
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book had been recommended to me for years, and finally last summer I read it. Now I have become another proselytiser. One hundred and sixty-six exquisite pages. Never have I read a book that captures more fully the feeling of being alive, of being utterly receptive to life.
The books I am currently reading
I normally have a few things going at a time. I’ve been slowly moving through Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which is getting very good now the war has started. I’m also reading Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips, and for research for a new book, The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh, The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, which is blowing my mind.
My comfort read
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith: an underrated novel that is pure delight.