About the author

Lucy Mangan is a columnist for Stylist magazine and a features writer and reviewer for The Guardian, The Telegraph and many other publications. She broadcasts frequently on radio and occasionally on television, and is the author of My Family and Other Disasters, The Reluctant Bride, Hopscotch and Handbags and Inside Charlie’s Chocolate Factory.

ALSO BY LUCY MANGAN

Hopscotch & Handbags: The Truth about Being a Girl

My Family and Other Disasters

The Reluctant Bride: One Woman’s Journey
(Kicking and Screaming) Down the Aisle

Bookworm: A Childhood Memoir

Praise for BOOKWORM:

‘What Mangan does brilliantly is express the experience of reading and articulate the emotional connections we make with stories. She understands how books become entwined in our lives and help us make sense of the world … You don’t need to have enjoyed the same books as she has to recognise the pure, life-affirming joy of reading that Bookworm celebrates so eloquently’ Observer

‘The most wonderful, funny, clever, charming, evocative book’ India Knight

‘A book for people who love books, by a person who loves books. Bookworms unite (or just sit in our separate corners and read!)’ Stylist

‘A deliciously nostalgic treat that will make you want to pull out all those old favourites again’ Good Housekeeping

‘Artfully evokes that particular magic of reading as a child … Deliciously unrepentant, Mangan’s Bookworm makes a timely case not just for how vital reading is, but also for rereading books as a child, and how reading remains consoling, fortifying and, sometimes, magical’ Sunday Times

‘A wonderful romp through the pages of childhood, illuminated by wisdom, humour and enthusiasm’ Bernard Cornwell

‘Lucy Mangan has enough comic energy to power the National Grid … We need this new memoir about her childhood of being a bookworm. It’s enchanting’ Spectator

‘A love letter to the books we all read as children’ Mike Gayle, Metro

‘To read Lucy Mangan’s memoir of growing up bookish is to be taken back to a time in life when reading wasn’t merely a gentle pleasure or mild obligation but an activity as essential as breathing’ Guardian

‘Anyone who has ever preferred books to life will recognise Lucy Mangan as a kindred spirit. Her moving, funny, honest and superbly written memoir about how childhood reading shapes our personalities, memories and chances could not be more timely or more needed in an age of library closures, embattled humanities teaching and philistinism’ Amanda Craig

‘Lucy Mangan’s passionate, amusing and nostalgic reflection upon her favourite children’s books deserves to become as much of a classic as the novels she revisits’ Sunday Express

‘Fiercely unsentimental and often funny, it’s a memoir that will strike a ringing chord with anyone who spent most of their childhood glued to a book’ Irish Times

‘Funny, nostalgic and super interesting … Warm, witty and a must-read for every bookworm’ Sun

‘Beautifully narrated, Bookworm brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and brilliantly uses them to tell her own story’ Psychologies

‘Deft, warm and beautifully balanced. Made me smile. Made me glow. Made me think again and again’ Jason Hazeley, co-author of the Adult Ladybird series

‘An enchanting, nostalgic, comfort read’ Mail on Sunday

Lucy Mangan

BOOKISH

How Books Shape Our Lives

To Dad

Introduction: Hungry for Books

I am never happier than when I am in a bookshop. Or at least, to put it at its very, very lowest, I am never more reliably happy than when I am in a bookshop. I feel at peace in a way that I do not feel anywhere else. I feel my mind calm and my anxieties flee for the duration of my visit. It is like magic. Nothing else restores me like time in such a place. Libraries of course come close, but unfortunately the older I get, the greedier I become for the joy of permanently possessing rather than borrowing books.

My tsundoku habit (the indispensable-once-you-know-it Japanese word for the act of buying books at a rate that far outstrips the speed at which you can read them) has been out of control for years. When I broke my ankle in 2023, the common assumption amongst my friends and family was that I had tripped over one of the to-be-read piles of books with which my home is liberally strewn, despite every wall being lined with shelves and the existence of a dedicated book room at the bottom of the garden. Those friends and family were only slightly wrong. I was actually on my way up the stairs while reading a book and dressed in an off-brand Slanket (my preferred reading attire October–May) and I caught my foot in its hem. But, you know, point taken. I didn’t really, you might say, have a leg to stand on.

This is what it means to be bookish – along with never leaving the house without at least two books (one started, one not) in your bag, your holiday luggage packed with clothes stuffed into gaps between books (instead of the other way round) and refusing to part with any of your childhood favourites, however often your mother/spouse/children complain about the space they take up. It means being able to look along your bookshelves and remember all the good times you had with your paperback (and occasionally hardback, from particularly profligate days) companions. Not just the simple pleasure of reading them, but the times you turned to them for comfort too (God bless the stabilising force of my Maeve Binchys and Miss Reads); or the times they introduced you to new concepts – bigger, darker, deeper, more fascinating ideas (dystopian fiction, I’m looking at you); or the times they gave you a safe way to vent your rage at the world (we will discuss the soothing violence of Jack Reacher at length later); or the times they helped restore your sense of self after a gigantic life-event did its best to blow that precious asset apart. I didn’t foresee that I would need books more than ever after giving birth to a baby, and I certainly never envisioned that it would be Edward Rutherfurd’s London that I needed. But if we’re lucky, we live and learn.

Bookish I was born and bookish I shall die – maybe in another Slanket-related accident, maybe when a bank of shelves collapses as I try to ram home one more acquisition, or maybe in a paroxysm of delight when an unknown Wodehouse is discovered and published for the world to enjoy.

In childhood, books were my perfect delight. A new world to discover between every set of covers, with no worries to distract me from my full immersion in them and no constraints on my time to prevent me reading and rereading everything I wanted, until I had sucked the very marrow from them and absorbed it into my own. A few years ago I wrote Bookworm about those years, as a heartfelt and grateful celebration of the unique, intense relationship that we form with books in childhood.

The golden glow of those early loves warms us still, as adults. But as we move into adolescence, we tend to put away childish things for a while as we try to make sense of the confusing business of growing up into a bookish adult. In our teenage years new books find us and become a refuge from the bewildering world outside, particularly if we are of a persuasion that finds the prospect of parties, nightclubs, boyfriends and sex less tempting than terrifying. In our twenties, with any luck, such things – not nightclubs, never nightclubs – become more manageable, even pleasurable, and books return to the status of beloved companions rather than crutches. In our thirties, maybe we meet someone who understands us, and our need not to be interrupted while reading, and settle down with him or her. And eventually we might reach an age when we return to our childhood books – maybe as we read them to our own children or grandchildren, maybe simply to restore them to ourselves.

In this book you will find paeans to many treasures that I found and hoarded as teenager, as a busy twenty- and thirty-something, as a mother, and that I now gaze upon as a woman in middle age with growing apprehension as I count the number of books still to consume, and the likely number of years left to me, and fail to make the maths work.

Some of these later beloveds were discovered under deeply unpromising conditions, such as the forced marches through the reading lists of GCSE and A-level school curricula or, a few decades later, when Covid-19 shut down the world around us. Some came already laden with promise, as presents from friends – once I’d got the hang of making them – and to catch sight of them is to remember not only encounters with wonderful stories, but relationships with wonderful people too. Many were bought with the encouragement of the man who would become – and remains – my husband, his enabling of my addiction forming the enduring basis of our marriage. Some are proof copies, an incredible perk of an incredible job as a journalist and author, a job it had never occurred to me, growing up, that I could ever have. And some belong to my late father, and we all know how precious the relics that best embody the people that we miss can be. And many, many more were just … picked up along the way, their origins lost, but their contents preserved for as long as I need them.

‘Read in order to live,’ Flaubert once said, in a letter to Mademoiselle de Chantepie, and to all of us. The journey into and through adulthood has taught me quite how deep the wisdom of this runs. My reading both pushed me out into the world – often in search of new books – and opened up the world to me, helping me understand the people around me in a new way. If we stop reading, if we stop putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, if we stop considering their situations, relationships, reactions, choices and morals, if we stop exercising ourselves imaginatively, if we stop asking ourselves, ‘What if …?’ and ‘What would I …?’, then we cut ourselves off from inward avenues of growth, exploration, adventure – and at a time when the outer world may be shutting itself down too. Modern adult life is busy, complicated and demanding. Sometimes it flings a pandemic and home-schooling in there too and then the shit really hits the fan.

Under the burning responsibilities of adulthood, the lack of time, the duties, the pressures that accumulate as you acquire jobs, partners, children and other such … uh, well, let’s be semi-diplomatic and call them ‘rewarding burdens’, the bookish ore becomes refined. Indulgences – experimentations in genre perhaps, or the resolve to finish every book you start – fall away. But the hard, irreducible core of a love of books and reading stands unaltered. You will know this by the annual accusation that you are taking ‘too many books’ on holiday, and your annual explanation (a display of wondrous patience – well done) that there is no such thing. Yes, you are taking more books than you could read in a fortnight, but not nearly enough to account for all possible exigencies, moods (what if you visit a ruined cathedral and suddenly nothing but Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge saga will do?), rabbit holes opened up by a chance reference or a stray sentence, weather events (a three-day downpour changes the reading schedule entirely), illnesses (the beach-read selection suddenly made obsolete, but you pivot seamlessly to the comfort-reads tucked into hand luggage at the last moment) and all the shifting rest upon which your reading appetite depends. Really, you end thoughtfully, you should be congratulated for agreeing to move so far from your bookshelves at all.

In adulthood, you learn quite how far you will go to preserve the time you need (not want – that’s gone and probably for ever, unless your provision for retirement far exceeds my own) to consume the stuff that was always the essence of you. You learn what you will cast to the wind (housework, child craft projects, second-tier-and-below friendships) to protect the relationship that has always been central to your existence. And – when truly huge life-events come along – you learn what happens when you can’t.

Bookish starts where Bookworm left off – with me staring down the barrel of adolescence – and takes us up to the present day, where I have just turned fifty, am basically knackered, with a husband, a thirteen-year-old son, a seventeen-year-old cat and a book room at the bottom of the garden that will hopefully get me through everything.

In the following pages you will find paeans of praise to what many might consider an eclectic selection of books, from Chaucer to Maeve Binchy, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Shirley Conran’s Lace and other such apparently odd bedfellows. This is because if I have done one thing right in my life it is this: I have always read for pleasure and never with an eye to impressing others or keeping up with the bestseller or Booker lists. And if you read without self-consciousness or snobbery, you are liberated: free to enjoy whatever comes your way and makes you happy, instead of being cowed or trammelled by overt or covert disapproval. I wish I could have absorbed this lesson as readily regarding other areas of life – jobs, boyfriends, high-cocoa-content chocolate bars spring to mind – but at least, thank God, I seemed to realise it from the off where books were concerned, and they have been an unpolluted wellspring of delight all my life as a result.

Maybe you have been similarly lucky and have always had the same degree of joy. If not, please read on, and maybe I – and Winston Smith, the Wife of Bath, Aisling, Pagan, Maxine and more – can start you on the journey. If there is one flaw in the bookish, it’s that we tend not to shout too much about our greatest pleasure, and this means that sometimes we do not find our people as early in life as those who love noisier or more public pursuits do. I hope this book reaches you. We are a huge and far-flung gang, a broad church, a quiet army of voracious readers. Let us sally forth, together and yet separately, just the way we like it.

1

Flies, Rats and Mole: On Formative Novels

It is 1988. Margaret Thatcher recently became the longest-serving prime minister this century. The National Health Service is in turmoil. England’s ports are paralysed by striking ferry workers. But I am fourteen and I have real problems.

‘Look at this,’ I shout, standing in the middle of the sitting room and brandishing a piece of A4 at my parents. ‘Just look at this!’ I am outraged. Unlike most fourteen-year-olds, this is not a normal state for me. Such hormones as I have yet bothered to produce are coursing only sluggishly through my veins. I am basically a mud turtle. But even mud turtles can be pushed too far. ‘They want,’ I explain, my voice dropping to a furious whisper, ‘to make me read!’

The perpetual-motion machine known as my mother pauses in planing the doorframe, which had recently offended her with its micromillimetric asymmetry, to attend briefly to my woes. My sister – a carbon copy of my mother in looks and DIY zeal, to whom had been added a terrifying mathematical brain to the distaff brawn – looks up from her latest attempt to hack into the Pentagon with the BBC Microcomputer that we acquired a few years ago. It is a lump of beige plastic passing for state-of-the-art technology at the time, and which children today would look at with as much mystification as we would have done at a particularly antique zoetrope. Dad, a man whom Trappist monks would find reserved, doesn’t look up from his book. Things have not yet reached such a pitch.

‘What’s yer problem?’ asks my sister. ‘It’s all you like to do: read. You’re so boring.’

‘She’s right,’ says my mother. ‘Well, you’re not boring – just too quiet, and slow, and lazy, and impractical – but you do like to read. And who’s making you? Explain yourself. I haven’t got all day. I’m panel-beating after this. ‘

‘Teachers,’ I say. ‘For GCSE English. They’ve given us a reading list. And I like to read. But I do not like being made to read. And I definitely don’t want to be given exams on what I’ve read.’

‘Yer an idiot,’ says my sister, returning to her recalcitrant code as the computer bucks and strains and belches smoke.

‘It does seem quite stupid,’ agrees Mum, picking up her tools and preparing to restart work.

‘Not at all,’ comments Dad, finally moved to speech. ‘The loss of any liberty is always hard to bear. Think of how you feel, my pet, when the car has to go in for its MOT.’

‘I could kill,’ says Mum.

‘Exactly. And now, in some small measure, our firstborn’s absolute freedom to roam through literature at will has been curtailed. What she is experiencing is a neat inversion of the Tom Sawyer fence-principle. Just as you can find any number of willing helpers for a task by framing it as a fun pursuit, so too you can alienate aficionados of any activity by introducing an element of coercion or compulsion.’

‘Tom who?’ says my sister, breaking open our phone’s receiver and extracting new wires and a tiny circuit board.

Dad looks at me to see if I’ve understood. I nod.

‘You’ll get used to it, though,’ he says. ‘It’ll even end up adding something – you’ll see.’

‘You’ll bloody have to,’ says Mum, throwing the plane back into her toolbox and the door back onto its hinges. ‘GCSE English is compulsory.’

It didn’t quite happen like that, of course. But the essence is true. I don’t know what I thought my first set of formal examinations – preceded by this newfangled thing called ‘coursework’ over the next two years – would entail. But the requirement to read to order had not crossed my mind.

Soon, however, my natural passivity and trained obedience to authority reasserted themselves and I turned my face towards the set reading list. I knew that at least one thing wouldn’t change: the childhood friends of my reading life would stay by my side, forever unchanged and ready to offer me succour as I embarked on this new journey of Proper Reading. All the famous old classics were still there on my bedroom shelves: Little Women (I still longed – indeed, still long – to be Jo), The Secret Garden (still yearning for one of those too), The Chronicles of Narnia (don’t we all still have to suppress the urge to tap the back of a wardrobe in vestigial hope?) alongside the less well-known and slightly newer, such as The Family from One End Street (including the valiant Kate Ruggles, an early bookworm role model in the middle of her rambunctious family) and Milo’s semantic and numerical adventures in The Phantom Tollbooth. I still loved them all. Nor had the gloss and glamour of Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series yet worn off, or the thrill of Judy Blume. Reading Antonia Forest’s stories about the school and holiday adventures of the Marlow family, or the slow blooming of Will under the care of his guardian in Goodnight Mister Tom, or of Tom and Hatty’s platonic love affair across time and yew hedges in Tom’s Midnight Garden was still a full-immersion experience every time.

They were the steadying hand on my emotional tiller as we entered uncharted waters in school (we had, in case you were wondering, already Done Metaphors the year before). The title of the first book we tackled was distinctly unappealing. So too was the cover: a monochrome, very dead pig’s head on a stick, the only splashes of colour the red trickles of blood from its eye and mouth. Those superficialities aside, however, Lord of the Flies turned out to be an excellent first choice by our new teacher, my soon-to-be-beloved Mrs Jenkins. At the most immediate, and immediately valuable, level – when you’re about to make thirty reluctant pupils read the whole thing aloud in turn – it is simply an unremittingly gripping yarn, the perfect Robinsonade. Except that instead of just one Crusoe trapped on a desert island, there’s a whole classful. And they’re not practised adventurers and sailors; they’re young boys, left to struggle for survival after their plane is shot down over the Pacific as part of what appears to be the outbreak of the Third World War. After that – well, it was exactly like school. The group comprises nascent bullies, natural victims, misfits and the effortlessly charismatic and popular, who dictate the collective mood and actions. If they had been girls, you’d have said they formed cliques. As it was, they are likened to tribes.

Okay, I thought, before we had got very far at all, I’m in.

Well, the survival parts were nothing, to a battle-hardened veteran of the early 1980s trend in children’s fiction for post-nuclear-war endurance tales. Chasing a pig through the undergrowth and hacking it to death? Practically a comedy interlude, after you’ve faced down the Purple People Eaters who roam through Robert Swindell’s Brother in the Land, my friends! And while I’ve got you, let me also note that the heroine of Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah made a much better fist of providing for herself than this chaotic gang of boys does. And she did it alone, in an irradiated wasteland, not with labourers aplenty on an island groaning with nature’s bounty.

But, of course, the main pig-meat of Golding’s tale – incredibly, his debut novel – is the factionalism that soon occurs, and the war between might and right that develops as the majority of boys shuck off first their clothes and manners and then their morals to unite under bloodthirsty Jack, preferring hunting, feasts and fun to the duller work of gathering, maintaining a fire and staying disciplined. Suspicions and paranoia bloom, rogue quasi-religious beliefs take hold, their fragile democracy collapses and one boy feels the freedom to unleash the murderous instincts that – Golding seems to say – we all harbour within us, albeit with some finding them more readily accessible than others.

I loved it. It’s a book that speaks to pessimists everywhere. As indeed it should, born as it was out of Golding’s reaction to reading R. M. Ballantyne’s Victorian classic of adventurous and heroic derring-do, The Coral Island, to his children sometime in the late 1940s/early 50s. This paean to noble and manly virtues from the golden age of optimism hit differently with the knowledge of the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War. Golding asked his wife if it would be a good idea if he wrote a book about what would happen if a group of boys was stranded on an island together and behaved how a group of boys stranded on an island together really would behave, and she encouraged him to give it a shot. He borrowed character names and made other references to Ballantyne’s book in his own, but Golding’s story is its dark counterpoint: a suggestion that if men are left to rule the world untrammelled, there will soon not be many of them – or much of the world – left to dominate.

I loved especially one of the closing lines: famous, though I wasn’t aware of it then. Help in the form of a naval officer arrives – too late to save poor Simon and Piggy, good souls who have met awful ends – and ‘Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of a man’s heart and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.’ I almost got to read it aloud too. Mrs Jenkins went round the classroom, where we sat in alphabetical rows, allocating the paragraphs, and it fell into mine. At last the whole torturous business of reading aloud was going to be worth it; I could possess these beautiful, heartbreaking words as if they were mine, for just a few moments. And then Paula Maltby-comes-before-Mangan turned up and fucked everything. Yes, yes, I am still bitter. Why would I not be?

In a power move by Mrs Jenkins that I can only respect, she decided to break our psyches further on the wheel of terrifying truths and dystopian visions by marching us straight on to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It was at least a familiar title. I had read it before, when I was ten. I think Dad had been encouraged to buy it for me partly by the fact that it was, actually, 1984; and partly because I had appeared to grasp the fundamentals of Animal Farm when he took me to see a production of it for children at a theatre in town.

(By ‘fundamentals’ I mean the notion that we all – pigs, man, man, pigs – contain the potential for evil if the circumstances are right, and that Boxer’s death is up there with Bambi’s, if you’d like to inflict another and more rarefied emotional scar on your children. I don’t mean that I turned to Dad at the interval and said, ‘By Jove, Father, as an allegorical fable, this maps rather neatly onto the events leading up to the Russian Revolution and then onto the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, as a Democratic Socialist such as its author, George Orwell, likely would have seen them! What more natural way could there have been for him to have expressed his disbelief at the British intelligentsia’s starry-eyed adoration of ol’ Joe at the time of writing, which, according to these programme notes, was 1943–4, when Britain and the Soviets were allied against Nazi Germany.’ I was still years off realising that Narnia and Aslan were doing double-duty as heaven and Christ at this point.)

Now look, I’m not advocating censorship. And if I were, I probably wouldn’t start with Orwell, lest the irony kill me. But I’m just going to say that ten is possibly a bit young to hand your offspring a copy of one of the world’s most brutal dystopian visions – acknowledged masterpiece though it may be – and walk away without another word.

These are the five things I remembered from reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four at the age of ten:

A man’s mouth turning into a ‘cherry-coloured mass with a hole in the middle of it’, when he is smashed in the teeth by a guard at the Ministry of Love

Where and what your solar plexus is, after Julia is thumped in hers

Rats

RATS

RATS!

The rats were the first time I ever had to put a book down and walk away for a while. When O’Brien, at the culmination of his torture of Winston, puts the cageful of starving vermin (or was it only one starving, scrabbling creature? was it even starving? I will never know, because I am never going back to check) over his victim’s head in Room 101 and finally breaks Winston – as a man and as a human being – for ever, I discovered that the power of evocation in books could exist at an order of magnitude greater than I had ever imagined.

I prowled around that book for a few days. It rested, radiating malevolence, on the green units.fn1 By tacit agreement, nobody touched it. They all knew I was going through something. My mother even resisted the urge to tidy it away, despite the fact it was open, face-down and distinctly out of place in her clinically ordered home. As I prowled, I wrestled. With simple fear: rats! In a cage! An inescapable cage over one’s head, and a man describing how they go in through the soft cheeks and eat your eyes first! With a question that my mind refused both to answer and to dismiss: what was my greatest fear? What would I be confronted with in Room 101? And with a dilemma: Nineteen Eighty-Four was scary as hell, but also … really, really, really good. I was transfixed by the world depicted – so like ours, but canted at an intriguing angle.

It reminded me of one of my favourite stories in the Mandy comics that Lauren Jones (we bless her name) at school was still passing on to me when she had finished reading hers every week. ‘The Last Buttercup’ was set in 2083, when Britain was ruled by a giant computer called The Decider. Flowers had been outlawed, in the name of modern efficiency, but our heroine Moira had discovered a forgotten corner of her city called the Zone of Voices where – you guessed it – buttercups and other flowers had survived. There were punishment battalions in 2083; and Re-Education Centres within which were housed Zero punishment cells; and specially appointed Trusties patrolled the cities, keeping an eye on ordinary people – surveilling them, you might say – and reporting any suspicious behaviour to the authorities. What an impressive series of coincidences, I thought, too young to know, and too stupid to intuit, that stories of all kinds did not stand alone, emerging uniquely from some pure creative ether, but existed in intricate and cross-pollinating relation to each other, part of a web that spans both time and space.

Just as with ‘The Last Buttercup’, I wanted desperately to know what happened next. How would Winston escape, how would he and his girlfriend Julia get the happy ending that books provided? Charlotte’s Web had been the only instance I had come across where this truth did not hold true. But that was set in animal land – and in America. And if I understood nothing else, I understood that Julia’s and Winston’s lives were very much set in the human world, and in England, only a very little further in the future. I could see that a cheery conclusion was going to be tricky, but I had faith that Orwell would provide.

I hope I’m not supplying a great spoiler here when I say that he did not. The final scene – the final lines – have a bullet entering Winston’s brain and him dying with two gin-scented tears trickling down the sides of his nose, and a heart full of love for Big Brother.

When I was required to read Nineteen Eighty-Four again four years later by Mrs Jenkins for GCSEs, however, I of course got it all totally. I mean, it was deep, but I got it. Thoughtcrime, Newspeak, doublethink (‘The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia’ – how could you not read that and feel both chills down the spine and the thrilling sense of having been initiated into an entirely new field of depraved human endeavour?); the brainwashed proletariat, the limitless cruelty that those who have power will inflict in order to keep hold of it. Totalitarianism, is that it? I see. I would be firmly on the alert for that from now on.

Rereading it now (I know, I said I wouldn’t a few pages ago and I meant it at the time, but it has since come to seem like a bit of a dereliction of duty), I find it terrifying in entirely new ways. The telescreen surveillance – George, babe! I wish that was the extent of the state’s grip on us! Hell, I wish it was only the state that had that grip on us! But I gave innumerable faceless organisations more information about myself in one quick trip around Instagram before I got out of bed this morning than one of your little screens could gather in a lifetime. And they are already chopping it up, repackaging it, selling it on and showing me the ads that are going to make me pay for the privilege of doing so! It’s mad out here, George, I’m telling you. To be fair, we’ve no Ministry of Love – though we do have social media screaming at us if we step out of line – but we do have six or seven gigabillionaires who look set to reduce the rest of us to their servants, so that gin-soaked proletariat may be even larger than you dreamed. Oh, happy days, when I was ten, fourteen, and Nineteen Eighty-Four was a deliciously terrifying thought-experiment and not a prescient vision. Nineteen Eighty-Four sits on my shelf now as the book that taught me the world is never more than three bad decisions away – or one really bad invention that looks really good at the time – from exceeding even the most dystopic imagination.fn2

This first – conscious – taste of a real, unequivocally adult book, then, was a potent and intriguing one, but not exactly moreish. And I knew, really, that I had only begun to understand it. Orwell’s novel had teemed with more and darker ideas than I was ready to face. I felt them moving under the words like sharks beneath the water. And for the first time they were exactly that: ideas. Big political and philosophical ideas instead of (or at least as well as) the ever-fascinating nuances and convolutions of human relationships and the endlessly compelling complexities of character.

But GCSE pupils cannot live by keystone political fiction alone. They need some light relief. Fortunately, a recent publishing phenomenon provided it: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾. It hit the shelves in the early 1980s, when I was a few years younger than the spotty hero. I had picked it up at a friend’s house – her mum was reading it and left it on the kitchen table – vaguely aware, by osmosis, of its popularity, but not somehow cognisant of the fact that it was considered a comic masterpiece. To me, as I rested my hip against the table and got stuck in, the diary read as a horror story.

If you are too young to get the joke, to understand that the era you are living through is being wittily satirised at every turn, to appreciate the tropes of adolescence that are being attended to, spun and made honest and hilarious – well, let me tell you: it’s a bleak read. Not as bleak as Nineteen Eighty-Four, you understand, but still … the setting was deeply depressing; 1981–2 Leicester did not seem to be madly differentiated from 1981–2 Catford, mid-breaking on the wheel of Thatcherism as they both were, and I felt I had enough real-life bleakness to be getting on with. And as for the life … I did not thrill to the prospect of adolescence if it meant being surrounded by people who thought they were so-o-o-o-o clever, painted their bedrooms black and were forever measuring their things. I’d seen my dad’s thing often enough, as he nipped across the landing from shower to bedroom, to be quite sure that if I’d been unfortunate enough to be born in possession of one, I’d keep it hidden and ignore the ugly thing as much as possible. God’s sake!

Maybe I would have appreciated the book more if I had known that Sue Townsend’s experiences as a working-class woman (who, after her marriage ended, had to bring up three young children in extreme poverty) informed everything she wrote, however comic the lens through which they were refracted. This was rare in the world of publishing – for reasons that it would take another book to discuss properly – and as newsworthy a story as another penurious single mother’s would become, after the publication of a certain book about a boy wizard a few decades later. Or maybe matters would have been different if I had known that although Townsend couldn’t read until she was eight, it was the Just William books – and her mother’s patient teaching – that finally cracked the world of literacy open to her, and that Adrian was inspired by Richmal Crompton’s creation. Perhaps then I might have been tipped off about the comic nature of the book I was reading. But then again: if you’re too stupid and/or inexperienced to get the joke, you’re too stupid/inexperienced to get the joke.

So my first meeting with Adrian was not a success. Fortunately, books are patient. And when one of them becomes a cultural phenomenon, it is also persistent, crossing your path again and again and again until one day, almost in exasperation, you relent, pick it up at another friend’s house and angrily give it another go. And that was when I discovered that, just as when I read Z for Zachariah as an adult and found that the horror lay more in the man than in the apocalypse, or that the sorrowing heart of Anne of Green Gables lies in Marilla, or that reading Pride and Prejudice at thirty-five reveals the enduring injustice done to Mrs Bennet by her husband, or even when I read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first and second time only a few years apart, Adrian’s diary underwent the shift I needed. At some point during our separation it had become funny. It had become profound. It had become the comic masterpiece everyone had been telling everyone it was.

Perhaps appropriately, it induced my own mini identity crisis. How had I ever been someone who did not ‘get’ a line like ‘Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the telly last night, and I understood nearly every word. It all adds up. A bad home, poor diet, not liking punk. I think I will join the library and see what happens.’ How did ‘I have never seen a dead body or a female nipple. This is what comes of living in a cul-de-sac’ ever fail to slay me in the aisles? How had I failed to appreciate ‘I used to be the sort of boy who had sand kicked in his face. Now I’m the sort of boy who watches someone else having it kicked in their face’? That perfect, precise delineation of Adrian’s temperament and the bone-deep limits of his ambition – knowing deeper than conscious thought that he would never be the hunted who becomes the hunter. But the satisfied bystander? Mole in us and us in Mole. Perfect. Perfect.

Now there are those who will say the book’s transformation was wrought by the fact that by then I was Adrian’s age and had myself drunk deep of the teenage brew, that heady, toxic mix of self-absorption, resentment, misunderstood-ness, earnestness, without which knowledge you cannot find most of the humour in the book. And – though I scowl and hunch my shoulders mutinously as I say it – they may have a point.

Since then, Adrian Mole has grown to manhood. I must confess we parted company after his Growing Pains. I started The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole, but felt the bleakness returning. My loss, I’m quite sure. I think it’s something to do with the unavoidable intimations of mortality that come with following a character through what would be his real-time ageing. I think it more revealing – more interesting – and less disturbing to return to the original pair and find my sympathies realigning as the years pass. At the moment, of course, my heart is with Pauline shucking off the burdens and responsibilities that have accrued to her over the years in favour of pink hair, feminism and declining to indulge her son’s ‘revolting adolescent mooning’. Mr Lucas I could do without, but each to her own. The time will come, I’m sure – as Caitlin Moran says in her foreword to the anniversary edition – when we discover that Grandma Mole and thereafter maybe even Bert Digweed are the true heroes of the story. But for now, I am Pauline, albeit a version who is readying herself to take down Adrian’s diary and hand it to her own son one day, not nearly long enough from now, and let the Everyteen guide him through the coming maelstrom. If he thinks he’s painting his bedroom black, though, he can damn well think again.

Thanks to Adrian, and to Winston Smith and Julia, I was beginning to understand a little more about how books work. They are not the one-way delivery system they first appear to be. The form – that wonderful, miraculous form, slices of tree marked by different selections from the infinite combinations to be made out of twenty-six characters and a handful of punctuation marks, in the way best designed to conjure certain people and places in your mind – is fixed, but the content is not as static a thing as you might think. You, the reader, bring something to it too. Your temperament, for one thing. The political messages and interrogations of received ideas in Nineteen Eighty-Four can put fire in the belly of less melancholy, more proactive people than me, for example. And, in time, your experiences and the change in perspective that age ineluctably brings alter the text too. You find new layers to it – new aspects to old friends. Every book, left long enough, becomes reborn. Rereading a book, after years apart, is the bibliographic equivalent of never stepping in the same river twice.

2

Mass Market: On the Joys of Genre Fiction

Adolescence is often presented as a time of burgeoning of all kinds. Not just the kind dwelt on in the most fascinating parts of Judy Blume, but also of great fields of opportunity opening up before you, of life suddenly teeming with possibilities for finding out who you really are, what you really want, dreaming your dreams, forming your ambitions and drawing up plans to fulfil them all.

Well, I would like to speak to whoever is in charge of our preferred sociocultural concept of adolescence, because I have notes. The main one being: has he or she ever met a teenager? Because I met several back in the day – and was technically one myself, even if forever burdened with that deadening but accurate tag ‘late bloomer’ – and it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that there is at least as much closing down going on as there is opening up of horizons.

This idea, for example, that you begin the tentative, delicious process of finding out who you really are, of excavating the layers of your Self and holding precious artefacts of personality up to the light to assemble them at leisure when the full panoply of delights is arrayed before you.

No.

I cannot speak for boys, but certainly as a girl in the late 1980s your overriding decision at this stage was to choose between which one of the two permissible pubescent female types you were going to be. They have different names, according to your school/region. Mine was ‘Slag’ or ‘Virgin’, which is crude, but does effectively capture the essential distinction. If you prefer a gentler take: you could be attractive to boys (pretty, booby, acquiescent – two out of the three would do, but if you could nail the trifecta … well, you could pretty much nail anyone else you wanted thereafter) or not attractive to boys (anything else). Gentler still: you could have a life of the body or a life of the mind. You could not – whatever Melanie ‘I have a mind for business and a body for sin’ Griffith in Working Girl claimed – have both.

If you had big boobs, of course, your choice was no choice at all. It is one that people make for you. Into the bimbo box you go, to spend the rest of your life fighting your way out or not, as you see fit. If you are bookish, you go straight into the other box. You would try and fight your way out, but it seems like an awful lot of effort and you’re probably too busy reading.

I had no boobs and a lot of books, and frankly I am never happier than when I am in a box (close the lid, leave me alone), so my (non-)option was clear. My little feminist consciousness still being largely unraised, I accepted this state of affairs with some sadness, but no anger. The world was as it was. Nobody – boy, girl, child, adult, though the last-named may hide it better – likes a bluestocking. And they especially don’t like those who know the word ‘bluestocking’ 150 years after it fell out of common use. Turns out they’ll kick you halfway across the playground and back for that. Still, as someone always at the extreme edge of social acceptability, there was almost a relief in being officially banished to the shadows.

I did mourn the loss of those who had been in the grey area, though. There were girls who were lively, gorgeous, clever and interesting and I can still vividly recall those whom I watched give up the struggle to straddle the divide. Quite understandably, they declined to joined the losers’ side. We really were not a good advertisement for ourselves – plus we were a loose coalition of oddballs who never had the united front, like the popular girls, that we would have needed for any successful PR campaign. So instead, consciously or unconsciously, the girls who potentially had everything gradually repressed various parts of themselves, stopped working so hard and gaining the ‘unfeminine’ high marks in which they had once gloried, in order to present a more consistent face to the world and fit in with the unforgiving crowd.

Not my problem, I thought then. It wouldn’t be until years later that I realised that it is a problem – it is the problem – for us all.

This, then, is what comprises the awkward teenage years for the bookish. You have exhausted your childhood companions and self and are in need of new material to help you stay sane in the midst of all the changes. A forceful parent will perhaps try to introduce you to real life and make you undergo novel and character-building experiences. You will recognise this as a well-intentioned endeavour, and will passively yet successfully resist. A useful life-lesson in itself – people can grow, people can stretch slightly. But they cannot, in their fundamentals, change.

But what was this new material to be? The school library, the children’s section of my local council library, Torridon, and of the local WHSmith had been fully mined for treasures. I found myself unexpectedly in limbo. If I were a bookish teenager nowadays, of course, I would be specifically catered for via a wide array of young-adult (YA) books, aimed entirely at my voracious demographic. But then? Not so much.

Technically, YA already existed. By general consensus, S. E. Hinton’s 1967 bestseller The Outsiders marks the real start of books being written specifically for and about (older) teens (at least it did, once they noticed that most purchases were being made by schools and libraries and, pulling it off the adult shelves, they started marketing it to teenagers). Hinton was herself a teen when she wrote it (fourteen when she began, seventeen when it was published), but that has not been retained as a requirement for YA.

Thereafter the market grew fairly incrementally. The 1970s and 80s were the age of the ‘problem novel’ (in which teens could read about realistically/heavy-handedly depicted issues such as drug use, abortion, anorexia and so on) and occasional pieces of delectable trash like the Sweet Valley High series. Then, in the late 1990s/early 2000s, aided by the phenomenal crossover success of a certain boy wizard (whose story we will cover in more detail later on), the thing went stratospheric. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy garnered critical and commercial success; Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga gained at least the latter (see Bookworm if you want my full rant about its deeply retrograde messages to its predominantly female readership); and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy (now quartet) was devoured by anyone with a penchant for violent dystopias, kickass heroines and a robust approach to premises that really don’t work at all, if you stop and think about them for even a moment.

Since then, the YA market has further benefited from the rise in technology and the abundance of social-media sites – BookTok of course, most famously and powerfully – that enable word-of-mouth hits to be created at an unprecedented rate, opening up more and more opportunities and resulting in bookshop shelves filled to bursting with myriad delights to suit every burgeoning taste. Fantasy fans are amongst the best catered for. At one end of the spectrum they have the rich, beautiful constructions of Frances Hardinge, whose every book is different, but shares the shimmering magic and idiosyncratic infusion of the uncanny. At the other end, via stops at all points in between, lie the prolific likes of Cassandra Clare and Sarah J. Maas, providing pile-driving plots and adventures galore in an alternative Manhattan in the Mortal Instruments series, the kingdom of Adarlan in the Throne of Glass collection, the faerie lands of Prythian in A Court of Thorns and Roses, and many more.

Dystopia fans have it almost as good, with Vanessa Roth’s Divergent series, Michael Grant’s hugely popular Gone series, and the mile-a-minute zombiefest that is Charlie Higson’s The Enemy collection, to name but a very, very few. And again, for those looking for a bit more philosophical meat on narrative bones, there is Patrick Ness’ extraordinary Chaos Walking trilogy or Meg Rosoff’s quietly devastating How I Live Now to get your teeth into.

Budding classicists have Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series; romantics have Jenny Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (if they want to laugh) and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (if they want to cry); social realists can fill their boots via Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and examining the corrosive effects of racism, plus Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It, which deals with the fallout from a rape, and R. J. Palacio’s Wonder, about navigating the world when you have a physical abnormality that sets you apart; and anyone who is, has ever been or is thinking about becoming an adolescent has Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (now twenty years old, though I would have sworn it came out yesterday).

And all this, of course, hardly even scratches the surface of what is out there. Not to sound too ancient and/or bitter, but if you had told me in my youth that there would not only be this many books published with my age group specifically in mind – let alone a magical network that enabled you to connect with other bookworms without having to leave the house, and generally to live in a world where bookishness was something to be celebrated rather than hidden away as weird and unattractive, and that there could be fan fiction about and blockbusters made out of books that united great swathes of teenagers in their love of them – well, I would have thought you were toying cruelly with me and would have stricken you, verily, from my will and Christmas-card list. What a wonderful world, in some very few and specific ways, it is out there now.

Thank goodness there are no restrictions on reading outside your age range and we are all free to benefit from this new cornucopia. Figures from the last ten years or so consistently show that around 75–80 per cent of YA literature is bought by the simply A. Of course it’s likely that some of this is being bought by adults for the young people in their lives (possibly after reading it themselves – who buys anyone a book they don’t read first?), but that still leaves a huge number being consumed by those outside the intended demographic.

And who can blame them? By which I mean, of course, us. I have not been able, by any measure, to keep up with all that has been released for adolescents over the last twenty-five years, much as I would have liked to. But I have devoured the historical fiction of Celia Rees, Mary Hooper and Berlie Doherty. I have read a quietly devastating counterfactual – Julie Mayhew’s The Big Lie, set in a Britain that was successfully invaded by the Nazis – whose heroine’s life is further complicated by the fact that she is gay. I have worked my way, with mounting pleasure and awe, through almost all of Melvin Burgess (Nicholas Dane, The Hit, Junk, Doing It – all causing laughter, enlightenment and harrowing of the soul by turns). I have read the most beautiful, spare, haunting book about the power of silence and the horrors of social prejudice in Julie Berry’s All The Truth That’s In Me. I have had thrills and spills with most of Malorie Blackman and her unending and unerring ability to take you straight to the heart of the matter and to the hearts of all her characters. I have revelled in books written in strange forms of English – Moira Young’s Blood Red Road trilogy, Sophie Someone by Hayley Long – that show you your language anew; have fallen in love with physicist Elon Dann’s Clockwise to Titan and Awe of Mercury, which pushed at my brain from all new directions; and have been exhilarated by the boundless imagination, energy, wit and intelligence of a million others.

People always ask adult readers ‘why they bother’ with children’s literature or YA novels. And the answer is simple: they make you think, cry and laugh; they illuminate and enrich your own inner life in all the myriad tangible and intangible ways that we ask and expect of ‘real’ books. And by some additional alchemy that this genre alone brings – something to do with the enthusiasm of brilliant writers writing for a brilliant and enthusiastic audience infusing the cankered souls of the rest of us – they will make me read as if I were young again: in one mad, open-minded, unstoppable rush. What delight. What a privilege. What joy.

But let us return to the late 1980s, when we are barely out of the scrolls-’n’-codices era and you had to make your own entertainments down t’pit … Sorry, no. I’ve crossed streams. But the basic point still stands: beyond early practitioners such as S. E. Hinton and Paul Zindel and Paula Danziger, the YA market (especially in the UK) hadn’t yet been identified (or invented, if you’re feeling very cynical about capitalism today) and there was nothing ‘official’ that formed the transition between children’s books and adult reading. You had to forge your own path. That usually meant making your first forays into genre fiction. In my day (see scrolls-’n’-codices, passim) this meant different things for boys and girls.

Boys went for spy and detective fiction (Maigret, Sherlock, Bond), sci-fi (Asimov, Aldiss, Wyndham, maybe Carl Hiaasen if you were really cool, which is to say that in the wider world you were not cool at all), horror (Herbert, Wheatley) and fantasy, which in practice meant Tolkien. Tolkien then takes boys one of two ways. He is either an inescapable but minor rite of passage (I sometimes suspect that although you can skip The Hobbit and The Silmarillion if you must, you are not allowed to get your Man Certificate until you have read at least The Lord of the Rings) or he becomes part of your soul and 90 per cent of your personality for at least five years post-Narnia. You will discover which type you prefer when you are of an age. Whichever side you come down on, it won’t take long.

For girls there were romances (mostly from Georgette Heyer), sagas (Catherine Cookson, Josephine Cox) and cosy crime (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers if you were posh, Ruth Rendell if your parents were watching the Inspector Wexford series on ITV, and P. D. James if you were truly intrepid). Girls had a handful of classics on offer too, because these technically qualified under ‘romance’. Foremost amongst them were Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, depending on whether you liked your love-affairs-by-proxy to be relatively painless, highly tortured or absolute agony across generations.

I like mine as painless as possible, but unfortunately I hadn’t yet come across Jane Austen. Instead we had read Jane Eyre aloud in class (again, the mind boggles) the year before GCSEs. Perhaps because of that excruciatingly unnatural method of consumption, it had failed to ‘take’ in the way that you might expect a story to that begins with a bookworm physically injuring someone who won’t leave her in peace to read, although in fact my animus ran deeper than that. I flinched from the passion of Jane Eyre/Charlotte Brontë until I had done a project for class – three age-appropriate biographies, cardboard folder, lots of underlining on the sisters themselves (I kind of skipped over Branwell – he didn’t seem very important in the grand scheme of things) and then became entranced. The moors! The isolation! The stoicism, deprivation and death! But especially the isolation. Sitting around a table writing masterpieces as the wind, rain and snow howled outside seemed the very greatest way to live. But Jane Eyre itself was a bust.

Then, for our GCSEs, Mrs Jenkins set us on Wuthering Heights. Or set Wuthering Heights on us. It was the first book – and remains one of very few – that bored me to furious tears. Extremely unfairly (but then extreme unfairness is what teenagers are all about), some of this fury was directed at Mrs Jenkins. She was the first teacher I had ever had whom I had started to feel was a real, live human being rather than merely a looming authority figure. I had been so entranced by Lord of the Flies and Nineteen Eighty-Four that I had made the mistake of trusting her to lead me onwards and upwards into an ever more dazzling world of Proper Literature. And then she goes and gives me the Gothic. Perfectly good mansions and sweeping moorland settings ruined by nonsensical people – egomaniacal dingbat Cathy, egomaniacal psychopath Heathcliff, lily-livered Linton, for whose wealth and gentility she abandons Heathcliff – and their nonsensical, overabundant emotions going everywhere. One of Mrs Jenkins’ favourite books, it turned out. I just looked at her wordlessly when she told me. I felt almost as betrayed as Heathcliff. I simply expressed it much more quietly.

Ignorance, lack of life experience and a temperament not given to, and easily embarrassed by, displays of high emotion bear a large part of the responsibility for my failure to engage with the mother of all Gothic romances,fn1 but plenty of admirers will at least admit that, as a book, it is completely bonkers. Structurally crackers. Nomenclaturally off its rocker, what with its unwillingness to provide multiple generations of the families with more than two monikers for use amongst them all. And plotwise, it’s wha-a-at?wise. It’s an exhaustingly mad and madly exhausting experience. I’m glad I went through it once, so it’s ticked off my list, but once was quite enough.

I do see – if I turn my face from the memories of her treachery – why Mrs Jenkins must have thought it was a slam dunk of a choice for the group of (mostly) boisterous, hormone-addled girls in front of her. Emotionally, Emily Brontë is a teenage girl, but one gifted with the ability to give voice to usually inarticulate longings, and who found a way to express inchoate yearnings through a sprawling cast of characters that included someone for everyone. Cathy for the nascent sex bomb, Isabella for the wannabes and neverwoulds, Heathcliff for those already doomed to go for bad boys, and Edgar for those already doomed to settle for bad sex (but nice houses). Wuthering Heights is a book that tells you – at a time when the world seems otherwise bent on cramming you into a smaller and smaller space – that your huge feelings are valid and worthwhile and deserving of a great canvas across which they can play out, however many dogs and puppies get hanged to make a sadomasochistic point in the meantime. This is a message that will always find an appreciative audience somewhere.

But Brontë madness and the few other classics aside, it was genre fiction and its spies, detectives, star-crossed lovers and mithered women who most assiduously guided teenagers across the gulf between Clearly Child and Clearly Adult literature. This is, I suspect, for the very simple reason that genre fiction for an adult audience still privileges plot over the more ostensibly grown-up things like characterisation, evocations of life experiences (you won’t be able to identify with or appreciate them for decades) and interrogations of moral conflicts (ditto). It is still, in other words, keen to do the most important thing: tell a story.

In much the same way as your first drink or cigarette often depends on what you can sneak out of your parents’ stash, precisely what you use to edge yourself into the adult book world usually depends on what you come across on your parents’ shelves. And the Mangans didn’t actually have much.

Dad, the book lover, was naturally unacquisitive and had depended for most of his life on libraries, rather than retailers, to meet his needs. And my mother didn’t read. Throughout their sixty-plus years of married life, Dad would put a library book or a paperback thriller that he had enjoyed, or a medical memoir he knew she would like, on her bedside table. She would read two pages of it every night to send her off to sleep and, when the end was reached, Dad would spirit it away and provide her with another.

This concept of reading just a couple of pages a night, of reading as something so boring that sleep seemed preferable, was fantastic to me – and indeed to Dad. We used to look at each other in silent disbelief whenever Mum triumphantly announced that she had stayed awake for four whole pages (or, even more triumphantly, had managed to fall asleep within the first paragraph), when we were both doing our best to read around the clock.

I read in bed, of course – which is to say I relocated myself and my book there from the sofa every night without interruption, having long since mastered the art of cleaning my teeth without having to put down my paperback. Dad could manage it with hardbacks too, but my hands were and remain too small. I put the light out when Mum sounded the klaxon, so honour was satisfied, and then turned it on again five minutes later. Then (given that she could spot an illegal photon at fifty paces) I turned it off again when she came up to bed. Back on when she was safely tucked in, then off again an hour or two later when I lost the fiercely fought but ultimately futile battle against fatigue. Judging by the fact that as I check myself now, I see that all my limbs are intact, I conclude that I was never caught.

I would try each of Mum’s books as they arrived on the bedside table, but I don’t remember any of them striking a chord. Equally unhelpfully, if more unexpectedly, Dad too had very few books. Cut from essentially the same cloth we may have been, but his collection of best beloveds was small and comprised mostly plays and poetry accumulated during his years as a drama student and then a teacher. I thought plays and poetry were all nonsense. Prose was what I wanted, and plenty of it. Great chunks of text in which you could happily lose yourself for hours. Not annoying bitty things like poems! Not just lines of dialogue, leaving out half the story. Where, I thought, was the fun in that? What can I say? Youth is a thing that fortunately doesn’t endure too long.

Luckily, we did, uncharacteristically and only on occasion, play host to visitors. Three of them in fact, on rotation. One was Grandma, Mum’s mum, who was another redoubtable powerhouse. She had brought up five children, all under seven years old when she was widowed in the war, on no money, but now in her sixties was beginning to feel she could relax. This took the form of feeding her grandchildren illicit snacks and chocolate every half-hour and playing endless games of three-card Brag and Pontoon with them. We could not fault this arrangement.

Another visitor was Nanny, Dad’s mum, as garrulous as he was silent, alternating her cigarettes with tumblerfuls of whisky (Victoria Wood’s line ‘all snug in their Crimplene and gin’ sums her up perfectly), and an excellent cuddler while she told you stories of long-dead people from every county in the North, every one of whom was apparently no better than he or she should be. My sister and I once got very excited, when young, at the sight of Nanny and one of her friends on the telly. Dad explained that in fact it was not her, but a comedian called Les Dawson and his friend Roy Barraclough, as Cissie and Ada. The resemblance was so uncanny, however, that we remained unconvinced for years. I think a part of me is unconvinced still.

Our third guest on rotation was my beloved godmother, Anne, Mum’s best friend, who completed this triumvirate of visiting northern matriarchs and was the only person in recorded history who could ever get my mother to stop what she was doing, sit down or listen to a divergent point of view. We tried to work out how she did it, but never could.

And these visitors would on occasion leave behind treasure. In my godmother’s case, almost literally – she would give me and my sister (and undying gratitude to her from both of us, by the way) cash that would be converted into books and Lego as soon as a parent could be persuaded to take us to WHSmith. In Grandma’s case, it was slim paperbacks; and in Nanny’s case, big bulging ones.

Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar was Grandma’s greatest inadvertent gift to me. The story of the quiet, solid Ashby family first rocked to its foundations when thirteen-year-old Patrick apparently dies by suicide in the wake of his parents’ death, and then again when a man claiming to be him turns up seven years later, just in time to whip the inheritance out from underneath his slightly younger twin Simon’s nose, was my first crime novel. But so gentle an introduction to the form was it that I hardly noticed. Yes, I was enthralled by the mystery of how the imposter (that’s not a spoiler – we are told this from the beginning; do still read the book!) would be unmasked. But it was the acuity of the psychology and the succinctness of the prose delineating it that really had me hooked. Patrick possessing the type of goodness that ‘not only gives but gives up’, I turned this over and over in my mind, and it stays with me still as a measure of a soul. The different proportions in which grief, love, longing, happiness and rage rose and were blended in each family member and friend, when Patrick reappeared and shaped their varying reactions to him, fascinated me. Still, the criminal seed was planted and would flourish abundantly many years later.

In perfect contrast to the elegant, cool, slightly spare work of Tey, Nanny left me Light A Penny Candle by the now sadly late, but enduringly great, Maeve Binchy. I was slightly daunted by its size (500-odd pages) back then. That was a proper, grown-up length, that was. My powers of concentration were mighty for my age, I knew that, but this was twice as long as I had ever gone before. Was I up to it?

But the cover was so enticing: two women gazing out from the backdrop of a sunset sea, and the hills of Ireland rising beyond it (they continued across the thick spine and onto the back, which I thought was the height of sophistication), so clearly ready to tell you a cracking story that I could hardly stand it. And the blurb! ‘This is the magnificent story of twenty turbulent years in the lives of two women. One is English, the other is Irish. Their friendship is sealed when they are children: it is warm, devoted, unshakeable and, against all odds, it survives. Their names are Aisling and Elizabeth …’

Oh, inject it – as the young folk would not say until many, many years after I needed the phrase – straight into my veins, please! Magnificence? Turbulence? (I felt this meant sex, but sex in a way I could handle, and so it proved to be, on both counts.) From children to women, a whole lifetime? The sheer audacity of the idea reeled me in. When I found out that it began during the Second World War (my then-favourite period of history, mostly because it was the only one I’d heard of, and the idea of rationing really appealed to me) the deal was sealed.

What a world I found – and it was a world entire, lovingly detailed by a master storyteller who knew the milieu, the people she was writing about, in her bones. Anxious ten-year-old Elizabeth, further cowed by the unhappiness in her parents’ marriage, is sent to Ireland to stay with her mother Violet’s old school friend, Eileen – a warm, maternal, endlessly capable and intuitive sort, in sharp contrast to fragile, flighty Violet – and her rambunctious brood. Amongst that brood is ten-year-old Aisling, as confident and fiery as Elizabeth is quiet and thoughtful. They balance each other perfectly, then and on through the years as they make their way in the world of work and relationships, survive terrible shocks, are bereaved, get married, meet good men and bad, and generally experience most of the vicissitudes of life that two decades of living it will throw at you, their love and support for each other only increasing with time and under every duress.

The novel was wonderful in so many ways. I saw much of my own wider family (Catholic on both sides) in it, and it helped explain them to me. Grandma was pregnant every year of her marriage, and my mother is the same age for six weeks of the year as her nearest brother. This was simply the right and proper way of things. I existed halfway between Aisling and the Protestant Elizabeth. I was as baffled as Elizabeth was by the religious intricacies so embedded in my wider family’s psyche that they seemed to them an innate part of normal life, and yet as accepting as Aisling was of what they said and believed. Binchy gave me a dual perspective that enabled me to make sense of it all.

Even without that extra bond, it would have been an absolutely addictive story. I read and reread Light a Penny Candle to literal pieces, then did the same with Echoes (when Nanny came to stay again), Silver Wedding (library), Firefly Summer and Circle of Friends (the result of one of my earliest bravings of the adult section in Catford’s WHSmith, and bought with my own saved pocket money, because it was by now very clear that I needed to own them all for everfn2), which Binchy kindly published as I was sucking the last drops of juice from their predecessors. I read The Copper Beech and The Glass Lake before the raging fire of my love for her died down to glowing embers. The later books retain of course all her skill, but the setting is modern Ireland, and it is with the earlier (in every sense) books that my heart will for-ever reside. Maybe it’s because the Mangans left the ould country so long before the Celtic tiger was a thing you could even dream of that my folk memory cannot let me rest there.

But perhaps the most wonderful thing about Light a Penny Candle – and certainly the one that I’ve come to understand has done me the most good, over time – was that it was about women. Just straightforwardly, unapologetically about women. Of all ages, of all types, all considered in the round and as absolutely worthy of close attention and note-perfect rendering as anyone else. I consider myself deeply lucky to have come across this model of writing (of behaviour even) as standard at a formative point in my reading and every other type of development. Because it is not, in fact, standard. But if you see early enough that it can be done – that it is a matter of will to write about female characters and put them front and centre, rather than a special, noble, compensatory effort that can occasionally be made to address a historical imbalance – then it is the latter that will, subtly at first and then more stridently as you become more consciously aware of what is going on, seem wrong. There is nothing more valuable than gaining perspective on the mainstream before you immerse yourself in it. Maeve Binchy gave me that. Like any seed planted by literature, it wouldn’t come to fruition immediately. But it was there, settling in, finding its place, biding its time.

If I’d had any wit about me, I would have sought out other such historical fiction sagas by other authors much sooner. I reckon at the rate I could read in those days (no falling asleep! no proliferating demands on my time! we all knew where we stood with, and on, the family chore rota and got two weeks’ notice by official memo if any changes were incoming), then I could have knocked off the entirety of Catherine Cookson, Josephine Cox and Barbara Taylor Bradford in a month. I missed out on Joanna Trollope too – though I did once bump into her on a train and she was utterly charming – and feel now that I have saved her for my fifties.

Happy though I was dwelling at home amongst the trials and tribulations of post-war Ireland and its vivid inhabitants, school was another matter, however. The forced march through the English curriculum was continuing apace, and I regret to inform you that we had hit Shakespeare.

What, after 400 years of bardolatry, expert and tender analysis, discussion, explanation, devotion, interpretation and re-interpretation by some of the greatest academics, philosophers, actors and writers down the generations, is there left to say about Shakespeare, the greatest writer of this or any other age, the man who held up a mirror to nature and showed man himself in every aspect in ways that would never stale or wither? We did A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and King Lear and were bored shitless.

We didn’t understand a word, we didn’t understand the form, we didn’t understand the context or know the period. There was a girl in class who could read it aloud as if she were channelling the spirit of Richard Burbage himself. It was incredible. But she didn’t understand it, either, and was bored as shitless as the rest of us.

It was simply too hard. It felt more like solving a maths puzzle than anything else. My ‘easy reading’ in genre fiction, where words still worked their magic, kept me sane. But I wonder how many borderline bookworms have been put off reading – or at least been put off reading ‘the greats’ – by being required to slog through material beyond their capacity to comprehend it with any pleasure, or without the right support to bring it within such a capacity? Especially if they don’t have a shelf full of Maeve Binchy to turn to, for balm.

But we gamely ploughed on, and the end of each battered textbook – and eventually the end of GCSEs themselves – was reached in time. Thank God for that.

3

The Tyranny of Set Texts: On Reading the Canon

Then came a long summer of waterskiing, cave diving, rock climbing and … Just kidding! It was reading, two weeks at Grandma’s in Preston and refusing as many family activities as possible. And then it was on to English, French and Spanish A levels at a new sixth form. This was at a mixed state school in – get this! – Bromley! For the uninitiated, Bromley is to Catford as Versailles is to your garden shed. It is one shiny, rich, decadent borough, full of luxurious houses, lush gardens and at least two gleaming cars sitting outside each one, which get tucked into equally luxurious double garages every evening by one of the equally gleaming people who own them.

The school was amazing. I thought I’d died and gone to Eton. You got a textbook each in every class! No more sharing. No more spending an hour at a time leaning at a forty-five-degree angle to get a glimpse of what you were supposed to be studying. An assembly hall with a proper stage and, off it, a rehearsal room for the drama productions that seemed to be put on every ten minutes. And, of course, it had a lavishly stocked library. I don’t remember many of the books I borrowed from there, because the radiant glory of five that awaited me therein has burned all other memories from my brain.

First there were the sequels to Little Women and Good Wives, which I had not known existed. Little Men and Jo’s Boys were, even to my untutored eye, lesser books – more sentimental, less carefully worked – but still recognisably Alcott and recognisably the March family, and the unexpected reunion was wonderful.

Then there was the sequel to a book that I had adored ever since Dad first brought it home to me six or seven years earlier – Sybil Burr’s Life with Lisa. I had only grown to love it and Lisa’s idiosyncratic voice more over the intervening years, as greater experience threw into relief how rare and refreshing it was. Leave It to Lisa continued her adventures with the same effervescent charm as the original. As with Alcott, I hadn’t even known there was a sequel. And then suddenly, as I inspected the new library terrain a few days after term started, there it was. It was the closest thing to the answer to a prayer I was likely to experience, I thought.

And there were two more Antonia Forest books, including the very last in the Marlow series, Run Away Home. I couldn’t believe my luck. And for the first time I thought of the forces behind the making of a library collection. Someone in charge of this place a decade ago had, amongst all the options available (most of them, presumably, as Forest was never a big name, with far more likely candidates for filling shelves with guaranteed appeal to teenagers, when you are on a limited budget), chosen these books. Seen something special in them, hoped that others would see it too and, in an act of absolute faith, made the purchase. Maybe it wasn’t just books that could give you insight into another person. Maybe collections of books could do it too.

When it came to the municipal rather than the school library, the curation was of course far less obviously the work of one individual mind. But it was very clearly the work of one borough that was very different from mine. When I stepped into Bromley’s local library the top of my little Lewisham head nearly blew off.

Yes, it was as ugly as sin. Unlike my beloved Torridon, it was modern. Its cold, stark, straight lines, metal bookshelves and thin polyester carpeting (no built-in wooden shelving or warm, worn parquet flooring) amplified every sound. There was a free-and-easy atmosphere about the place – children were allowed to run about at will, grown-ups held conversations far above the thoughtfully muted volumes that I was used to, at the many little tables scattered about, which were apparently there to encourage conviviality instead of reading – that did nothing to endear it to me.

But it had more books than Torridon. Lots more books. More books in one place than I had ever seen. They lived on the first floor of the two-storey rectangular box. You came into a fabulously unwelcoming lobby, went up a flight of stairs and suddenly found yourself in a sea of adult and children’s fiction. A mezzanine ran around almost the entirety of this, and non-fiction was up there, staying aloof from its inferiors. Some of the books were very new, especially in the adults’ section; it even had a bay devoted to ‘New Releases’. I began to form some notion of what it meant to be rich, or at least to live in a rich borough. I felt a heady joy – they had given me a library card, despite my address, and everything was now mine for the taking – mixed with deep resentment. And this, I realised, looking round at the clean, brightly coloured beanbags and cushions in the children’s part and the local watercolourists’ exhibition in a far corner, must only be the tip of the advantageous iceberg.

I told Dad of the wonders I’d seen, and he explained Labour and Tory councils to me. It was very complicated, but the gist was: Labour are about helping people and would spend lots on libraries if they could, but they have no money, because most of the people they want to help and who vote for them are poor. Tories don’t give a shit about people and only spend a tiny bit on libraries, but they have so much more money to throw around that they still often spend more on them than Labour. ‘So enjoy it,’ he concluded. ‘But don’t be fooled. And always use Tory services if you can.’ To which I would only add now: and their charity shops. I lived briefly in Notting Hill and have never seen better-clad people. Buying a Nicole Farhi jumper for £7 represents almost book-buying levels of thrill.

Following Dad’s advice, I enjoyed my new discovery to the full. I found two Dimsie novels I hadn’t known existed. The library had more books by Florence King, whose Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady I had read so many times by then that I could almost recite it from memory. It had countless others that I motored happily through, even if they left no lasting impression. It had, if you knew where to look, armchairs in relatively quiet spots (usually up on the mezzanine, which had the further benefit of being inaccessible to the small children zooming around downstairs, who generally came a cropper on the open-tread staircase before the third step).

And it had a secret. Behind a set of unassuming double doors was hiding a silent reading room and a reference library. I had presumed the doors led to an administrative and/or staff-only area, until I noticed occasional – very occasional – normal people passing in or out. A mere month or two later I had plucked up the courage to investigate for myself. And there was the haven I had been looking for. Still modern and as ugly as sin, sure – but so quiet. So peaceful. So … scholarly. I looked round and noticed a few familiar faces from the year above me at sixth form, the ones who were heading down the home straight to their A levels, all sitting silently, doing their homework with books and papers – of equations, chemistry experiments, Spanish, all sorts of mad things – strewn around them on the table. It looked wonderful. Professional but glamorous, like something from the set of a film about a dedicated doctor researching the cure for a fatal disease, or a harried genius pursuing a vision that only he could see inside his mighty mind. I wanted in.

I had stopped going to our local library with Dad every weekend by now. I asked him if this development had been a cause of sorrow to him. ‘Did you stop coming?’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Well,’ he said, resettling himself behind the paper, ‘I’m sure you had your reasons.’

Well, yes, I did, and very sensible ones they were too – all arranged on my expanding set of bookcases. By the time I was fourteen I much preferred to hole up with my accumulated hoard rather than go out to borrow more.

Three factors that would go on to define my life were in play here.

One: I was very much over leaving the house. I went to school five times a week. I was occasionally dragged around the clothing emporia of Lewisham at weekends in search of new shoes and itchy jumpers, when I’d disobeyed maternal instruction and had grown faster than scheduled. And I was – not frequently but, I felt, quite often enough – required to go to birthday parties thrown by the kind or curious souls who were still inviting the class weirdo, if only to see what she did outside a classroom setting (sat quietly, didn’t read because her mother had strip-searched her in the car for hidden books, left early). I’d seen enough, I felt, of what was Out There and was very much happier with what was In Here. Or I was at Grandma’s. We still decamped to her flat in Preston every school holiday and in many ways it was even better than staying at home, because you got more in the way of Hawaiian sandwiches and less in the way of parenting. ‘Leave her alone, Christine!’ Grandma would cry, as I entered my seventh straight hour with Dimsie/William Brown/the Ruggles family. ‘She’s on holiday!’ And my mother would roll her eyes and go for a run up a fell or six, to burn off the energy left unspent by nagging her eldest child into a semblance of normality.

Two: I was an obsessive rereader. I would be still, if I had the time and remained unaware of my limited span on this Earth and the number of absolutely irresistible books coming out each year. All reading is comfort-reading, strictly speaking, but oh God, the absolute joy and security that come with sinking back into a book you already know virtually by heart. You can lean into the twists and turns, appreciating them anew, but knowing nothing’s going to surprise you this time. You can linger over the best parts, skim over others – effectively performing a bespoke edit that is your right as a reader; enjoy the words, the make-up, the structure; get to know the characters so well that you can take a moment here and there to stare off into the distance and imagine further scenes and adventures for them, knowing exactly how they’d react; eagerly anticipate your favourite moments and sigh with satisfaction once they’re past; and … oh, just enjoy the whole thing, every bit of it, all over again.

I don’t know if I wholly trust once-and-done readers. I suspect that when they grow up, they are the people who view books as another plate in their social armour and arrange their reading around lists like ‘The 100 classics you must read before thirty’, ‘The 806 Best Books of the 1950s’ and ‘62 Obscure Novels by Famous Authors So You Can Pretend to Your Friends You’ve Read Everything’. They make sure they’ve read every Booker prize-winner, plus one other from the shortlist, and unload their thoughts on them both like a soldier’s bullets from his bandolier. This is not the way of the truly bookish. All you can do, once they start firing, is hunker down and pray for daylight.

The third factor keeping me at home and out of the library (although it’s so closely related to the second that it may not deserve its own entry) was that I liked to own my books. Obviously having access to the library’s panoply of choices was wonderful (yes, I had read most of them by now, but this is no problem for a devout rereader), but borrowing was full of uncertainty. You could never relax. The book could be out with someone else when you went to get it – when you needed it! When it was the only thing that would truly do and everything else was a pale substitute, and the meaningless days and weeks without it threatened to stretch on into oblivion. And if you did get it (and to be honest, the public appetite for Spiderweb for Two, the fourth instalment of Elizabeth Enright’s largely-unknown-over-here series of books about the Melendy family, was pretty minimal), you still couldn’t truly relax with it. You knew it had to go back. You had to read – and reread and reread – with one eye on the clock, and trying to commit as much to memory as you could before the time was up. Sometimes I would try to copy books out, but was always defeated by how long it took to write them rather than read them; an agony, of course, that I now know much more intimately as an author.

More than the uncertainty of access, though, was the feeling described by Alberto Manguel in A Reading Diary when he says that reading a book and knowing that he doesn’t own it gives him a feeling of something incomplete, only half-enjoyed. For some reason ownership, possession of a book, is important. Some people – non-readers, mostly, I suspect, but perhaps some readers, maybe of particularly generous or transcendently unacquisitive, unselfish spirit – may be baffled by this. How can it make that much difference? You read the contents and put it back on a shelf, either way. Whether that shelf is in your home or a municipal building, what does it matter? But it does. Most readers want to know the book is there (right there, under their own roof and control), should they ever want to read or refer to it again. And to be able to catch sight of it at odd moments and be reminded of the happy time you spent with it, the holiday you bought it on, the person who gave or recommended it to you, this exquisite phrase, that perfectly turned sentence, the character you loved or hated, the laugh it gave you or the moment of insight it provided. Asking why a bookworm keeps the book he or she has read is like asking someone why they keep a picture on the wall when they have already seen it. It is because we always get something out of it, because it always causes a little wave of happiness to break over us and improve, in some immaterial way, the day.

In all honesty, I do not borrow much at all from libraries any more. I should, for all sorts of good and community-minded reasons, but I am a selfish sybarite who cannot hold out against the ‘voluptuous greed’ – Manguel again – that pushes me into bookshops and out again only when my fell desires are met. But I have not escaped the itchy sense of incompleteness; it merely attaches now to the contents of my Kindle (which a combination of declining shelf space and eyesight led me to buy a few years ago) instead of an abundance of Mylar-jacketed loans.

Why do I wrestle with this sense of incompleteness? Partly, of course, because I am very much a books-as-books lover and I miss the multisensory pleasures that a tangible bundle of pages surrounded by evocative covers brings me. But also because of the inescapable hum of unease at the back of my mind induced by the knowledge that I do not own any of the thousand or so e-volumes on my Kindle. Amazon does. And Amazon could in fact – in law – take them back at any moment. How am I supposed to relax and truly enjoy my new Jack Reacher under these conditions? I do, however, enjoy the fact that the book that brought to public attention Amazon’s ability to go into any and every Kindle and do with its content (or at least any content acquired from Bezos’ behemoth) as it pleases, like something out of 1984, was … Ninety Eighty-Four. Isn’t that wonderful? It happened in 2009. Amazon noticed that two of Orwell’s e-books had been uploaded to the Kindle ‘bookshop’ by a company that didn’t own the rights to them and it promptly deleted every copy that had been bought and refunded the owners – to use the word incorrectly, as it turned out – without warning, apology or permission. Beautiful.

I am told that there are programmes out there for converting and saving e-books so that they can be salted away and hoarded against the day when Amazon goes bust or becomes sentient and decides it has no use for literate humans. I am told this usually by people who have never met me and assume that I am someone who has successfully downloaded an app without recourse to help from her child, or has ever set up a Spotify account. Still, I pass the information on to you – ‘Calibre’ is the word I most often hear in this context, and I presume it is the name of the ‘program’ – in case it helps. I would only invite you to consider, along with me and the rest of my catastrophising but never-yet-wrongfooted brethren, what happens in the event of … well, an Event that takes out all electronics around the globe? Nuclear strike, EMP, someone accidentally breaking the seal of an ancient tomb in Wales and setting the machines against us and bouncing us back to the Dark Ages overnight? (Thank you for that abiding fear and/or useful warning, Peter Dickinson’s The Changes trilogy). Look around you. Think on.

But let’s go back to Bromley Library, as I stand gazing at biblio-Xanadu hidden away in the world’s ugliest repository and feeling myself fill with a new zeal. I no longer wanted merely to borrow books. I wanted to work there, surrounded by them, grown-up and independent but for their silent support, taking down ones I needed, filleting their knowledge, shaping it into thoughts and essays and putting them back on the shelves, a tiny thread of gratitude connecting me to each one for evermore. And that, more or less, is what I did for the next two years.

I wish I had a more interesting rite-of-passage story for you, I do (though I also know that you were probably wise enough not to be expecting one). But I don’t think I’ve ever felt more grown-up or independent than when I first took my seat opposite the newspaper spikes, opened my bag, set out my A4 WHSmith refill pad, my Parker Jotter and my Arthur Miller (we were doing A View from the Bridge, whose incest vibe is an interesting one to unleash on a crowd of extremely vociferous and judgemental seventeen-year-olds) and started doing my homework there for the first time, instead of at the kitchen table. In the gentle glow and quiet, studious atmosphere I felt I had found my people and my place.

Yet further bounty arrived during my Bromley sojourn in the form of the A-level syllabus – a great improvement (like life as a late rather than early teenager itself, I would discover) on the GCSE madness. Yes, there was still Shakespeare and I had to do my big coursework essay on the tragediesfn1 and I still barely understood a word of them. Yes, there was poetry too, including Sylvia Plath, who made the Brontës look well-adjusted. Writing about her poems nearly killed me. Mum still talks about those weeks in hushed tones, as the first and last time she saw me truly furious. But there were also revelations.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Jane Austen?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an English curriculum in want of a lady author must reach for Pride and Prejudice, and so it was with ours. We diligently dissected the novel over many weeks and learned to lay out the correct component parts of what was once a living text instead of a dismembered corpse, depending on what mock-exam question was presented to us.

The strange thing was that, despite the disfiguring surgery carried out, despite the tight focus on discrete parts and all the exam taint – I knew that I loved her. Or maybe that I was going to love her. I knew, anyway, that Austen was for me in a way that (for example) forthcoming fellow A-level vivisectee Thomas Hardy would never be.

That knowledge lay dormant for a while and then, in the final term of my first year at university, I found I had acquired over the preceding weeks and months a full set of her works. That makes them sound like hand-tooled leather affairs in a vellum-lined slipcase. They were not. They were Wordsworth editions, which in the early 1990s had colonised every bookshop across the land. A man called Michael Trayler had realised that you could print and sell anything long out of copyright far more cheaply than mainstream publishers were doing, and he quickly started doing just that. The first £1 classic – Pride and Prejudice, of course! – shorn of notes, introductions or any other apparatus (though some were added as the series grew more popular and mainstream publishers started reducing their own prices, as a result of the sudden competition) to keep costs down hit the shelves in 1992. By the end of the decade another 300 titles had joined Austen’s finest. They were perfect for anyone who either simply wanted to read the damn book and/or who didn’t need the notes and intros, because they were currently surrounded by libraries and people insistent on serving them up more thoughts on everyone from Chaucer to Woolf than they realised it was possible to have.

So by the time I got to university, every English student’s shelves could be well and cheaply stocked, and mine were soon no exception. At the end of the first year I went to stay with one of my new friends and her parents in Driffield, Yorkshire (I am so tempted to relocate this story to Bath or at the very least Lyme Regis, but will resist), and decided I’d take my new copy of Pride and Prejudice with me, purge it of its exam stink and try and put it back together for myself. And I’d take one more, in case my instincts were right and it really was as good as it had somewhere – deep beneath the sixth-form detritus heaped on top of it – promised to be. But I couldn’t decide which one. And I had them all (for less than a tenner). So I took them all. And I devoured the lot in under a fortnight. Abi – who could drive! – and I spent the days touring the many second-hand bookshops of God’s Own County and our evenings reading, all of it in near-silence. Those two blissful weeks spent with her, Fanny Price, the Dashwoods, Emma Woodhouse, Anne Elliot and of course the Bennet sisters and Mr Darcy shine in my memory still. There’s not many as can say it, but Driffield is my happy place.

I didn’t put it in so many words at the time of course, but I think now that what I initially found in Austen was that she was an introvert’s writer. ‘The little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush’, as her own description of her work runs, is the perfect size for someone whose tastes and temperament run to interiority and its endless examination. Introverts know that the tiniest moment, scene or view contains multitudes if you only examine and interrogate it enough, and no one examines them more closely, interrogates them more granularly or follows the ramifications through with more devotion to detail than Austen.

Charlotte Brontë – an extrovert’s writer – didn’t get it at all. ‘There is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy, in the painting. She ruffles her reader by nothing vehement, disturbs him with nothing profound. The passions are perfectly unknown to her: she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood.’ To which the only reply is: Yes! Isn’t it great? Instead of hysterics and obfuscation, we get quiet truths and genuine feeling – if you care to look properly, pay attention and appreciate that people don’t have to be exhausting show-offs to have complicated, passionate inner lives. I’ll leave it there for now. But we’re coming back to those Brontës. We are coming back.

Jane Austen is of course now revered as one of the wonders of the literary world (and TV adaptation land), but it wasn’t always thus. She and the Brontës have this much in common: they were none of them fully understood or appreciated in their lifetimes. It has been a long posthumous flowering of adoration for them all, and Jane’s is currently in fullest bloom – possibly because we live in an age in which the ability of your plots to translate into screenplays with mass appeal will carry the day amongst competitors of otherwise equal standing. Both Austen and the Brontës lose much in translation, but however much you strip away from the former, you will always be left with an appealing and serviceable romance-cum-comedy-of-manners.

Austen is considered a lone genius too, springing from nowhere. Instead of writing around a table in the company of her sisters, the image we have of her is of the spinster aunt gamely scribbling away at her tiny writing table, decorously drawing a sheet of blank paper over her work if anyone seemed curious about it.

The lone-genius myth is always a seductive one. That such a being can emerge at any time, any place, and will (if truly worthy of the name) flourish under any conditions is a delicious one – and it lets us ordinary folk off the hook; unanointed in this way, how can we be said to have failed? The attaching of glamour or moral worth to people whose talents emerge from oppressive circumstances lets us off the hook in a wider sense as well. Why worry about creating fairness or equality of opportunity when real talent can never be kept down?

This is all nonsense, of course. Talent is rare and genius rarer still, but the chances are that it is still as evenly distributed as anything else across a given population. It is the opportunities to exercise it that are not. But until someone figures out the technology that will enable us to scan babies’ brains at birth and work out quite how many geniuses are born every generation, and how many we have always lost to poverty and assorted other man-made ills, we’ll have to keep hearing these self-serving platitudes and punching ourselves in the head until it makes sense, or we don’t care that it doesn’t.

In any case, Jane (I’m calling her by her first name because there are a lot of Austens coming up, and anything but first-name terms promises absolute confusion) didn’t quite spring from the stoniest ground. She had several advantages – foremost amongst them a liberal paterfamilias who let all his children, regardless of sex, roam free in his large library, and who provided paper and writing tools to all who wanted them. As a family, the Austens were much given to debating and to performing plays (written by themselves or others). And from the age of about eleven, Jane was busy writing poems, stories, pastiches of novels and plays (particularly the sensational sort) to amuse herself and her family. She would eventually gather the 90,000-ish words that she produced over the next six or seven years into three notebooks – known to her as Volume the First, Second and Third, but known to us as Jane Austen’s juvenilia. They contain, amongst other things, a thirty-four-page History of England parodying contemporary history-writing and supplemented by thirteen watercolours by her beloved sister Cassandra; Love and Freindship (sic), mocking the novels of sensibility that were popular at the time; and pieces prefiguring Northanger Abbey. Towards the end of her juveniling – between the ages of eighteen and twenty – Jane wrote the short epistolary novel Lady Susan and then, having firmly set her sights on becoming a professional writer, began work on another epistolary but this time full-length venture entitled ‘Elinor and Marianne’. It was de-epistled, retitled and published (anonymously, by ‘A Lady’) in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility.

While making her revisions to the Dashwoods’ adventures, Jane began work in 1796 – I’ll just mention here, in case you were in danger of feeling good about yourself today, that she was only twenty at the time – on a second novel, called ‘First Impressions’. She finished the first draft in 1797 (reading aloud to her family as she went along, as she did with all her works) and it became a firm favourite with them. I don’t know what happens if you’re a satirical genius born to a family without a sense of humour who simply stare back at you blankly, saying, ‘What? I don’t geddit’, but again when we raise the dead and brain-scan them all with our supertechnology, I will have my answers. ‘First Impressions’ was published in 1813 (‘By the Author of Sense and Sensibility’) as Pride and Prejudice. Jane’s books got good enough reviews to become popular ‘fashionable’ novels – in other words, the aristocracy enjoyed them, and word filtered down to the middle-class novel-reading masses – and made her some money, but the lack of appreciation of their true worth amongst the majority of contemporary critics and readers is enough to drive you mad. You have to make do with scraps of insight from heroes like the playwright Richard Sheridan, who advised a friend to buy Pride and Prejudice immediately because ‘it was one of the cleverest things’ he had ever read.

Mansfield Park came out in 1814 (the reviews were not as good as for the previous novels, but by then her fans were operating under their own steam, and the comments did not harm her solid, if unspectacular sales) and a year later came Emma.

Far more satisfactorily – probably from Jane’s point of view, and certainly from future fans’ – is the fact that Sir Walter Scott, famous and revered for his swashbuckling Waverley novels, was asked to write a review. As befits the man who once wrote in his private diary that the author of Pride and Prejudice had ‘a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me’, Scott gave Mansfield Park a thoughtful, detailed, unquestionable rave.

Jane Austen’s health started failing as she worked on ‘The Elliots’, revised Northanger Abbey and began to write Sanditon. She died on 18 July 1817. The Elliots (as Persuasion) and Northanger Abbey were published posthumously. They were brought out as a set and included a short biography by her brother Henry, naming Jane as the author of these and the four novels that had gone before. In accordance with the practice at the time with female authors, none of Jane’s novels had ever been published under her own name (though her level of success meant it became an open secret). When reading is only just considered a suitable occupation for a lady, a woman in the eighteenth century had to take a lot of care not to be seen to be a writer – and certainly not a writer who wanted to write, or even (imagine!) earn money from the activity. The dozen or so chapters of Sanditon came out in 1925, under the title Fragments of a Novel. The 7,500 words of an unfinished – or perhaps merely abortive – work given the title The Watsons, by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, was first published in the second edition of his A Memoir of Jane Austen, which came out in 1871, as was Jane’s short epistolary novel (probably written around 1794), Lady Susan.

And that’s all, folks. Three notebooks, six full-length novels, one short, one unfinished and one fragment. Oh, and some letters. But not very many letters. Because in a move that, nearly two centuries on, only causes scholars and fans to jackknife in ever-increasing pain as Jane’s recognition and status grow, her sister Cassandra destroyed almost all of her vast collection of correspondence in order to protect Jane and the family’s privacy and reputation. Of an estimated 3,000 letters, 161 survive. They were mostly given to other family members as mementos, so it’s a fair assumption that they were amongst the most anodyne and ‘acceptable’ that Jane wrote. The true voice is not lost, but is almost certainly – as the few other letters that have emerged over the years that were received and saved by correspondents other than Cassandra suggest – attenuated.

But we have the books – we have the books. And now, of course, as more and more people over the years have followed where Walter Scott led, we have a mountain of biographies of Jane, critical analyses and appreciations of her work by scholars and fans, providing information and insight about her and designed to serve every level of interest, from the mildly curious to the full-on rapturous, bonnet-wearing Janeite (which I intend to become the moment I retire and/or can afford a pied-à-terre in Bath, Hampshire or Lyme Regis).

Virginia Woolf famously said that of all writers, Jane Austen was the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness. And she was right, as she was right in most things, especially when it comes to women generally, and the need for a room of your own specifically. But if there was one thing it was worth going to university for, it was for the understanding of this phrase: ‘free indirect style’ (or ‘free indirect discourse’, but let’s not) – what is it? It’s the thing that makes it possible to catch Jane Austen in the act of greatness.

Free indirect style means narrating something in the third person while keeping some elements, some of the perspective, of a first-person narrator so that you end up with a blend of objective and subjective truth and are able, as a writer, to reveal much more about your character, and far more cleverly and subtly, than you would when limited to one or the other point of view. For example, in Sense and Sensibility you have this: ‘Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able at all to sleep the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it.’

It’s a third-person (omniscient, objective) narrator apparently speaking, but with full access to, and knowledge of, Marianne’s thoughts and so of her character; and we get an understanding of how receptive she is to outside influences – a weakness that is so pivotal to her and the novel itself – to a degree that could not easily be managed in any other manner. We inhabit and view Marianne’s mind at the same time. We are not being quite told about it or quite shown it, but are being given something made up of both, and it is all the more powerful (dramatically interesting, intimate, comic) for that.

Inhabiting and viewing a consciousness at the same time, which effectively produces an unspoken commentary on it, is an invaluable tool for any comic writer or satirist. It’s the difference in effectiveness between a 1990s stand-up prefacing a joke with ‘Don’t you just hate it when …?’ and Peter Kay saying, ‘I went round to me mum’s for Sunday lunch. I don’t go every Sunday, but she’d bought a big chicken.’

And Jane Austen invented it. Not roast chicken: free indirect style. Not out of absolutely nothing – there are tiny flickerings of it in a few earlier authors, and it was surely a development whose time in novel-writing history had come – but it was Austen, indisputably, who properly pioneered it. Who took it, ran with it and made it a weapon in the writerly arsenal that few have declined to use since.

I can’t remember which book or which lecturer first introduced me to this concept (though if you want to read more about it yourself, I would recommend anything John Mullan writes – so cleverly, but so accessibly and so beautifully – about it), but it blew my mind. Not simply that you could pinpoint a moment when literature changed, when a new world of possibilities was opened up by one author, but that it explained in new measure why Austen was such a deep and enduring joy to read. Instead of straightforward description (the novelist’s mainstay), she gives us an incalculably richer experience, dipping in and out of characters’ consciousnesses and hovering in some liminal state between the internal and the external whenever she wants to bring us closer, drop us hints or push us away again, to fend for ourselves and make of them what we will. Free indirect style enriches any reading experience in ways that are almost impossible to describe. And it’s Austen whom all readers, and almost all authors, have to thank for it. An act of unsurpassable greatness.

Back in the early 1990s and a classroom on the Kent borders, however, we were learning none of this. We underlined quotes, discussed pride, discussed prejudice, had a row about Charlotte Lucas … and then we moved on abruptly to Chaucer.

I don’t know why we weren’t doing things chronologically – it may have had something to do with the fact that there were two A-level classes, and even Bromley didn’t have enough money for two sets of each text. The name of the author was familiar to me. I had since an early age been fascinated by the small run of books in slipcases that Dad kept on one of his higher shelves, and which he would periodically get down for me whenever I needed to examine them again. They were Folio Society editions, bought second-hand from the stalls on the South Bank during his years working at the National Theatre. One of them had a cream-and-brown buckram cover whose contrast with the smooth, dark-brown leather spine entranced me. It was called The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey (pronounced ‘Jefry’, when I enquired) Chaucer. It was a translation into modern English, so was technically readable by young me, but I treated these beautiful volumes more as objets d’art than as books and never took in more than a few lines. The paper was so thick and creamy. The type seemed somehow to have bitten into it more crisply and clearly than in any other book. I was awestruck by its beauty. The words themselves seemed very much a secondary consideration.

In those days every newspaper supplement and grown-up magazine had an advertisement – usually on the prestigious back cover – for membership of the Folio Society, and I would dream of the day when I would be old enough and rich enough (the prices were, to my infant mind, astonishing) to join. I did not know then that by the time such a day came round I would long have moved to a ‘quantity over quality’ model for book-buying and would never feel able to justify membership. I am far enough into my dotage now to be able to say that it shall almost certainly be the case for evermore that whenever I have forty quid to spare, it will be converted into several purchases (as many as a dozen, if I’m in a good second-hand bookshop with a fair wind behind me) rather than one slipcased luxury. I wish I wasn’t so committed to practicality over beauty (my home and wardrobe wish this too), but there are certain things you simply cannot fight.

So I was ready to engage when Mrs Eddie announced that we were going to start on Chaucer and his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales – you know, the thing that starts ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote’ and everyone looks at each other in horror on discovering that there is something out there even more impenetrable than Shakespeare. And as I’d spent most of my time admiring Dad’s copy, rather than reading it, I was as adrift as anyone.

Unlike Shakespeare, however, this stuff grew on me. There was something about this guy – he was … direct. He was vigorous. To read Chaucer was to feel that someone wanted to tell us a story, and it was just unfortunate that centuries of language evolution were getting in our way. Shakespeare, I felt, was doing it deliberately.

I think the contextlessness of secondary-school teaching is the strangest thing about it. Our poetry module had comprised a tiny part of The Waste Land, Louis MacNeice’s ‘Prayer Before Birth’ and a few other scraps and husks so random that it made me wonder, even at the time, whether any reasoning at all had informed the choice or whether the powers-that-be had simply opened an armful of anthologies and gone blindfold at them with a pin. Even if the idea had been to give us a flavour of different types of poem and writers, a selection could surely still have been put together that gave us some idea of evolving traditions, new schools of thought and the reactions of some against others. Now, with Chaucer, a similar non-process was under way. I had no idea who he was (courtier, diplomat, Member of Parliament, philosopher, bureaucrat, all-round busy fourteenth-century guy). I had no idea why he had written The Canterbury Tales (he read Boccaccio’s The Decameron, probably, and thought: Hey, you know what we don’t have in English? Do you know what I could do, in between my courtiering, wine merchanting and gallivanting about?fn2)

I had no idea why we were studying him (father of the English language and its literature – who knew? not me for another two or three years). And we were only studying part of the Prologue (which memory, as I come to write about him now, told me was about 900 pages long, but Google reveals was probably no more than about 300 lines) – and I didn’t really understand it. I am literally typing in a state of high excitement and delight, because my little Google search has also revealed to me that I can now read and comprehend it pretty easily. This is the first tangible proof of any progress I have made in anything over the last thirty-odd years that I can remember.

But I knew, again, that it was a thing for me. I loved that you could see our modern language emerging out of the shadows of the past. I loved that vigour and directness that I could see were pointing my way, even if I couldn’t get the full effect yet. I loved how the characters sprang so vividly to life, despite it all. How I hated the Pardoner for his long yellow hair alone (‘But smothe it heeng … And therewith he his shuldres overspradde / But thynne it lay’), long before his Tale ever reached my ken.

I tucked the name, the feeling, the … Chauceriness of Chaucer away and – as neither Dad’s nor any library shelves that I knew about were awash with introductory textbooks to Middle English or medieval literature – forgot about it for a while.

We battled through Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. On the one hand, we – a largely female class of seventeen-year-olds – roared our approval of the subtitle (‘A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented’) and what our teacher told us it meant: that the author was kicking against Victorian morality, which should have seen Tess blamed for being raped by Alec d’Urberville. Despite her ‘mobile peony mouth’ and having a red ribbon in her hair when we first meet her, Hardy was clear that this gave nobody the right to force anything upon her. Go, you 1891 controversial classic! We were on board. Then we were bored. It was feminism, yes, but a very quiet sort, and there’s lots of countryside to get through in between. Although my appetite for pastoral settings was greater than most people’s, I did start to feel a bit like I was on a very scenic but very long train journey that was proving you can have too much of a good thing.

Still, there was just enough in there to keep me going through a sense of something other than pedagogic duty. Sentence by sentence, even if there were a lot of them, it was gorgeous – hedgerows like ‘a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass’ – and when it wasn’t gorgeous, it was arresting. I can hear Tess’ ‘insane dry voice of terror’ now. The hatred of Angel Clare, of course (stupid name, stupid man) who – like most of the 1891 reviewers – washed his hands of Tess when he found out she was not the maiden he had assumed her to be, powered me through the latter sections. ‘The woman I have been loving is not you.’ ‘But who?’ ‘Another woman in your shape.’ Fuck off, Angel, and when you get there, fuck off some more. I sure was glad nobody in our day and age would react like that.

I attempted some more Hardy a bit later – Far from the Madding Crowd, I think, and The Mayor of Casterbridge, but always got off before the final stop. I may go back and try again, but not yet. All I know for sure is that I will not be going anywhere near Jude the Obscure, because in 1996 I made the mistake of watching Michael Winterbottom’s film adaptation and if you think I am putting myself through any version of the ‘Done because we are too menny’ scene ever, ever again, you’ve got another think coming. Bad enough onscreen. On the page, it might break me for good.

And then came The Color Purple. Just as Jane Austen was the answer to de-sexisting your 1990s curriculum, so Alice Walker was the answer to de-racisting it. So simple! I suppose the best that can be said about the shabby state of affairs thirty years ago is that if there was only one slot for Black authors and culture to be represented, at least they did fill it with this blistering, beautiful, uncompromising Pulitzer Prize-winner (the first ever won, incidentally, by a Black woman for fiction). Published in 1982, it was the sixth book and third novel by Walker, a long-time activist for Black and women’s rights.

It tells the story of Celie (aged fourteen in 1909 when she begins writing the letters to God that comprise the book, and in her fifties when it ends), who is growing up poor and Black in rural Georgia. She has two children by her violent rapist of a father – he takes them from her, and she believes they are dead – and is soon married off by him to an almost equally abusive man whom she calls ‘Mister’. What follows would sound, in bare summary, like a litany of all the sufferings that female flesh is heir to: racism and sexism compound to put Celie, her younger sister Nettie (Mister’s mistress) and eventually Celie’s friend and lover, Shug, and his daughter-in-law Sofia in an enduring double-bind. In fact it is a loving, relentless, blazing examination of how people (of either sex) can be individually and collectively oppressed, the many forms that resilience and resistance – along with the difference between them – can take, but also how it is possible to be warped and made violent by it in your own turn, when every day is shaped and every experience deformed by hundreds of years of apparently ineradicable bigotry and injustice.

This was being taught to an all-white class (Bromley being notably less diverse than Lewisham) by a (white) American teacher who could at least provide some cultural background without being doubly alienated by a UK birth. It also meant that she was extra-effective at shutting off the avenues of comfort we sought when Celie’s sorrows became almost unbearable. When we asked if this, or surely that, was fiction – an appalling invention to make a point by the author – Dr B would tell us exactly how and why it was nothing more than the appalling truth.

The Color Purple lifted me wholesale out of my reading (hell, my entire mental) comfort-zone. It was compelling in every way, but the unsensationalised horrors made me long to run away. It was bitter, sweet, unflinching and gruelling in a way I didn’t know it was possible to be. And it was – it shouldn’t have been, either through my own efforts or earlier school curricula – my first direct exposure to Black history, and if not quite my first introduction to the idea that an ancestral inheritance could be vastly different from my own, certainly the most dramatic and profoundly moving.

The Color Purple was hugely controversial when it was published (and most of those controversies were reignited when it was made into a film starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie and Oprah Winfrey as Sofia). The two main objections from critics were that it was written in Black vernacular, not ‘proper’ English – making it difficult to understand. Which is to say, you do not have to be too gifted a decoder to realise: ‘harder for white critics to understand’. I suspect that Walker did not lose too much sleep over that particular argument.

(This is, incidentally, a criticism with which Black authors of children’s books have always had to contend, with the added twist that they are seen to be failing in their duty to improve young readers’ literacy. Most have followed the lead of Langston Hughes, a prominent member of the 1920s’ Harlem Renaissance who became one of the first successful Black writers for children in the following decade. With each succeeding book he found a way to approximate the real speech of the children he was writing about, and follow, more closely – the desire, maybe even duty, to represent his readers accurately and render his stories accessible; children’s consequent delight trumping diktats from elsewhere.)

What does seem to have affected Walker more – she says she became depressed and went into therapy as the onslaught continued – was the criticism of her negative portrayal of Black men. But Walker was an ardent feminist and was deeply aware of the status of Black women and their common experiences whenever they find themselves in a society that is not only patriarchal, but racist too. Their truth is what she set out to explore in The Color Purple. But the question of whether you can support the sisterhood without betraying your race is one that her critics gnawed at for a long time.

Not, of course, that we were aware of this nearly ten years on and many thousands of miles away in a quiet corner of north Kent. We were just left reeling by the book’s force and grappling with all its revelations.

Such a book, such an experience, should have led me onwards. To Toni Morrison, perhaps, whose fiercely harrowing, astonishing Beloved had been published and, like The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize a few years earlier (it would punch my heart to the back of my chest when I finally read it in my forties) and, along with The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, helped earn her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Or Maya Angelou, thirty-five copies of whose autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, had sat in a classroom cupboard throughout my primary-school years awaiting, I presume, word from on high that would allow them to be brought into set-book circulation. I still cannot believe that instead we read The Starlight Barking – a surreal sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians and a demented mishmash of a book that, much as I love Dodie Smith and all her other works, I think most would agree has virtually nothing to recommend it as a piece of literature or even storytelling.

That it didn’t lead me onwards to these or any other Black authors (or even backwards, maybe to reread Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry with a supplemented understanding of the Logan family’s wider history) was largely because I still had the vague belief – and here you are about to get the greatest proof yet of my fathomless stupidity in youth – that you could finish reading all of one kind of book (one kind of literature, I think I meant) before moving neatly on to the next. This belief stubbornly endures somewhere beneath my rational brain (it is an ineradicable part of my completist nature, I suspect), but at least now I am aware of my idiocy, even if I still fail to take all the necessary steps to correct it. Not just in reading, but in every area of life, which I expend far too much energy on keeping calm, regulated and controlled. I need to have slack in all my systems. It is only now, as I crest the hill of middle age, that I am beginning to see what a dull life and mind this creates. I must find the correct notebook and add ‘Mental Sea Change’ to my ‘Long-Term To-Do List’.

I made some lovely new friends at my new school – only a handful, but it was a handful more than I or anyone else had expected, given my rudimentary social skills and unappealing aesthetic. But it was still only Sally (we had been friends for five or six years by this point, which was basically a lifetime) who had the power to make me go out and actually do things occasionally. And thank goodness she did, because that’s how I found out about Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg’s glorious, rambunctious, heart-warming, heartbreaking feminist tale of life, love and lesbians across the generations in a tiny Alabama town. Sally took me to see the film at the cinema. The Bromley Odeon, not the local Catford ABC! You would have thought we were flying to Cannes in a two-seater biplane for the anxiety it caused me, but no matter. We got there and I rapidly unclenched and lost myself in the story of Ruth Jamison and Idgie Threadgoode. Then I went out and bought the book and – you’ll never guess what? – it was even better than the film.

It’s a great, capacious ragbag of a book. There is a large cast of vivid characters, all eccentric or notable in some way, but never tipping into stereotype or becoming ludicrous; and all intrinsic to the story – never there just to add colour. In the present there is Evelyn Couch, a busy, lonely, underappreciated middle-aged woman who makes the weekly visit with her husband to see his aged mother in a nursing home. There, she gets talking to fellow resident of the home Ninny Threadgoode, who is soon regaling her and beguiling her – beguiling us all – with memories of her 1920s childhood in Whistle Stop after, she says, she was taken in as an orphan by the Threadgoodes. She begins to tell the story of the youngest daughter Idgie and the unbreakable friendship that she forms with Ruth, who comes to stay with the Threadgoodes while she teaches at the local summer Bible school. Flagg adds an epistolary-ish layer too, by interspersing Ninny’s recounting with excerpts from the local newsletter’s reporting of events at the time: The Weems Weekly, by good-hearted busybody Dot Weems.

Intertwined with the main story is Evelyn’s own, which is one of gradual awakening and growing self-confidence and assertion. She is inspired by Ruth and Idgie’s story of female friendship, love and survival (of bereavement, domestic violence and various other ills to which women’s flesh in particular is heiress), which is itself intertwined with the stories of the town’s Black women, their husbands, brothers and children, still suffering almost as acutely in the segregated, racist South as their enslaved recent ancestors. With Ruth’s quiet fortitude and Idgie’s fearless and uncompromising nature to guide her, to say nothing of the ways to subvert the dominant power that the Black characters (Big George, Sipsey and Onzell) have accumulated in order to live, Evelyn finds her world – especially after Ninny briskly notes that half her problems are down to the menopause – opening up and she starts to order it to her liking at last.

From the ragbag, Flagg creates a warm, generous, perfectly worked quilt. It remains one of the greatest comfort-reads in my collection. It does for me what Ninny does for Evelyn, and what Flagg has done for readers since the novel (probably her best work, though I love all the others too) was first published in 1987. It gives me perspective, it shows me as a link in a chain; it reminds me that there is nothing new under the sun, and that there are people before, around and no doubt ahead of me who have all faced the same problems and survived, and that the same delights will endure. So, thank you, Idgie Threadgoode; and thank you, Sally, for forcing me out of the house that day and into many, many hours of reading pleasure thereafter.

While that adventure outside my comfort-zone proved that sometimes leaving the house is a good thing for bookish people, I wasn’t inclined to do all of it all the time. I had heard a lot about drink, drugs and clubbing by then, from fellow sixth-formers who were genuinely concerned about my teenage well-being and happiness. I had tried drink, and thought that definitely had something going for it, but to drugs I said a firm no; and to clubbing – after a twenty-minute eternity at a venue called the Venue in New Cross – a firmer no still. As the actor Ernest Thesiger said when people asked him about his experiences at the front during the First World War, ‘My dear – the noise! The people!’ No.

I also tried exploring love and dating, and towards the end of A levels I did get a boyfriend. He was very nice. When he broke up with me, I was upset, but pleased to have the insight into what all the stories involving any kind of sundered relationship that I’d read up till then had been going on about. However much it hurts, a new kind of pain is always interesting. And once it passes, you have all the time back for reading that you used to spend lying on his bed trying to avoid his penis.

4

Dystopias, Decisions, Departure: On Academia

At some point mid-sixth-form seven or eight of us had been summoned to the headmaster’s office. I sat in the corridor outside, racking my brain and conscience for any idea of what I could have done wrong – especially with the others, most of whom were doing maths and science A levels and with whom I therefore had no more than a passing familiarity. We walked in and he was sitting behind his desk, flanked by the deputy head and our head of year. I nearly lost control of my bowels. I have always known I could never be a resistance fighter in a war. Anyone with any shred of authority can make me do or confess to anything. People are always so incredulous about Netflix true-crime series that pivot on a coerced confession or witness statement. I’m not. Those who are infinitely suggestible under pressure are my people. I was ready to swear I’d masterminded the Brink’s-Mat robbery if it got me out of Mr Allan’s office any quicker.

It did not prove necessary. The heads swiftly explained that they thought we should all apply for Oxbridge – which, after a little more close listening, turned out to be shorthand for Oxford and Cambridge Universities. About half said, ‘No, thank you’ and left. The rest of us agreed to have a bash.

You could only apply to one or the other, so I asked Mum and Dad what they thought. ‘No idea,’ said Mum. ‘An English degree is just reading books anyway, isn’t it? You can read them anywhere. You do read them anywhere.’

‘Cambridge is prettier,’ said Dad.

So I told Mr Allan I’d try there. I didn’t give it another thought until it was time to go for an open day to one of the colleges. I walked into Cambridge city centre for the first time and fell instantly and irrevocably in love. Not so much with the look of the place, although Dad was right: it was not only pretty, but beautiful under a bright-blue sky, and half the buildings literally looking golden in the sunlight. But it was the peace of the place that got me – sunk into and emanating from every inch of it. I felt safe in a way I had literally never felt anywhere beyond the four walls of my house (or Grandma’s). The size was manageable. I felt that when I got lost (there is no ‘if’ with me), it would not be for too long, and that the unknowing journey would be one of delightful discovery rather than panicked horrors. It was a world away from the hurry and jangle of Catford. It felt like it had been designed by bookworms for bookworms, which I suppose in a sense it had.

I had a wonderful, perfect day roaming around and boggling at the gorgeously jumbled shops, the lovely little alleyways that didn’t smell of piss, the astonishing colleges and the idea of living in one of them – which would surely bring me as close as anyone could possibly come to realising the dream of living in the past, but with all the benefits of modern dentistry and sewage systems still at hand.

I got home, filled out the application form (the university sent it back, explaining how it actually needed to be done – I’m assuming private schools covered this after their swan-tipping lessons or something) and spent the next nine months consumed by longing and a dread of failure. I needed two As and a B and – by the absolute skin of my teeth and a re-mark of Spanish – I got them. I was off to Cambridge.

But, first, a gap year. I never refuse a pause if it’s offered. And especially not if it also offers the chance to make money. I got a job working for the local NHS admin centre in New Cross. My dad made me sandwiches for lunch, and my parents didn’t charge me rent, so I was effectively the richest I’ve ever been in my entire life. I saved most of it to help me through the coming three years away. You can guess what I spent the rest on.

Oh, the glory of being able to buy any book I wanted!fn1 Like William Brown swaggering into the sweet shop with an auntly shilling in his pocket, I walked into Waterstone’s and WHSmith feeling like a Rothschild. Direct, unfettered communion between me and a shopful of choices. Which one did I most want? Hmm. This one? Maybe. Ah, but then there was this … or maybe that? I would wander around my palace of delights, holding the current favourite under my arm so that I didn’t stain it with my sweaty fingers, leafing through contenders, swapping candidates in and out until my heart was set. There is nothing like the feeling of finding The One. You look at the cover, you read the blurb, you scan the first few pages to make sure, but really you just know. You could probably give a few rational reasons – heard about it from a friend, liked the sound of the plot, got a thing for Victorian-set fiction at the moment, something like that – but beyond that it’s simply an ineffable communion of souls. Why this Victorian-set one and not that? Why this plot and not that other very similar one over there? We can’t tell you. Mainly because we’ve already taken it to the till, declined a bag and are reading it on the bus home.

My new-found riches were how I discovered that Nineteen Eighty-Four was not the only dystopia in town. A girl in possession of a good fortune could take her pick. Especially when an enterprising manager put a selection of them in a special display bin (such a disrespectful word) so that you now knew they existed, could note down their names and then acquire them one by one, even after the bin had gone on to meet other people’s needs. Oh, brave new financially independent world!

Aldous Huxley’s classic was my gateway drug, my twisted Soma. Brave New World was written in 1931 as an interrogation of the interwar period’s optimism and faith in technology to solve all of humanity’s problems. It is set roughly 600 years in the future, when society has been remodelled in accordance with the mass efficiencies that Henry Ford had brought to the car-assembly line in pursuit of perfect stability and happiness. Babies are no longer conceived or developed in the womb, but created in bottles, the embryos exposed to different chemicals and hormones as they grow, so that they can fit into the social rank allotted to them. Alphas are those bred for success and leadership, then come Betas (nearly as good), then on down through Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, with the last doing the most menial jobs. Further conditioning socially and psychologically keeps people more or less contentedly in their places. Everyone indulges in the drug Soma to smooth out any rough edges, and life in the World State AF632 (632 years After Ford) is generally pleasant, productive and conflict-free.

The protagonist Bernard is technically an Alpha, but not quite as well formed or – in a society that lives by the motto ‘Everyone belongs to everyone else’ – as gregarious or promiscuous as he should be. When he introduces John, a ‘Savage’ whom he brings back from a visit to a reservation and who has not been subjected to any tranquillising effects on his nature, then the stage is set for tragedy and, along the way, an examination of what it means to be human, the purpose of sorrow and grief, and whether the loss of complex emotions is worth the loss of art and culture that follows; and, maybe, of the meaning of life entire. The older and more tired I get, and the more the world seems to be going to hell in a very well-oiled, speedy handcart, the more I am on board with a life of Soma-infused international peace, however unnatural and culturally barren, although I am aware that this is not the takeaway Huxley intended.

That led me on to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, surely the bookworm’s most vital dystopian tale, set as it is in a future in which books are banned as sources of confusing and depressing thoughts for the populace. Dedicated ‘firemen’ hunt down hoarders and incinerate their collections – 451° Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns. The story centres on one fireman, Guy Montag, who becomes a convert to reading and is drawn into the world of people who secretly memorise books in order to stop them being destroyed completely when the imminent nuclear war finally arrives. At last, an apocalypse in which I could see myself playing a useful role! If anyone needed Antonia Forest’s Marlow stories regurgitating at any point in the future, they could count on me. At least until I was placed under any pressure at all to reveal the whereabouts of resistance members or meeting spots – at which point, as discussed, I would squeal like a pig.

And then came the book that should be pressed into every female (at least) teenage hand: The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopia is wildly famous now, of course, thanks to the television adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss that does full justice to its terrifying brilliance. But back then, ten or so years after it was published, it was very possible – unless you were older than I was perhaps, and/or moving in the world of socially or politically conscious ‘wimmin’ – to be unaware of it, and indeed of most feminist literature.

I didn’t actually buy this one myself. I first came across it in just about the most perfect way possible. I was cat-sitting for the weekend for an older friend who had recently divorced her vile husband and was busy making up for lost time in every possible way. Her new flat was filled with all the plants, throws, clutter – and cats – that he had very firmly eschewed in their minimalist marital home. And a very large part of this liberation-clutter was books. A lot of self-help, a lot of handsomely bound classics that were defiantly not part of any matching sets at all – and a generous helping of what I didn’t know then were feminist touchstones. I hunted through them. Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room – young woman unmarried and pregnant? I got enough of that at school (locally our student population was known as the Pram-Pushers). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper – seemed to be a long short story, and I was already firmly agin short stories, even long ones. No matter how beautifully structured, how choicely worded, how densely evocative and how clever the author was, in making so little do so much – and in fact the better all that was, the worse I reacted – I always felt short-changed. My hunger for that world wasn’t sated. I felt like Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when he talks about drinking until he feels the ‘click’: I needed my full fix, and I knew in my bones when I’d got it. At least my addiction was a lot easier on the liver and any unfortunate women I might marry.

Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room had the opposite problem – it was 550 pages, too long to get through in a weekend. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing was another stonker, so was passed over too. But The Handmaid’s Tale? Nineteen Eighty-Four, but about women? Three hundred or so pages set in near-future America? Sold!

I fed the cat and settled down on the sofa with Offred. When the cat had finished eating, he came and joined me. We were both still there the next morning. With no one to stop me, I read through the night and greeted the new dawn feeling harrowed, exhilarated and altogether as if my mind had been sandblasted by every one of its 300-odd pages. It had definitely been the right choice.

As gruelling as reportage, as propulsive as a thriller and bursting with ideas that you could spend a lifetime unpacking (how, I wondered, could anyone be so clever that they knew so very much and understood it all so deeply that they could render it in a story, make it palatable, accessible and fun to any random reader who came along?), The Handmaid’s Tale has rightly become a classic in the intervening years (even before the TV series sent its popularity soaring). We move between the past and present, from ‘Offred’s (her real name is never given in the book, though there are hints that it is ‘June’) previous untroubled, ordinary life as a librarian, wife and mother, daughter of a feminist single mother, best friend of Moira, to the nightmare it becomes after the fundamentalist Christian sect Sons of Jacob overthrow the government and establish the Republic of Gilead. They disenfranchise most of the population except the elite Commanders, and divide the women into rigid categories. If they are fertile – rare in an irradiated and heavily polluted future – they become Handmaids and are sent to bear children, via ritualised monthly rape, for Commanders and their Wives. If they are infertile, they become Marthas (housekeepers), Aunts (trainers of Handmaids and enforcers of discipline in re-education centres), Econowives (of lower-status men) or Unwomen (failed Handmaids, adulteresses, activists, ‘gender traitors’ – lesbians – nuns, unmarried or divorced women), who are fodder for the colonies where various toxic substances are mined. Or, if they’re very lucky, for the brothels that the Commanders are – naturally – allowed to frequent. Anyone at all of colour is classed as a Child of Ham and is ‘resettled’. It’s not quite clear what this means, but I think we can assume: nothing good.

Atwood classes her book as speculative rather than (as dystopias are usually categorised) science fiction, mainly because everything in it, she said, was drawn from life. Everything that happened in Gilead was happening, or had happened, somewhere in the world.

America’s history of slavery is everywhere evoked: in the punishments, the taking of the Handmaids’ children, the repeated dispossession as the women are shunted from post to post, their occasional rescue by the resistance network, (clumsily) named the Underground Femaleroad, after the Underground Railroad that took escaped Black slaves to safety. The 1978–9 Islamic Revolution and events in Afghanistan provided the model for the religious extremists forcing women out of their jobs and back into the home (as they had also effectively been, for non-religious reasons, in the West during Atwood’s own post-war childhood) and having their bank accounts handed over to male relatives. The hanging of resistance fighters on the Wall, which Offred and her mandated companion Ofglen must pass to do their shopping, was taken from President Ferdinand Marcos’ dissident-murdering regime in the Philippines. The fetishising and abuse of the few remaining fertile women as enslaved child-bearing Handmaids to the elite Commanders and their Wives had its roots in Romanian dictator Ceaușescu’s obsession with increasing his country’s birth rate. For the religious intolerance: well, take your pick, but Atwood herself named Puritanism (one of her research subjects at Harvard) as a particular inspiration. The Handmaid’s Tale is a speculation about what would happen in Reagan’s, and the Moral Majority’s, America in particular if totalitarianism took hold. What seeds already sown would flourish? In a patriarchy – which is to say everywhere, to some degree or other, across the world and across history – the answer was: none that produced anything but bitter fruit for women.

I knew only the barest facts about America’s history of slavery, and almost nothing about the other horrors Atwood was drawing on, that night the cat, Offred, and I spent curled up together on the sofa. But I knew enough. I felt its deeper veracities in my bones. It was the drumbeat of recognition, as much as the addictive plot, that kept me reading. The suffering of the women of Gilead was different in degree, but not in kind, from those I knew about. I’d first read about rape when I was about six or seven and the local paper was filled with headlines about a serial predator, nicknamed the Fox, who was attacking women in their homes at night. Like any female I had grown up amidst a barrage of messages about how to keep myself safe and how not to attract unwanted attention (and why I shouldn’t want it on the occasions when it was right and proper to want it, which was … confusing); amidst constant reminders to stay alert, remain in a group or – ideally – stop at home. And so on, and so very much on.

The warnings and the worry had intensified over the last few years as my friends, and friends of friends, gathered enough frightening experiences at first hand to prove that for once the adults trying to trammel our lives were not being wholly unreasonable. Men were a clear and present danger. Not all men, we are supposed to add hastily, these days. To which I would further add: no. But a lot of men. And far more men than you’d think. I’d like to think that today’s teenagers could be reading Atwood’s book with detached interest as a mere historical curiosity – much like the professor in its epilogue, who is reporting Offred’s story in what seems to be a much healthier far-distant future, as one found on aged tapes from the past. But I suspect they are not. In fact I’d go so far as to say I know – we all know – they cannot be. But The Handmaid’s Tale has surely helped, and will continue to help, in the fight.

All this heady joy came to an abrupt end when an innocuous-looking envelope dropped onto the doormat in early summer. It contained the reading list for university. It looked like a lot to get through in the first year, but I was ready and willing, and we would soon enough find out if I was able. Except that, on second reading, it was not the list of books we would be studying in our first year. It was the list of books we were supposed to read before what they called ‘going up’, and what normal people called ‘arriving in September’.

Whatever you call it, it was in eight weeks’ time, and eight weeks is not long enough to get through:

Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene – a sixteenth-century epic poem, more than 4,000 stanzas – or 36,000 lines – long, written in sixteenth-century epic poem-ese

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney – a pastoral romance (dunno) in 422 pages of sixteenth-century prose, which is not as different from sixteenth-century poetry as you’d hope

Several volumes of poetry by, and critical works on, the Romantic and Metaphysical poets – the who? The what?

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa – literally the longest novel in the English language, just shy of 1 million words. Its full title is Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage, because in 1748 authors started as they meant to go on.

William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity – what?

I. A. Richards’ The Principles of Literary Criticism – what?

Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction – what?

Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic – please stop.

And those are merely the ones I can remember at this distance.

My dutiful dad went into London for the day and scoured the shops to buy them all, in each of the particular editions specified. They cost £200. We all paled at the expense and I cried in secret, horrified both by how much my parents had had to spend and how impossible the task before me was. It was clear I had failed already. It was clear Cambridge was not for me. If I’d known how to back out, if I’d had any hope that my parents would let me, I would have done so in a heartbeat. As it was, I picked up The Faerie Queene and began.

I’d love to report a transcendent experience. That by the second Spenserian stanza about the Redcrosse Knight I had been awoken to the beauties of Elizabethan verse, and by the end was blown away by Edmund’s prowess in the field of representing private and public virtue via sustained allegory, closing the enormous book with a sigh only of sorrow that there were not another 36,000 allusive lines still to come.

But no. I read it without understanding a single thing about it. Which is to say, I suppose, that I didn’t read the book at all. I diligently passed my eyes over every word, but my brain could not compute them. It was a terrifying experience and one that was repeated and intensified with the Arcadia and then with all the stuff about the Romantic and Metaphysical poets. Maybe I would have fared a little better with the secondary texts about ambiguity and magic and whatnot, but I was out of time. Clarissa too would have to wait. It was time to go. We packed my things into the car – Clarissa took up half the boot – and set off down the M1.

5

Dark Academia: On Studying the Classics

My first term at university was what I think you might call ‘a mixed bag’. On the one hand, I was ecstatically happy. It was exactly what my day-trip there had seemed to promise. Beauty, tranquillity and it turned out that the alleys not only didn’t smell of piss, they also led – almost without exception – either to a library or a bookshop.

Oh, the libraries! Such niche academic interests were catered for that I assumed for many weeks that they were just having me on. You would pass tiny signs marking the presence of a theological college’s book collection that only covered Catholicism in 1596–7, or a maths department’s that dealt only with Fermat’s Last Theorem or the number three. As for the classics libraries – well, do you want Greek, Latin, ancient Greek or Really Ancient Greek, and are you even going to give the time of day to those upstarts without reading your way through the Proto-Indo-European library down Pilcrow Passageway first, dimwit?

And then there were the people. If school had been like a daily cold shower, this was like slipping into a warm bath. They were all so nice. Which is to say, they were all nerdily/geekily/bookishly inclined, to some degree. No more did I have to sneak off to read, or come up with convoluted excuses about why I wanted to be left quietly alone. No longer did I have to stand bewildered amongst people who were talking about things I knew nothing about and cared even less about. Everything was suddenly so much easier.

Partly, of course, this is simply a function of age. If you haven’t grown out of automatically bullying someone to tears for not liking the things you like, by the age of eighteen or nineteen, you’re basically a sociopath – and there are few of those around. And partly it’s because almost everyone in tertiary education is there through choice, instead of legal requirement. It lessens the frustrations and unhappiness all round.

Whatever the reason, university was where I began to think for the first time that maybe there was nothing wrong with me. Which is always a nice feeling. I revelled in the fact that someone might ask if you wanted to go for a coffee, or out to this thing or that thing, and you could say yes and know that you were in for something fun and not overwhelming; or – or, and this was the crucial bit, the life-transforming bit – you could say no, thank you, and they would understand and be fine with that answer. You could stay in your room and read for as long as you liked, and nobody would think you were weird, try to prise you out or tease or bully you about it. Even if they weren’t too much that way inclined themselves (and plenty were), they seemed to understand that this wasn’t a hostile rejection, but simply a different mode of being and were happy to accept you as you were. This naturally has the immediate effect of making you much more relaxed and eager to go out and meet people than ever before, and gradually everyone found their groove and the level of social life that most suited them. I even went to a nightclub once.

On the other hand, I was so homesick that by eight every evening I could be found in Market Square feeding ten-pence pieces into one of its cluster of red phone boxes, crying down the telephone to my family for at least an hour. It was very expensive. And very boring, I’m told. Mum, Dad and Emily used to have to take it in shifts, handing the receiver to each other in relay as they waited for me to exhaust myself and head back to college and bed.

Gradually, the homesickness wore off and I got more firmly to grips with university life. The work was hard and there was a lot of it, but it became easier once the simple terror of being asked to offer a thought or give an opinion on, say, Paradise Lost (‘Was Milton a misogynist?’) – by someone who had literally written the book on the subject (I read his book – the short answer is ‘Yes’fn1) – had worn off. Or, if not exactly worn off, was so omnipresent and inescapable that it eventually created a protective callus on my heart/brain/spirit/soul that saved me from being permanently crushed by it.

The English curriculum was a solid, not to say stolid, unbending thing. The idea was simplicity itself: for the first two years you would plough through the centuries, reading as much as you could of, and about, everyone you could who had died before novels were invented; and after that, in your third and final year, you did … well, All The Novels. The ploughing-through of the centuries should have been done chronologically, of course, to give you the best chance of understanding how we got from there to here, but because of some vagaries of timetabling that you might have thought an 800-year-old educational institution would have ironed out by now, even if a sixth-form comprehensive could not, it was not. We started with the Metaphysical poets.

The Metaphysicals were a group of seventeenth-century poets not formally affiliated with each other, but including John Donne, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell and Richard Crashaw, who reacted against the Augustan age by writing highly intellectualised poetry marked by bold and ingenious conceits, incongruous imagery, complexity and subtlety of thought, the frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression. Yes, I did copy that straight from the Internet. I was too busy feeding ten-pence pieces into phones and begging to come home to remember anything anyone tried to cram into my head that term. I have a vague recollection of Donne and his blood-filled flea (really about his penis), Andrew Marvell and his coy mistress (really quite obviously about his penis) and George Herbert (a model of Christian piety and totally in denial about his penis) and that’s about it.

Actually I quite warmed to Herbert. We did him towards the end of term, when the thick fog of my misery was beginning to lift. I remember being pleased to discover his poem ‘The Collar’ is the source of the famous line ‘I struck the board, and cried, No more!’ In the days before the Internet, this kind of thing was much more satisfying than it has since become – one of the many smaller pleasures that we have lost to technology, though I suppose it hardly matters, given the size of the big ones (democracy, non-Fascism, the conception of human history as one of slow but essentially linear progress). And the rest of the poem – and the collection it came in, The Temple – was good too. The vision of a man genuinely wrestling with himself, caught up in spiritual self-conflicts but his goodness always apparent, was strangely moving. It was the first time I was able to enter, in some tiny way, not the mind of a fictional character, but the mindset of an age. Herbert’s clarity and rigour made me – modern, secular, limited me – understand that religion had been, could be, a real force, that it mattered. He gave me the first flickerings of understanding of how fundamentally your life and your society would be shaped by the sincere belief that God and heaven and hell were real. Everything I had read up until that point had given me insights into people, sure, but only people who – however superficially different from me – still shared my basic worldview. That there could be a more profound difference between people had never entered my (tiny, modern, secular, limited) thoughts.

Whatever nascent insights had been vouchsafed me by the Reverend Herbert were put in abeyance the next term. It was devoted to Shakespeare. I was no longer homesick, but it was so boring that I remember nothing about it except being forced, along with Emma – the single other state-school pupil in my English group (I think it was maybe part of some covert Help the Proles programme?) – to go to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Toby Stephens in Coriolanus. I don’t recall much of Coriolanus, but I cannot pretend that the sight of a twenty-eight-year-old, lightly muscled Toby Stephens striding about the stage is not a memory that burns brightly still.

Emma and I turned to each other a lot in the first couple of terms. We had one particularly restorative session in the corner of a common room one afternoon, during which we rendered each other hysterical with all the things we didn’t know, compared to all the private-school students and public-school boys. Prime ministers. Any history dates other than the World Wars. The Waughs’ family tree. The fact that literary criticism existed. ‘I really feel,’ said my companion, ‘that we shouldn’t have been sent here to read English without someone telling us that people write books about books. That seems like something we should have been introduced to earlier. Before we were sitting next to people who had a different tutor for each Shakespearean sonnet.’ I heartily concurred.

Late on in the second term, our group was given tutorials by a doctoral student called Charlotte. She was young, she was female, she was ragingly intelligent and she imparted knowledge quickly, efficiently and in what I can only describe as a normal manner. She had no ravenous sense of self or professorial affectations, no ponderous, fusty ways. She had confidence, but no ego that needed to be served by keeping us waiting for pronouncements as if they were being handed down from Mount Sinai. She was great. Beyond that, for Emma and me especially, she was approachable, she was friendly, she was a role model. We could see that surviving – even thriving – in this strange, fascinating, but periodically oppressive place was possible. In her supervisions we could relax mental muscles we didn’t even know we had been tensing, and free all our energy for learning. It was wonderful. It made a difference. It was brief. Soon she was off somewhere new and as we watched her disappear off into the distance, Emma sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘back to normal then. Up shit creek without a Charlotte.’

It made me very jealous of the boys. How we felt with Charlotte – wholly at ease, secure, confident that we would be heard, and with all the liberation and joy that brings – must be how they felt all the time. Psychologists call it ‘consciousness of kind’. What must that be like, I wondered, and have wondered many, many times since in many more and wider contexts, as I have made my way through this badly arranged, stupidly biased world that is so set against women accessing … well, everything, on equal terms with men, so that we never reach the critical mass in any field that would bring about the root-and-branch overhaul life needs.fn2

In tribute to my fleeting mentor, I decided to tackle a novel Charlotte had mentioned in passing as one of her favourites. Bravely disregarding the trauma I had previously suffered at the hands of the Brontës, I bought a second-hand copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by the youngest and least famous of the windswept sisters – Anne. Oh, Charlotte. Thank you, again. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was better than Jane Eyre. It was much, much better than Wuthering Heights. It was, in fact, better than almost anything.

Look, I know Emily gave us Wuthering Heights, a groundbreaking piece of literature whose elemental passions ring down the ages, inspired Kate Bush and brought about the sight of Laurence Olivier in leather britches striding across Hollywood moors (for which, absolutely, many thanks). And Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, I know, I do know, isn’t half-bad (and by this stage in my romantic non-endeavours I was certainly warming to her depiction of a handsome hero who nevertheless sees through the heroine’s plain exterior to love the personality within). But here, from the quietest Brontë, was a book, published in 1847, laying out in remorseless, compelling detail the effects of a husband’s alcoholism on a woman, Helen Graham, and her son – and her fight to begin a new life away from his violence. So perfectly did it capture and illuminate the powerlessness and fear of the female experience that I remain convinced to this day that to read it is to be armed for ever against the traps into which the unwary Helen fell. Anyone who professes not to understand ‘why women stay’ should read it – and be re-educated from top to bottom.

This is the Brontë book I would put on the GCSE curriculum. A book that doesn’t merely advocate female independence (at the time of writing, a woman had no right to divorce, no matter how abusive her husband was – she was a ‘feme covert’, a woman covered over, covered up by him and his rights), but also celebrates good men. It celebrates those who don’t resort to violence, who accept a woman’s decision not to marry them (rather than taking out a Heathcliffian twenty-year intergenerational revenge policy) and who would never think of locking a recalcitrant wife in an attic in order to continue life uninterrupted. There is a happy ending, but instead of a raging conflagration and a blinding, the novel relies on mutual understanding, appreciation and repeated proof in word and deed that Helen’s eventual husband, Gilbert Markham, is a good, trustworthy, deserving man. Helen (and indeed the protagonist in Agnes Grey, Anne’s first novel, which I read as soon as I’d finished Wildfell Hall) is an ordinary woman making extraordinary decisions and ending up with the partner she truly deserves – with un-singed extremities, but no grand estate – who helped her to rescue herself, but stands quietly by until she is ready to start a new chapter. ‘Markham’ should be the name we reach for when we want to evoke the heroic ideal or romantic archetype (I think ‘Gilbert’ would be a stretch), instead of ‘Heathcliff’; and Anne should be who first comes to mind when we think of Brontë brilliance.

As I was always slow on the uptake, one of the many things The Tenant of Wildfell Hall taught me was that literary reputations might not be the purely meritocratic things I thought they were. Even now, people are still more likely to have heard about their drunken brother Branwell than of Anne. She remains the underdog, even though any reading of their collected works will show her talent burning as brightly and as fiercely as those of her more famous sisters. Why? Well, partly bad luck. And partly bloody Branwell.

Let’s take the bad luck first. The near-simultaneous publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Anne’s first book, was the youngest sister’s initial misfortune. Her debut was almost literally subsumed by Emily’s. Wuthering Heights comprised two volumes of the standard triple-decker format of the time, while Anne’s tale of a governess (based on her own experiences of teaching variously appalling children in rich houses) made up the third. The problem, of course, was that Wuthering Heights was, well, Wuthering Heights: a mad fever-dream of a novel that couldn’t, and shouldn’t, be doing all the extraordinary things it does (I grudgingly admit, even though I remain immune to its charms), elemental and impossible all at once. It sucked up all the available column inches, while Agnes Grey – a spare, quiet tale of endurance that prefers unflinching realism to wild romance – went largely unremarked. Context is not all, but it matters.

In 1914, when the moorland mist had cleared a little, Agnes Grey was re-evaluated to a degree, with the writer May Sinclair, for example, noting that ‘Anne Brontë attacks her problem with a freedom and audacity before which her sisters’ boldest enterprises seem cowardly and restrained. Her behaviour is revolutionary.’ Ten years later, George Moore called the book ‘the most perfect prose narrative in English letters’ and suggested that if Anne had lived, she might have taken a place next to Jane Austen. But it was too little too late.

Wildfell Hall followed a year after Agnes Grey. It’s an immeasurably better book in all sorts of ways – in form and in content, weaving more ideas and sociocultural critiques into a more complicated, compelling and finely worked story – and it might have changed things for Anne, but this time she was hamstrung not only by the critics’ disapproval, but also by her own sister Charlotte-not-my-Charlotte’s distaste for the book.

Anne stood up to the critics, who largely condemned her book’s shocking ‘coarseness’, feminism and Helen’s violation of social convention and contemporary English law. She made her stand in the preface to the second edition, in which she called them ‘more bitter than just’, insisting that the depiction of vice they claimed she gratuitously included and revelled in was a necessary function of art. ‘Oh, reader!’ she wrote. ‘If there were less of this delicate concealing of facts – this whispering, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace – there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.’ The compacted fury of ‘this whispering, “Peace, peace” when there is no peace’ makes my heart ache and blaze every time. Of all the sisters, it was Anne who nursed Branwell longest and during his later, worst times. The portrait of Helen’s violent alcoholic husband may not have been a direct depiction of Branwell, but her descriptions of the selfishness, irrationality and danger unleashed by drink on those around the drinker are surely infused by real-life experience.

In that preface Anne also delivered as full-bodied a response to those who thought – and were seized with horror at that thought – that it had been written by a woman. ‘I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be … I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.’

That was the critics answered. But there was little she could do about what appeared in Charlotte’s introduction to Tenant in the editions published after Anne’s death, which occurred in Scarborough in May 1849. Charlotte always stood in (slightly fearful) admiration of Emily’s genius – she referred to her as ‘a giant’ and ‘a baby god’ – but she seems never to have fully appreciated her younger sister’s work. Maybe their temperaments and talents were simply too different for her to see Anne’s for what they were; or maybe she secretly recognised the truth of their home life with Branwell in what Anne wrote and felt that she was giving away too much of their private suffering and shame?

Either way, Charlotte surely did Anne’s reputation and levels of posthumous fame no favours by writing in her introduction to her sister’s second novel: ‘Wildfell Hall it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake – it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer.’ It continues in this vein for some time. As the Brontës’ biographer Juliet Barker puts it: ‘Charlotte, it appears, was prepared to consign her sister’s novel to oblivion because she considered its subject at odds with her own perception of what Anne’s character was and ought to have been.’

Yes, context matters, especially when it contains an elder sister with a particular set of idées fixes. But to read the books now, in a contemporary context, is a liberation. We can see what her sister could not. We are not blinded, like Anne’s critics, by her ‘coarseness’ or distracted by speculation about her sex. We know about Branwell, we know what the disease of alcoholism inflicts on others as well as the patient, and we can admire Anne’s courage in refusing to pretend there was peace, when there was no peace. I’d like to think her time will come soon.

When I finally looked up from Anne’s masterpiece, I found something almost equally delightful waiting for me. The final term of the year was about to go (as a film just about to be released would put it) medieval on our ass. Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur! Sir Gawain and the Green Knight! It was Chaucer with knobs on.

Now, in all honesty, I don’t remember much about Le Morte d’Arthur itself. Sir Thomas Malory’s reworking of all the legends of Arthur into one complete, chronologically sound account of his life – and those of his knights – and death sparked off too many memories of its own. There were bits I remembered from BBC programmes that Dad had ‘casually’ tuned into and asked if we wanted to watch with him. There were bits of Narnia in there. There were, in fact, bits of everything in there. Such is the way of legend. It gets everywhere, without you even realising it. And Malory’s version had been the go-to source since the nineteenth century for any writers interested in Britain’s folkloric or mythological past. They had been filling my books with stories, scenes, moments, heroes, heroines, villains, beasts, birds, images and metaphors from it all this time. And now here, in a cheap red paperback edition from Galloway and Porter, was the real thing. The Guinevere, Lancelot, Morgan le Fay they had all been referring to, to whom they had looked for inspiration, whose characters and adventures they had modernised, adapted, taken as springboards for their own, were suddenly there, standing before me, as if they were just anyone and this – the very Matter of Britain! – was any old book. I could hardly believe it.

Just as I was beginning to recover my equilibrium, it was time to move on. This happened a lot. I was neither bright nor prepared enough to keep proper pace with the books we were being exposed to, or the work we were being set – delights flashed by and I tried to catch them all, but it was like trying to leap onto a bullet train going at full speed. The best I could do was note the titles or the category (‘Medieval! Stuff like Chaucer! I’m going to like it all one day’) as they whizzed by, and hope for more time in the future. And never more so than when I met Gawain and the Green Knight.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late-fourteenth-century chivalric romance written in Middle English by a poet from the West Midlands. What does this mean? It means, basically, that you have to let it wash over you and enjoy the sensation for a long time before you have any actual clue what is going on.

It was written around the same time as The Canterbury Tales, but is much harder to understand because it was Chaucer’s English that developed into modern English and not the West Midlands’ English. ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote’ suddenly looks pellucid next to:

SIÞEN þe sege and þe assaut watz sesed at Troye,

Þe borȝ brittened and brent to brondeȝ and askez,

Þe tulk þat þe trammes of tresoun þer wroȝt

Watz tried for his tricherie, þe trewest on erthe:

But, oh, how I wanted – instantly and, so far, always – to know more. And with the help of the discovery of something called a ‘parallel text’ (mad English on one side of a spread, sane English on the other), I soon did. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (the real things, I said excitedly to myself. I mean, not real-real, but the real source! Apart from the realer sources that he was drawing on. But late fourteenth century is real enough for me) are gathered at Camelot on New Year’s Eve when a giant green man on a giant green horse and carrying a giant green axe arrives.

I will say here that ‘a romance’, in medieval terms, means something closer to ‘an adventure’ than what we mean by the word now. Beyond that, you really have to continue to go with it for a while and not ask too many questions.

The Green Knight issues the (boring, ordinary-coloured) knights a challenge. Will one of them strike him a single blow with the axe and allow him to do the same back, a year and a day from now? Whoever accepts the challenge may keep the axe.

As I say, you just have to go with it.

The Camelotians are understandably, but not very chivalricly, reluctant. But eventually Sir Gawain steps forward, takes hold of the axe and beheads the visitor. Unfazed, the Green Knight picks up his own head and says that he looks forward to seeing Sir Gawain this time next year at the Green Chapel, to repay the favour.

Off Gawain sets at the appointed time. Two miles from the chapel he is invited by a local lord to stay at his castle, where there also lives his beautiful lady wife and a very well-treated old crone. Gawain agrees to the jolly host’s jolly proposition that he will give his guest the spoils of the day’s hunting every evening, in return for whatever Gawain has acquired during the day, because he has clearly learned nothing from any previous encounters with strangers making odd, unprompted propositions, a mere year or so ago.

Never mind. After this point, things start to become a little more narratively and psychologically recognisable to us, even if you are as dependent as ever on the precious translation to your left/right, as the beautiful lady wife makes advances of increasing seductiveness towards our hero and he must pass on the spoils – one kiss on the first day, two on the second, three on the third – to his host. On that last day, however, he also accepts the lady’s green-and-gold girdle, which she says will keep Gawain safe from harm when he meets the Green Knight the next day, and acquiesces to her wish to keep it secret from her husband. Chivalric code has wrestled with the etiquette of courtly love and with the desire to live – and life has proven the winner.

But will it work? Off Gawain sets for the Green Chapel and there his verdant nemesis is waiting. He goes to strike the blow, and Gawain flinches. The Green Knight gives him another chance, to allow him to die with honour. Gawain does not flinch, but the knight fakes the blow. Finally he brings the axe down for real, but only nicks the skin on Gawain’s neck before revealing that he is in fact the lord of the castle and has been under the sway of sorceress Morgan le Fay the whole time. She wanted to test Arthur’s knights and scare Guinevere to death.

The Green Knight forgives Gawain for keeping the girdle from him, but Gawain is still stricken by his breaking of the promise and returns, chastened, to Camelot. The knights absolve him too and resolve to wear green sashes themselves, as reminders always to act with honour.

It was just wonderful, in every sense. It was everything, all at once. The language barrier gradually lifts and you feel like you are reaching back in time to touch myth, legend and truth all at once. Scholarly arguments rage (gently – you will never meet an aggressive medievalist) over whether the poem is about the conflict between Christianity (godly Gawain) and paganism (the Green Knight as a supernatural entity); the nature of, and competing kinds of, honour (as a questing knight, Gawain should do one thing, while as a man, he does another); or civilisation (Camelot and the chivalric code) versus the wild (his opponent as a descendant or version of the green man of English folklore). But you don’t have to know any of this to be swept away as you read, by the endlessly evocative, enigmatic, elemental lure of it all.

I loved Sir Gawain instantly and I love it still, for itself, but also for offering me anew the gift of reading. If the Cambridge reading list had terrified me by making books incomprehensible again, Sir Gawain restored me. As I said in Bookworm, I don’t remember becoming able to read, the moment when shapes resolved into letters, words, sentences, stories that I could consume for as long and in as large amounts as I wanted, without – at last! – adult input or interference. But reading pre-modern poems and prologues and pilgrims’ tales strips everything of its familiarity, strips you of your complacency and makes things hard and new and fascinating again. You have to learn a new set of tropes and symbols (for example, the pentangle on Gawain’s shield suggests his fundamental goodness and purity, because in the fourteenth century the number five represented incorruptibility), as well as new letters – and so you must read, in many ways, as a child again. But this time you get to appreciate the building of your skill, the acquisition of your new knowledge, and to revel in your achievement instead of taking it for granted for the next thirty years. There is a real and particular joy in that. Sometimes I wonder if I should try and replicate it by learning another skill, such as crochet or découpage. But then I generally lie down until the feeling goes away.

But if knights errant played their vital part in banishing some of the dread sense that I had only been let into these hallowed halls by some administrative error that was bound to be corrected soon, let us not forget the part that very modern knobheads played in it too. Like the time one student in our English group who, when we were having a practical criticism lesson on Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, sidetracked our tutor for most of the hour with a discussion of what kind of rock would have been soft enough to let the River Alph run through it, but strong enough to support an entire stately pleasure dome. It was immeasurably frustrating (I was quite keen to hear more about these Coleridge and Kubla Khan guys, whose names were familiar, but no more than that) and how they fitted into the grand scheme of Eng Lit that we were meant to be learning about; but it did have the inestimable advantage of teaching me instead how much bollocks can be talked, and for how long, by two people as long as they sound confident enough and wish only to best each other rather than concentrate on anything that actually matters. A valuable lesson for life in any essentially patriarchal institution, and of course for life – being lived within a more decentralised but equally sexist system – more generally, once you leave.

With the aid of other such occasional chinks in the institutional armour and ‘Beware the confident man’ tattooed on my brain, I even felt able to challenge my supervisor a term or two later, when we were talking about Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov’s tale of the adult Humbert Humbert’s obsession with ‘nymphets’ (nine- to fourteen-year-old girls), and one in particular, Dolores Haze (‘but in my arms she was always Lolita’), was, even in 1953 when he was searching for a publisher, controversial. The manuscript was rejected by all the major firms – some with regret, some with warnings, others in simple disgust – and in the end was brought out in 1955 by Olympia Press, which dealt mainly (there is doubt as to whether Nabokov was fully aware of this) in pornography. That pretty much took care of its initial chances of being considered either seriously or neutrally. But at the end of 1955 Graham Green called it, in The Sunday Times, one of the year’s three best books. The editor of the Sunday Express hit back, calling it ‘the filthiest book I have ever read … sheer unrestrained pornography’, and the Home Office instructed that all copies entering the UK be seized. A ban in France followed and lasted for two years. The novel was eventually published ‘properly’ in the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 1959. The scandal helped to end the political career of the latter half of W&N: the Conservative MP, Nigel Nicolson.

I loved it. I vaguely knew the novel had been controversial, and that some considered it despicable and/or titillating (though the last always says more about the critic than about anyone else), but I read it more or less for itself and probably, in my youth and ignorance, with fewer prejudices than a more experienced or cultured person would have done, and I loved it. It seemed to me very clearly about paedophilia, not love; about the brainwashing (today we have the word ‘grooming’) of a child, not a precocious sexuality that no man could be expected to resist. Humbert Humbert was the unreliable narrator of unreliable narrators and a rapist in the author’s eyes, even if not in his own mind. Nabokov seemed to have captured perfectly the indefinable vibe that female children especially come to recognise early, of ‘the creep’. The dodgy teacher/uncle/family friend/friendly man on the bus – they are legion, and they find you long before you have the words to define your objection to them; and I was in some strange way comforted that Nabokov had depicted him so horribly perfectly. An unspoken danger suddenly articulated on its prey’s behalf.

Which is why it came as such a shock when my supervisor started to talk about how Humbert probably wasn’t a paedophile at all, but a misunderstood man. A case of arrested development, after the girl he was in love with as a boy died suddenly. A victim himself in many ways, you see. And so very much on, while the other students (all boys) nodded obediently and took notes.

I went apeshit. Or as apeshit as I was capable of going at that age, and in that tiny, oppressive room. I raised my hand and choked out an objection, and when my supervisor started claiming in response that Lolita was well into adolescence and therefore – I paraphrase – fair game, I opened my book and jabbed at the page where Humbert Humbert specifically refers to the fact that ‘her iliac crests had not yet flared’. And as I turned puce with embarrassment, rage and upset, I told him what it meant: that she still has the body of a child, no sign yet of womanly curves, and it is this that draws Humbert’s eye. I don’t remember what he said in response. I hope this means that I got the last word, but I suspect it only means that by then my brain had overloaded and my memory circuits got fried. Still, at least I got one piece of original literary criticism out of it before then.

Such incidents helped me find my feet.

But a fuller and more lasting salvation lay in two things. The first was in a conversation with my director of studies, who had noticed – or been told – that I was not coping too well. He called me into his study (which instantly made me brick myself, of course) and posed the question – as I am sure he had to many an anxious young perfectionist idiot before me – ‘What would happen if you failed?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘my mother would kill me.’

‘No, but seriously,’ he replied.

‘You haven’t met my mother,’ I said. ‘I am serious.’

He waited. I admitted I took his essential point. If the very worst happened and I cocked up the whole of this university endeavour, I would survive. My mother wouldn’t really kill me – though there’d be some intensive questioning in a windowless cell, for sure – and the world would keep on turning.

It was a question that created a little breathing space, like popping up in an air bubble under an upturned boat. My panic cleared almost at once; the creeping depression took a little longer, but that went too. And it’s a question I’ve asked myself many times since, in order to keep a sense of perspective and militate against my multitudinous catastrophising tendencies, when faced with a challenge. I think it’s a good one for most of us to stop and ask ourselves, when life threatens to overwhelm. Unless you’re forming a human bridge for abandoned children crossing a frozen abyss at the time, the answer is rarely as bad as you think.

The second site of salvation was the faculty library. This was not like the fascinating, ancient little cubbyholes that I delighted in stumbling across as I picked my way across town. This was one big bugger. A vast, modern (alas) building, packed with thousands of books on shelves that (if memory serves) narrowed to a point that disappeared over the horizon, on every floor. My first thought as I gazed about me – noting that another thing I’d only ever read about in novels was in fact true: your eyes did widen when sufficiently astonished – was that although I was no closer to knowing anything about anything on my course, I now knew where all the knowledge was kept.

Two things immediately became irrefutably and inescapably clear: the first was that moveable type was the greatest invention in history. This fraction of human knowledge converted into robust volumes before me – which would last for decades without any special care or attention, comprehensible in form and content to anyone who knew how to open them at the right-hand side and how to read the little black shapes therein – stood for all the roomfuls of similar tomes across time and space that had carried, were carrying and would carry into the future every particle of thought and information anyone ever bothered to write down, so that each generation could see further by standing on giant tottering piles of bound paper.

The second was that no normal person had a hope of mastering more than an infinitesimal fragment, let alone the whole, of what was spread before me. This could have been a terrifying thought – and maybe should have been more terrifying than it was, and spurred me on to greater heights of ambition – but instead it was deeply freeing. I was no genius. I was a hard worker with a decent turn of phrase, when it came to putting my pedestrian, unpioneering thoughts about the classics of English literature down in essay form, but no more than that. All that I could do was my best. This was a radical thought, but an even more radical one followed quickly on its heels. My best could be limited to what I could do while still making friends, going out (in my own limited way) and having fun (ditto). Otherwise I would – in this beautiful city, this world made for bookworms, this really very impressive approximation of heaven on Earth, just a few miles up the M1 – be at best profoundly miserable for three years, and at worst go completely mad.

Nah, I decided. Nah.

6

Guilty Pleasures: On Bookshops and Bonkbusters

But woman cannot live by medieval religious narrative poems alone. However entranced you might be by them, it is still a job of work to understand and appreciate them. It is not reading for pleasure as we generally understand it. To sate that ongoing need, I had to go elsewhere. Fortunately, my new home was packed with elsewheres.

Part of the paradisiacal nature of an old university town, and a very great part of my homesickness cure – as the lasting delight this discovery occasioned seeped into my very bones, and its results onto my shelves – was the number of bookshops that Cambridge contained. I don’t know why I had not expected this, in one of the largest and most famous concentrations of students and academics, and a general magnet for nerds of all kinds, but it serves as a reminder that there are many different forms of intelligence, and being good at A levels is possibly the least of them.

I started with the familiar: Dillons (which would a few years later become Waterstone’s – the kind of gentle transfer of power that we could all cope with). It functioned as a refuge, a taste of home, just as (slightly more literally) the Burger King a little further up the road did. I had lunch there at least five times a week throughout my first term (you otherwise had to eat in the college-hall cafeteria, beneath enormous oil paintings of the great and good, no doubt known personally, and probably genetically, by the Shakespearean-tutored) to snatch a few safe minutes when I could relax and trust that no one was going to leap out and ask me what terza rima was, or why my essay was late.

Then I got braver and moved out of Waterstone’s and on to – whisper it – the chain’s bigger and better rival, Heffers. It was an institution, and the first bookshop I had ever been in that could not be fully embraced – mastered in a day. It was like walking into the English-faculty library again, but this time all the books were on sale. And covered every other subject too. It took several visits even to learn the layout. It was gorgeous. I could have lived there. Some people did, I think.

The only thing I didn’t do – couldn’t do, really – at either of these fine emporia was buy any books. They would have taken a sizeable part of my budget. Even three-for-two offers hadn’t been invented yet (they wouldn’t appear until the end of the Net Book Agreement in four years’ time brought in a booksellers’ bun-fight and the near-collapse of independent shops). What to do, what to do?

It was in the middle of Market Square – such a hell by night, about to become such a heaven by day! – that I first glimpsed, to the accompaniment of an unseen choir of angels and with a golden glow hanging about the stall, the answer to this increasingly pressing question: trestle table after trestle table covered with plastic crates in which second-hand volumes of everything from Penguin Classics (the older, like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with black spines, the more modern with green) to 1980s bonkbusters, via everything in between, was displayed, spines up and carefully categorised.

This was where my buying habit really began. How could it not? The stallholder knew his market (metaphorically, as well as literally) and his market was the thousands of me’s who filled the colleges all around the square and beyond. As I became more confident, I started to explore further afield and found entire shops dedicated to second-hand books! I felt like one of Arthur’s knights, albeit a less nobly motivated version, initiated into a secret brotherhood. Browsing etiquette, I would learn in G. David along St Edward’s Passage, tucked in by Great St Mary’s Church, is as strict and nuanced as any chivalric code. The sideways shuffle to accommodate a newcomer to the shelves; the patient wait – slight air of expectancy and/or anticipation permitted, encroachment on browser’s personal space emphatically not – for someone to complete a section’s perusal; the murmured (where a smile would not suffice) ‘Thanks’ and ‘Excuse me’ as you made your way around the tiny spaces left for humans amidst the beloved books … Oh, it was lovely.

The hushed air suffused with contentment could only belong to a bookshop. And I learned that taller bookworms, if you catch them in between readings (the ability to sample books at leisure being a vital contributor to said contentment), are very happy to get tempting volumes down from the two, three and sometimes even four shelves (bookcases can go up to the ceiling, and ceilings can be very high), for shorter ones. Sometimes they will say they have read and liked them. Sometimes they will recommend another by the author, or on the subject. You will murmur another ‘Thank you’ and will both return to your communion with the books. It is lovely. Imagine if the rest of life could be so gently but effectively regulated.

There was also an Oxfam bookshop, which was good for the same kind of stuff as the stalls sold, plus a fair sprinkling of academic texts, and Galloway and Porter. This wasn’t a second-hand place, but sold massively marked-down new fiction (mostly hardbacks) and academic texts (including my Malory), alongside similarly reduced paperback Oxford World Classics. Happy was the day I came out with a copy of Eileen Power’s groundbreaking 1924 work Medieval People, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Michael Crichton’s Disclosure (manly corporate man is passed over for promotion in favour of a womanly woman, who then sexually harasses him! Michael Douglas and Demi Moore in the film adaptation, because this was the early-to-mid-1990s). I read Disclosure immediately and – ahem – one day very soon I am going to start on the other two, which I know will be just as riveting in their own ways.

Most wonderfully – and most hidden away, in an even smaller, tighter area of St Edward’s Passage, which was all part of the wonderfulness – was the Haunted Bookshop. This was full (and I do mean full) of second-hand children’s books. I know, I know. I couldn’t believe it when I stumbled across it. It was like it had stepped straight out of my dreams and into reality. It was so perfect that, as I write this, I am fighting the urge to go back and check it did actually exist and wasn’t merely a figment of my imagination.fn1 The shop was tiny and was crammed from warped floor to bulging ceiling with books. On rickety shelves, on little bookcases fitted into little spaces, in wobbly piles on the floor and stacked in every available nook and cranny thereafter. There were generally a few on the perilously tight, perilously twisting staircase in the former, but it was well worth braving the ascent because up there was the real treasure. Along the nearest walls were all the books from the unofficial childhood canon: the Narnia Chronicles in various editions, and Puffin and Peacock paperbacks from the generation preceding mine. I completed my Wombles collection and my Borrowers collection. I fell with glee on D. K. Broster’s The Flight of the Heron, which was mentioned by Nicola in one of Forest’s Marlow stories. And on a copy of John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, which was much more appealing than the chunky, stiff one I’d had; so offputting was it, with its cover photograph showing a frightening figure in flapping brown clothes from the 1984 television drama, that I had never actually read the book (or watched the series). Now, I thought, I might.

Along the longer wall, opposite the stairs, were hardback delights. That was where I discovered that Eve Garnett had written more than The Family from One End Street (and, remember, even better sequels). Again, I had to take a moment and check I wasn’t hallucinating.

And then, on the farthest walls, there were the school stories. Shelves of clothbound Angela Brazils, Elsie J. Oxenhams, Elinor Brent-Dyers and then finally, if you imagine the camera panning round to the very last corner of the shop as some appropriately thrilling music crescendoes in the background – Dorita Fairlie Bruce, author of my beloved Dimsie books. This (as I said in Bookworm) was where I learned that the library’s editions I had read in my benighted youth had been modernised versions, and it gave me all the excuse I needed to start accumulating my own collection of the real, true thing. This was a very gradual process because the prices were, to my student eyes, astonishing.

I started to haunt the Haunted Bookshop. I watched and I waited and I saved – feeling rather like a character in a children’s book myself, and only wishing that I was dropping sixpences and shillings into a box under the floorboards instead of checking numbers at a cash machine. And whenever my funds and the shop’s acquisition of a more threadbare copy of Dimsie Does Something Noble/Hearty/Jolly Decent coincided, I swooped. I gleefully grabbed the books that brought me joy and sank into them every evening, after I’d finished having my brain cudgelled by whatever heavyweight classics or critical tomes were the subjects of that week’s classes, lectures and essays. I refused, as I have always refused since, to believe there should be any guilt attached to reading whatever you want. It’s such Gradgrindian nonsense to think that every moment of your time should be spent engaged in some sort of self-improvement.

I adored the set reading at university, I really did. But it was mostly the acquiring of new ways of appreciating writing and the sense of new worlds opening up to me – to be explored at leisure in weeks, months and years to come – that I loved. It was a tiny proportion of the many texts we looked at that straightforwardly delighted me, that kept my love of actual reading alive, compared to the ones I found ‘off duty’. We all have our happiest memories of university. Dimsie, Disclosure and a hundred other serendipitous discoveries are some of mine. With very few exceptions – you are a sadistic killer, for example, or a gleeful torturer of pets – life is too short to attach guilt to any pleasure.

My collection of paperbacks gleaned from the market stalls, however, grew apace. One crate in particular had seized my attention. Perhaps as an unconscious counterweight to the children’s literature I was devouring, I became obsessed with the world of the bonkbuster. That was the word coined in 1989 by journalist Sue Limb to describe what, before then, had been known as ‘sex-’n’-shopping’ novels. They made their first appearance in the 1960s, but became ubiquitous and wildly popular in the 1980s, the decade that, more than any since, embraced, celebrated and – appropriately – couldn’t get enough of these tales of glorious excess. Bonkbusters channelled all the materialism, capitalist can-do attitude and heady abundances of the era that gave us Margaret Thatcher, Joan Collins at her lipglossed and shoulder-padded best in Dynasty and the notion that lunch was for wimps, and they packed it all into fat paperbacks with shiny embossed titles of two words at most, and were written by (with the honourable exceptions of Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins), for and about women.

Their progenitor was the mighty Jacqueline Susann and her 1966 creation, Valley of the Dolls, which became the bestselling novel of that year and has sold 31 million further copies since – every one of which I imagine as a bursting firework, joyfully illuminating the lucky reader’s inner firmament.

Susann was born in Philadelphia in 1918 to a schoolteacher and a portrait artist, and she was from her earliest days a force to be reckoned with. A passionate child and then teenager (and gloriously obsessive about those passions, thinking nothing of tracking down the actresses she had crushes on, with whose photographs her bedroom walls were covered), eager for fame and fortune, she was hungry to experience as much of the world beyond Philadelphia as she could, as soon as she could. The obvious way to try and make it – especially for a young woman who had been awarded a screen test with Warner Bros in New York, as part of a prize for winning a local beauty contest (judged – uh – by her father) at the age of seventeen – was in films. But Warner Bros failed to bite, so Susann turned promptly to the stage. Small parts followed (often brought about with the help of her father, or by her marriage to press agent Irving Mansfield), but stardom did not. Eventually her restless yearning and searching energy led her to sit down at the typewriter that she had been given as a wedding present seven years earlier, and to co-write with Bea Cole (an actress who was no longer being cast as often as she had been) a bedroom farce called The Temporary Mrs Smith. It opened in New York. As would become a common occurrence with her novels, audiences loved it and critics hated it. And so it became one of those popular failures with which Broadway history is bitterly strewn, closing despite playing to packed houses. Susann saw one of the critics who had panned it at Sardi’s a year later, went over and punched him.

But, as indefatigable and sure of herself as ever, she sat down at the typewriter again with Cole and wrote Under the Pancake, an exposé of the experiences of women in show business. It was a sort of nursery slope for the slalom race of a bestseller that Susann would write a few years later. But in the meantime she became the spokeswoman for the Schiffli Lace and Embroidery Institute – at first just appearing in their ads and then coming to write and produce them too.

When her three-year-old only child was diagnosed with severe autism, the need to earn serious money to support him in the home to which (in keeping with the best advice at the time) she and Irving were advised to send him was urgent. They visited him every week and Susann’s grief over the situation seems to have been the trigger for her use of and dependence on pills, which would continue for the rest of her life.

When she discovered that she had breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy, the need to provide for her son’s future became ever more pressing. The next year she published her first book – Every Night, Josephine! – about the adventures of her beloved toy poodle of the same name. It became a bestseller.

While she had been waiting to hear whether Every Night would be accepted for publication, Susann had begun the book that would – at last – make her properly, incontestably famous, and rich to a degree that even she, a woman of rarely bridled appetites, could begin to feel satisfied with. She wrote five drafts of Valley of the Dolls (on different-coloured paper each time, as rewritten scenes are in the theatre) and its roiling, sexy, druggy madness was unleashed on what turned out to be a hungry world indeed. Thirty years after it first hit the shelves, I stayed up all night in my tiny study-bedroom at university, devouring a battered £2.50 paperback copy of this tale of three beautiful, talented women in Hollywood who wholly or partially self-destruct on amphetamines and barbiturates, while also having a lot of sex. I had no idea that it was basically a roman-à-clef, with characters based on the likes of Judy Garland, Ethel Merman and Dean Martin, as well as stories that Susann had magpied over the years from her gang of well-connected girlfriends, about lesser-known figures behind the scenes. I only knew there would be no essays done, no lectures attended and no supervisions revised for until I had finished it.

If I had known then that, before setting finger to typewriter, Susann had literally taken apart a Harold Robbins bestseller (one of the few male authors to make it big in the early bonkbuster market) – she cut up three copies of his latest book and reorganised them by character and theme, reckoning that his success lay in giving a disparate set of characters one common denominator – perhaps I would have turned to him. Instead I stuck with her, and if Robbins could have given me a better time, well, I’d be surprised.

I followed VoD up first with Susann’s less famous but still excellent The Love Machine (the most sixties title there ever was, about the most sixties man there ever was – tormented TV network exec Robin Stone – and the three women who love him). Then came Once Is Not Enough, about a girl hospitalised for three years in a Swiss facility after a terrible accident, who emerges into a changed world and has no option but to join the jet set as she searches for a husband who can match up to her beloved-but-now-emasculated-by-a-rich-second-wife daddy. I really cannot recommend Once Is Not Enough enough. Susann was at heart a chaos demon and this, her last book published before her death (a novella and a sci-fi tale came out posthumously), is bonkers in the best way. I could not detail all its madness here if I spent the rest of the book on it, so it must suffice to quote Susann herself, who stated that the novel’s themes were ‘mental and spiritual incest’, plus a contemporary reviewer’s summary of the whole in the Library Journal: ‘Spectacularly successful. There are plane crashes, drug orgies, motorcycle accidents, mass rapes, attempted abortions, suicide, evil doctors and assorted other activities; and I couldn’t put the damned thing down.’ I could not, and nor will you. So much fun.

Like Susann and Cole’s play, Valley of the Dolls and its successors were damned by the critics (Gore Vidal’s description, ‘She doesn’t write, she types’, is a fair representation of the tone of the whole). Unlike theatre critics, however, reviewers cannot shut down a book. Especially when they had promoting them as indefatigable and charismatic an author as Susann, who thrived upon (rather than shying away from) attention. She swept away traditional publishing politesse and championed her work, in bookstores and on radio and television, as energetically and professionally as she had done Schiffli Lace during her spokeswoman years. ‘You have to let the public know about [a book],’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

Susann understood her brand, and the art of branding, long before anyone else and, coupled with her talent for utterly addictive storytelling, her offerings sold in their millions. A powerfully charismatic, ardent, ambitious woman, she simply wasn’t made for half-measures. She poured everything into her books and the public loved her for it. Although she did not live nearly long enough to enjoy it as she should have done – the breast cancer recurred and killed her, just eight years after VoD came out – she was at least able to rest assured that her son was provided for. In 1971 Susann was in the Guinness Book of Records as the bestselling novelist ever, and when VoD’s fiftieth anniversary rolled round in 2016, it was repackaged in hot pink, black and gold livery, in rightful celebration.

After Susann, I tried Jilly Cooper, but the jolly English vibe reminded me too much of the girls’ school stories that I was buying from the Haunted Bookshop, and that felt all wrong, so I gave up and hit the Americans again. A bit of Jackie Collins (fine, but a bit too … cold, somehow, after the all-embracing ride provided by Susann); a soupçon of Danielle Steele; and then the motherlode: Judith Krantz. Princess Daisy, Mistral’s Daughter, I’ll Take Manhattan and then her pièce de résistance/magnum opus Scruples (plus sequel).

I thrilled uncritically to the irresistible tale of Wilhelmina Hunnewell ‘Honey’ Winthrop, an offshoot of one of the poorer branches of a venerable Boston family, who turns to food to comfort her during her lonely youth and therefore grows up – I can hardly bear to tell you this – fat. Fortunately, a distant aunt leaves her $10,000, which Honey uses to take herself off to Paris, ditch the poundage and her old name, learn Parisian style and return as thin, elegant Billy, who can now – after the requisite loss of virginity to whatever the American is for ‘absolute bounder’ – make a rich marriage to an older man and inherit his fortune when he carks it. She uses this fortune to found Scruples, an upscale Beverly Hills boutique, and if you have not gone by now to buy this book or root out your old copy, there is little point in me taking this synopsis to its end. Suffice to say that, after the kind of trials and tribulations that even a woman on five times Billy’s calorific intake would find tough to deal with, our heroine triumphs in love – and, more importantly, in retail – and everything is tied up most satisfactorily.

But like the second sex partner in a good romance, it was Shirley Conran’s Lace that truly stole my heart. If you are British and of an age, you will undoubtedly know at least one fact about Lace, and it will be fish-based. Apparently this had its genesis in a story that Conran’s then-husband Terence heard during his travels. This involved a stickleback rather than a goldfish – which I think, unless a stickleback is wildly mis-monikered, raises rather more questions than it answers.

You will probably also, even if you have not read the marked-up mucky bits of the samizdat copies that did the school rounds (all-girls schools at least – I cannot speak for others), have absorbed the basics of the story by cultural osmosis, so great was Lace’s presence back in the day.

Pagan (upper-class English), Kate (English, less posh) and Maxine (très French) become fast friends in the late 1940s while being ‘finished’ at l’Hirondelle, a Swiss boarding school in the Alps. Judy (American) is an exchange student at another school who is working as a waitress at the Chesa to pay her way. She becomes part of the gang after Pagan rescues her from a clifftop fall – a firm nod to the traditional school story that Conran is about to put a big, sexy bomb under.

We follow our quartet of heroines through school and over the next two decades, which take in four lots of highs and lows as they discover love and sex (not necessarily in that order) and booze (one becomes an alcoholic, another builds a champagne empire), hone their talents, follow wonderfully successful careers, survive personal and professional betrayals and losses, and amass, unashamedly and by dint of their own hard work and abilities (I mean, there are a couple of wealthy husbands along the way, but mostly for seed money and learning – one way or the other – the importance of good sex), copious riches. All of this glamour is interspersed with scenes from the life of the young starlet (porn, then Hollywood) Lili, whose relationship to the four women is summarised in the line that became (after the television miniseries based on the book) one of the most famous in popular literature: ‘Which one of you bitches,’ she asks, having gathered them all together under various pretexts, ‘is my mother?’

Lace as a whole became famous for its scandalous (even without the goldfish) sex scenes and its lavish glamour and extravagant narrative hand; it’s basically four books in one – each of the heroines could easily have had a novel to herself, but instead we have one that is simply packed to bursting with acute, absorbing detail, be it sartorial, sexual or psychological. But it became successful – quickly selling 3 million copies and being turned into the miniseries starring 1980s favourite Phoebe Cates – and was loved because these weren’t the cake. They formed the icing and the cherries on top of it, but the cake was the friendship, the wholly credible, multi-layered unshakeable friendship amongst the women. It’s only now, as I write this, that I realise how rare such depictions were, and still are – and rarer still to be depicted as existing and thriving amongst four equally independent, energetic, unapologetic female characters. They don’t need each other; they choose each other, choose to stick together ‘through sick and sin’ as Maxine and her accent have it, again and again, actively, freely, gloriously. Yes, they are even better together than they are separately, but they are each more than enough by themselves. Which is not to say they don’t make mistakes or are consistently able to spot a bastard at twenty paces. But they do pull themselves, and each other, out of the mire and then get back – literally – to work: a constant salvation.

Having come to feel during her time as women’s editor at the Daily Mail (where she launched Femail, the first dedicated newspaper section for women) and then at The Observer that women didn’t know enough about sex (or perhaps, more specifically, their own bodies and their own sexual pleasure), Conran had planned to write a non-fiction book for girls about the matter. The problem, she realised, was that it would be largely mothers buying the book for them, and either no one would want to read a book so mild that her mother was happy buying it for her, or the mothers wouldn’t buy a book explicitly informative enough that their daughters would fall upon it like the ravening jackals that girls will happily become if you provide meat (carnality?) enough. So she started shaping it into fictional form, and it transmogrified into one of the first – and possibly the greatest – of all the bonkbusters that era eventually yielded. Conran’s advance alone bought her a tenth-century chateau near Cannes, and by 1994 she was said to be the eighty-fourth-richest woman in Britain.

If I had a daughter, I would love her to read Lace. If it were politic, I would insist, but of course as we have just noted above, this would not be the thing to do. But I would leave it lying around as temptingly as possible, in the hope that she would pick up what really functions as a truly timeless, truly feminist tract. Find your ride-or-dies, it tells women. Find your clitoris while you’re about it. Trust in your talents, work hard and don’t be frightened or ashamed of anything you want out of it. Treat yourself with respect, and expect it from others. Move through the world as if you had every right to be there (even if, like Kate, it takes you a little longer to learn how to) and start to know it. And bin anyone who isn’t interested in giving you an orgasm. Partly because orgasms are very nice, but mostly because it means he won’t be interested in giving you much else, either.

Advice-wise, I don’t think you need much more. You could pair it with Valley of the Dolls if you wanted to send a message about how much barbiturates can get in the way of things, but Susann does make it look quite a lot of fun along the way, so have a care.

7

By the Book: On Starting a Career

Eventually, alas, I had to graduate and leave the Cantabrigian dreamland. Back home I went, accompanied by several hundred more books than I had left with, which Mum greeted with more delight than you might think, because she had an unaccounted-for two hours coming up after my return and putting up more shelves filled them nicely.

As an English degree fits you for absolutely nothing, I taught myself to touch-type, bought a green suit from Benetton – whose hideousness fills me with a strange kind of joy to remember now – and joined a temp agency. I was soon demonstrating no more than basic competence at a variety of low-level administrative roles in corporate offices around London.

It was great. I went from office to office, never having to get to know anyone because I never stayed anywhere long enough, able to spend my lunch hour (a full, mandated sixty minutes, at least for non-people-pleasers like me) roaming the nearest Waterstone’s or reading in a Starbucks,fn1 and never having enough responsibility to need to think about work for a second after I walked out of the door at six o’clock. And then I could even meet some of the friends I’d made at university, because they had all moved to London too, albeit to start proper jobs with annual salaries instead of hourly wages; and have a drink, maybe even a meal, before toddling home to begin the whole soothing and relatively lucrative cycle (God bless them a million times, my parents still weren’t making me pay rent) again the next day.

Unfortunately, temping did not lead to a permanent job or to a glimpse of any hitherto-unknown avenue I would actively like to pursue, now that I had fully acknowledged the impossibility of ever being able to cope with a classful of children who were un-keen to be taught the rudiments of English literature.

Exams were the only thing I had ever proved to be any good at, so I decided to apply for law school. I did not want to be a lawyer, but I thought this would be solved by law firms agreeing that they did not want me, either, and refusing to hire me afterwards. What I did not realise was that you need to get a training contract with a law firm before you start two years of law school, otherwise you cannot afford law school. And then you work for two years as a trainee with that law firm, to pay back the money they lent you for the fees.

(You have to remember that we were all children of L.A. Law and currently living through the era of Ally McBeal, neither of which showed any of these vital details. And Ally herself was a congenital idiot. A flapping, quivering, whimpering, pouting, wittering, twittering, vacillating, querulous, petulant, inept, vacuous, inane affront to humanity. A collection of infuriating mannerisms held together by a tiny suit. If she could make it, we subliminally reckoned, then anyone could.)

So I sent off more forms and got called for various interviews – I think word had spread about my suit and they wanted to verify its hideousness for themselves – and eventually got a training contract. Off I went to law school. For the first year you cram a three-year law degree into yourself and if none of your organs rupture as a result, in the second year you learn how to be either a solicitor (steady income, no outgoings if you’ve already got a suit, regular hours, mostly pushing paper) or a barrister (all the money or no money, all the hours or no hours, but you’ve still got to rent your room in chambers, pay for seven types of insurance in case you’re ever sued, ill or stuck in traffic before a murder trial, mostly pushing paper every evening and weekend after your actual job of practising actual law is over for the day), according to quite how miserable and stressful you want the remainder of your already brief span on this Earth to be. Guess which one I chose?

Hey-diddle-de-dee, a solicitor’s life for me. It was boring yet difficult, which I felt was cruelly unfair, and I could not have been worse at it. During one appraisal I was asked if I could manage to be more enthusiastic about my role. I said no. ’Twas no more than God’s honest truth.

I was painfully conscious that: a) I was daily hobbling a lot of kind, busy people whose unfortunate job it was to teach me on my way towards qualified solicitorhood; and b) it was leaving me too knackered and despairing every evening to entertain even the thought of picking up a book, which in turn made me even more miserable. Weekends were full of doing laundry and other crap that makes you wish you were dead, so it was down to bank holidays and annual leave to refill my reading tanks. I wouldn’t go away anywhere, obviously; just stock up on food, lock the door and plough through everything I had bought in the six months of preceding lunch hours. When I got lunch hours. It’s not like temping. I either worked through or was in the loo crying about how useless I was, in the hope that I could clear the backlog enough to get safely through the afternoon without bursting into tears in front of a client or partner. Our offices were fifty yards away from a Waterstone’s and I got there about once a month. It was an exquisite torture.

I tried, I really did, but the life of a lawyer was truly not the one for me.

Despite all the jokes, you have to be very clever to be a lawyer. You have to have a mind like a steel trap that will not relinquish details of case law, client company finances, regulatory updates or any contractual clause it’s ever seen, unless you plunge it into a vat of molten metal, like Arnie at the end of Terminator 2. You have to thrive on argument and live to network. Being a plodding, conflict-averse introvert with a decent way with words simply will not do.

But what really, truly proved that life in the law was not for me was that it left me unable to read. Not because of lack of time – though that was part of it – but because I was so miserably exhausted and brain-dead by the end of every day. Doing something so boring, yet difficult, sapped my resources so completely that I no longer had it in me to pick up a book and engage with it to any workable degree. When something – or someone, but I’ll write a whole self-help book about that one sometime – is eroding the core of you in such a way, you have to leave.

The only good thing that came out of my two-year servitude was that I could put ‘lawyer’ on a mortgage lending form and – because banks then assume your income will increase by pleasing amounts every year thereafter – actually borrow enough to buy a flat: a one-bed flat in Zone 5, with two windows and paper-thin walls, at the top of a block filled with former gold medallists in the Shouting All the Time Because I’ve Never Heard of Talking or Communal-Living Olympics, whose 700 square feet I loved regardless, because it was all mine and I could pull the door shut behind me and be the absolutely unchallenged master of all I surveyed.

I qualified at my firm on a Tuesday, left on the Friday and went to work as a Saturday girl in Bromley Waterstone’s on … well, the Saturday. My bank still doesn’t know. Please don’t tell them.

You’ll never guess what? Letting my instincts guide me totally paid off. My new job really, really suited me, and I really, really liked it. More shifts came my way once I’d proved to be competent, and it restored my spirits (it is very demoralising to be bad at something, however hard you try, for four years) in a way that only being surrounded by books and bookish people every day can.

I had worked on the local supermarket’s deli counter as soon as I was old enough to get a job, and at the local bakery every weekend after that. Selling buns was more fun than selling ham (though selling ham is more fun than you’d think, because you get to use the big meat slicer and you’re never quite guaranteed to go home with your hands intact), but selling books is definitely the best.

For a start, people are rarely stressed – book-buying is not a grim weekly necessity, like filling a trolley with a week’s worth of comestibles, loo paper and Fairy for an ungrateful family – and therefore very rarely rude. If they are rude, it is generally because they are truly horrible people and you can be rude straight back. A good manager understands this and will let the customer storm off, and let his or her staff continue their gradual refinement of the customer base without interruption.

The best bit, of course, was being asked for recommendations. If it was for horror or fantasy or self-help (genres I had not only not read, but had not even read enough about to know where to begin), I had to send them along to others, but children’s fiction? Contemporary fiction (even if I hadn’t read it, I was a voracious consumer of reviews and could generally matchmake well enough)? ‘Just a good read, really, something to take me out of myself’ novels? Walk this way, sir, madam, parent, child, shy teenager, occasional book-snacker or avid reader! Let’s talk! About Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Rebecca Wells’ Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or Ann Brashares’ The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, depending on which one I remember first; this guy called Haruki Marakami that people are starting to go mad for; and many, many more.

My go-to for the ‘just a good read’-ers was Kathleen Winsor’s recently republished 1944 bestseller Forever Amber, about the social and sexual adventures of Amber St Clare, of noble but illegitimate birth, brought up in an English village, but who works her way across and eventually up through the ranks, via London slum, Newgate prison, prostitution, success treading the boards and a few leveraged marriages to become the mistress of Charles II and eventually a duchess. If my mark baulked at its 972-page length, then I told them that they should think themselves lucky. The draft (her fifth) that was accepted by a publisher was the product of nearly 5,000 hours of research and writing, using an alleged 392 books on Restoration history, and came in at 2.5 million words, or 13,000 pages. It was thereafter cut by about 80 per cent. Really, it’s a miracle of compression. And as a result it never flags: a propulsive plot that takes in bounders, cads, true loves, the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London, made utterly convincing by the historical detail (thickly scattered, but always with purpose and never weighing the narrative down) and carried on the capable shoulders of the indefatigable Amber. She is part Becky Sharp (intelligent, endlessly resourceful, but warmer and more straightforwardly charming), part Moll Flanders (onwards and ever more bawdily and fabulously upwards!) and part Catherine Cookson heroine (so many trials and tribulations; so many layers of skirts pushed aside by ruffians and well-born men alike, set aflame by her beauty!) and completely irresistible. And it’s only the length of two Maeve Binchys, and still shorter than Gone with the Wind.

Forever Amber sold 100,000 copies in its first week (3 million within a couple of years), was banned for pornographic content in fourteen US states (seventy references to sexual intercourse, thirty-nine illegitimate pregnancies, ten descriptions of women undressing in front of men, and forty-nine ‘miscellaneous objectionable passages’, according to the Attorney General of Massachusetts, who can only be commended for the sacrifice he and his red pencil made in order to keep America safe); and it made Winsor more money than any other author of the time. Not bad for a twenty-four-year-old American woman who had never set foot in England and only started reading about the Restoration when her husband was doing a paper on Charles II and she, bored one day, picked up one of his books and idly started reading.

That husband, incidentally, was only the first of many. Winsor was an exceptionally beautiful as well as intelligent woman and notched up three more marriages – including one to band leader Artie Shaw – in between writing six more novels. In a power-move worthy of Amber herself, the first of them was called Star Money and was about a woman who writes a bestselling novel and must get used to being fabulously rich and having everything and every man she wants. It did well, but the others formed a case of diminishing returns in every sense. No matter – Forever Amber stands the test of time, and I like to think that her name is thought of especially fondly along one little stretch of Kent’s outskirts at least.

Waterstone’s other, equal-best bit (apart from it having the only staff break-room I’ve ever known that was permanently silent, because all its occupants were always reading) was the extensive children’s section upstairs. Here I was able to remedy some oversights (such as hunting down the other books in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, which Dad and I had not realised at the time existed), reread old favourites and – still high, I think, on the absolute freedom to read solely for pleasure now – paw through the recent acquisitions, looking for new treasure.

I found many gems, but three nuggets of the purest gold stand out. The first was Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. A film of it had just been released, and Sally had rung to say, ‘Don’t watch it – too much hair and too many floaty dresses for you. But read the book.’ The tie-in edition was everywhere, of course, but because of my religious beliefs, I had to order an older copy that didn’t have a still on the coverfn2 (and again: get you a group of colleagues who understand this entirely and will help you track one down on the database). When it finally arrived, the book had me, as it has had millions of adoring readers since it was first published in 1948, from the first, soon-famous line – ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.’ Thus are we introduced to the crisp, clear, inimitable voice of Cassandra Mortmain, younger daughter of a family living in a decaying castle and genteel poverty while they wait for their paterfamilias to get over his writer’s block and pen a follow-up to his successful first novel. Then they can stop selling off the furniture in order to put food on the table. (That’s not why she’s sitting in the sink, by the way. That’s just to catch the last of the light while she’s writing in the diary whose entries comprise the book. There are still enough chairs if you want to sit comfortably. Though not necessarily for much longer.)

By the time Cassandra had introduced us to her stepmother a few pages later – ‘She is a famous artist’s model who claims to have been christened Topaz – even if this is true there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that’ – I was in love. By the time I reached the (equally famous) closing lines of the first chapter, as Cassandra reflects on her current state of contentment (‘Perhaps it is because I have satisfied my creative urge; or it may be due to the thought of eggs for tea’), my eternal devotion was pledged. Had it ever faltered, there would always have been lines like the ones considering her older sister Rose, much given to melodrama (‘There were moments when my deep and loving pity for her merged into a desire to kick her fairly hard’), or her assessment of a would-be beau, the handsome but slightly vacant Stephen (‘I wondered if Stephen was haunted by the ghosts of ancient hens’). Tell me your spirits aren’t rising already, upon receipt of these tiny doses of Cassandra/Dodie’s medicine?

How I had not come across I Capture the Castle before then, I do not know. I can only assume that Dad, my main channel for books until I took control of my Christmas and birthday finances at the age of ten or so, had (given his background as a boy in the 1940s and 50s) not known about this foundational piece of girls’ literature. I’m not saying this is an unforgiveable dereliction of duty – I’m just saying he could have made more of an effort to overcome his blind spots and serve me better. On the other hand, there is every chance that if I had read this book at the correct age, it would have fitted me so perfectly that I would never have bothered reading another ever again. So perhaps Dad knew exactly what he was doing.

I did know of Dodie Smith herself, however. Dad had not failed so utterly in his duties that he had neglected to provide me at the appropriate age with a copy of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. The seed for what would become – with the help of various cartoon and other adaptations over the years – her most famous and enduring work, after it was published in 1956, was sown when a friend of hers saw a group of dogs playing and remarked on ‘what a lovely fur coat’ they would make.

I adored it. Well, who, I ask you, does not want to read a story about 101 spotty dogs? Simply no one. And especially a story written with all of Smith’s customary gaiety, charming details (what a perfect character note Cruella’s serving to her dinner guests black ice-cream tasting of pepper is) and lightness of touch. But it is I Capture the Castle that I return to again and again now, as a funny, tender portrait of adolescence whose compassion, wit and deft portraits of so many Types becomes only more remarkable with age.

My second gleaming nugget was E. L. Konigsburg. I had heard of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler (it is not a title that, once heard, is easy to forget), but had never read it. Here was my chance to get the 1968 Newbury Medal-winner under my belt – and what fun it was, albeit of an unexpected kind. Because it is a strange book. It’s oddly structured, for a start. It opens with a note from a rich old lady to her lawyer, explaining that she is sending him this story so that he will understand why she’s changing her will. The story – the meat of the book – is about Claudia and Jamie who, after much detailed planning by Claudia (I love Claudia), run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in nearby New York City. Why the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Because it is ‘a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place … a beautiful place’ and Claudia dislikes discomfort – ‘Even picnics were untidy and inconvenient.’ (Oh yes, I love Claudia. And even more so when she decides to take her little brother with her, mainly on the grounds that he is quiet and rich. Never having developed the habit of buying baseball cards, she knows that he has the money to pay the train fare.)

So, off they set. But what you would expect to become an adventure story full of narrow escapes, near-misses and clever evasions of adult authority by the two runaways becomes instead – after an easy ride into the city, and trouble-free establishment as covert residents at the museum – a quest, heavy on archival research, to establish the provenance of a statue there, which they reckon might be by Michelangelo. This eventually leads them to Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler and the proof they need, and it is noted (though without pedagogy or piety) that they have been very thoughtless towards their family. Theirs is a satisfying but muted triumph and I liked it very much.

Konigsburg drew the inspiration for this, her first book, from her own three children after they complained about going on a picnic. It occurred to her that they would never bother running away to anywhere less able to meet their preferred standards than the Met museum.

Since then I’ve got several other Konigsburgs under my belt. Her second book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth, was prompted by watching her daughter tentatively forge new friendships when the family moved house and she had to change schools. It was the runner-up for the Newbury Medal in 1968, the same year as Mixed-Up Files won, which is pretty good going for a debut children’s author who only turned to writing in her mid-thirties to give herself something to do after her children started school.

Although it was only (‘only’) the runner-up, Jennifer, Hecate … and Me, Elizabeth is in many ways a better book. Though only if you like heart-stopping moments poised on the brink of tragedy, appearing as if from nowhere because the entire relationship between the protagonists is so subtly layered that you only realise it has a hold on you, thirty-seven times stronger than you thought, when it is too late to protect yourself.

I’m sorry. I only read it for the first time fairly recently and clearly I am still recovering.

Jennifer, Hecate … and Me, Elizabeth is the story of lonely new girl Elizabeth, who becomes friends with Macbeth-reading, independent, iconoclastic Jennifer. Well, not quite friends with. Jennifer is, she informs Elizabeth, a fully qualified witch and is willing to take her on as an apprentice. They spend more and more time together, having fun performing rituals, preparing potions, and so on. Jennifer sets tasks for Elizabeth to complete to prove her worth and loyalty to the witchy cause, increasing in difficulty as Elizabeth’s apprenticeship approaches its end. The final test involves killing the frog they have been looking after, in order to complete a vital potion.

It is a book about truth and artifice, the power of make-believe and imagination, and the risks and rewards of real friendship. It is given further torque by the fact that – via only a word or two in the text, and the illustrations by Konigsburg – Jennifer is Black. Konigsburg was a voracious reader as a child, despite being part of a family that did not encourage it (she would read in the bathroom late at night and flush the loo to drown out the sound, if the book had made her cry). She said she always noticed that the characters she read about didn’t go to schools that looked like hers, or give the leading roles to children who looked as if they came from them. In her own book, she decided, she wanted to make life with ‘classes full of Radasevitches and Gabellas and Zaharious [seem] normal’. Perhaps aided by her own position as a slight outsider to the world of children’s publishing, because she turned to writing only after a career as a scientific researcher and then time as a stay-at-home-mother to three children, she made sure that in her own debut she grasped the issue of representation long before it was fashionable to do so.

And so, with Jennifer, we are silently invited to evaluate how much of her iconoclasm is a natural part of her and how much is for self-protection in an unfriendly world. Elizabeth, although certainly lonely as the newcomer to town, has always been able as a white girl to be herself, to meet people in their predominantly white world and be met by them on her own terms. Mixed-Up Files is a great caper (if idiosyncratically so, with its largely records-based plot) and does a nice job of championing lovers of learning and budding intellectuals; but Jennifer, Hecate … and Me, Elizabeth is both very funny and, in the end, deeply moving.

I’ve enjoyed several of Kongisburg’s other books over the years: A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (a historical novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine – in heaven, five centuries or so after she died, waiting to hear if Henry VIII will at last be let in too); The Second Mrs Giaconda (another historical novel, about a servant of Leonardo da Vinci); Father’s Arcane Daughter (is the young woman who turns up at a family’s door really their long-ago kidnapped daughter?); and The View from Saturday (about the creation of a quiz team who journey towards success – a study in how an apparently disparate group of people can in fact be complementary and end up more than the sum of their parts). They are a decidedly eclectic bunch of novels, which I suspect we can put down partly to the author’s roving intelligence and partly to her coming to writing late and perhaps feeling relatively unfettered by tradition and convention as a result.

As ever, I only wish I had come across her fizzing, brilliant books earlier and had managed to absorb into my bones more of the wisdom she casually imparts, embedded amongst the jokes and the increasingly outlandish plot points. As it stands, I retain only one piece so far, but it does come from Mrs Frankweiler herself, when she gives her thoughtful response to Claudia’s less-considered exaltation of learning. ‘I think you should learn, of course,’ she says. ‘And some days you must learn a great deal. But you should have days when you allow what’s already in you to swell up inside you until it touches everything.’ Otherwise, she says, you simply become a receptacle for facts that rattle around uselessly inside you, making only meaningless noise.

I’m not sure I would have understood this, had I read Mixed-Up Files at the ‘right’ age, let alone have clutched at it as hungrily as I did in my late twenties, or held onto it as tightly as I have ever since. It serves, I think, increasingly well in the ever more pressured and pressurised life of adulthood in this particularly ridiculously-paced era of ours. New standards are forever being brought to bear on things, new influences and influencers require assessing and assimilating or discarding. New areas of self-improvement are being forced on us at every turn. Thinking of Mrs F.’s measured pushback to Claudia enables me to pause and remember that it is neither right, proper nor sensible that everything should be tried or acquired all at once. You can pick, you can choose, you should leave enough time to let the things you already have within you grow to their proper size and strength. The older you get, the more of the hollow, rattling fools you meet who want you to do otherwise. To hell with them all! Return to your children’s books and see what other seeds they planted whose time to germinate has come.

And then there was the third and final golden nugget. On the shelf it looked a bit young for me, even in my second childhood, but I had been hearing it talked about for months. Word of it, and its two sequels, was spreading like wildfire and we had more and more children coming into Waterstone’s and asking for it, because their friends were already obsessed.

‘Which is the first one?’ I asked my friend Val, who was in charge of the children’s section.

‘This,’ she said, thrusting a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by someone called J. K. Rowling at me. ‘The kids can’t get enough of it.’

Nor could I. Within a handful of pages I was hooked. As securely, cleanly and entirely hooked as I would have been as a child, though alas without the youthful capacity any longer to retain plot details at the level I would need later, when my son came to devour them with similar gusto.

With the first three books in circulation, Rowling was already a publishing phenomenon, but her global explosion and stratospheric levels of fame and fortune didn’t occur until the next one, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, came out. It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but when I was first meeting Harry in his room under the Dursleys’ stairs it was possible to know almost nothing about J. K. Rowling apart from the barest outline of her rags-to-riches tale: the idea for a book about a boy wizard had come to her in 1990 while she was stuck on a delayed train from Manchester to London; she wrote it over the next five years, mostly in an Edinburgh café, while she was a single mother living on benefits; the manuscript was rejected by twelve publishers before finding a home at Bloomsbury, because its CEO gave the sample he had from Rowling’s agent to his eight-year-old daughter to read and she came downstairs demanding more; he bought the book for £2,500 and ordered a print run of 500 copies. That was in 1997. By 2004 Rowling was on the Forbes (dollar) billionaire list, the first writer ever to be so. She is still one of the richest writers in the world, though she no longer makes Forbes’ list because she has given so much of her fortune away to charity. You know, like most billionaires do.

The best thing about Rowling’s rags-to-riches story, by the way, is that it is basically true. More complicated, obviously, than the simple initial version put out to accompany the first few books’ publicity, but essentially correct. She wrote in several cafés rather than one. But she was, as she put it later, ‘as poor as it was possible to go in the UK without being homeless’. It left out private elements, such as the fact that Rowling was a single mother because she had left an abusive husband, and her struggles with depression and suicidal feelings as a result of that experience, plus (within a few years) the death of her mother from multiple sclerosis, unemployment, poverty and the unwanted reappearance of her ex-husband after he tracked her from Portugal to Scotland – all of which Rowling has chosen to document since. The success, in which that CEO’s eight-year-old daughter played exactly the pivotal role described, is sweet to read about and, you can only hope and trust, must have been even sweeter to experience.

I ploughed my way through the first books and waited as eagerly and impatiently as any of our child customers for the next. It was a frequent topic of conversation at the till. Oh, the exquisite agony of anticipation that bound us all! It was the first communal experience I’d ever had connected to reading. I wondered what it must be like to be that age and for a book to be a craze – the craze – of your generation? Imagine being a bookworm and your world, for a brief and glorious moment, aligning entirely with you.

Val asked if I wanted to get involved with any of the launch events we were doing. I would have to dress up, play with children and delay my own reading of the book for an evening. I politely declined. I was pleased for the kids, I was glad that they were happy, but selling them the book – within normal working hours and in normal working clothes – was as far as I was inclined to indulge them. Living in an age of Harry Potter should be reward enough. They shouldn’t need parties too. I am a wonderful person.

The law-time savings that had been supplementing my retail salary were dwindling and the longer I had been selling books, the more it had begun to dawn on me that finding a way to write for a living would be absolutely the greatest thing that could ever happen. I wasn’t quite so stupid as to think I could become a novelist, but I was foolish enough to think that journalism might be doable. So I applied for work experience at every newspaper and was rejected by almost every one. I’m sure I would have been by the Guardian too, except that the friend of a friend who worked there put in a good word for me and I was given a fortnight to sit in on the workings of the paper’s features supplement, G2.

As is my wont, I took full advantage of every minute of this brief and precious opportunity by hiding in the corner. At lunchtimes I hid in a different corner and read a book. One day a member of the editorial team paused by my cowering frame, tilted his head to read the title of my paperback and actually backed away in disgust. ‘Are you reading that for a piece?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said – the first word I had ever spoken to him, and probably the first thing I had said all day. ‘I’m just … reading it.’

‘You’re not enjoying it, are you?’ he went on, curling his lip.

‘Y-yes, I am,’ I replied, baffled. Why would I be reading a book that I wasn’t enjoying in my precious lunch hour?

He turned on his heel and walked away.

The book was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, whose unabashed tale concerned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu becoming caught up in a murderous battle between the religious cabal of the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei (in the real world a sort of Catholic press gang who, incidentally, tried very hard to recruit my mother and assorted other tall, blonde Holy Roman ladies to their ranks while she was at university and – I discovered as a friend of another such lady at college – was still at it a generation later) to find the Holy Grail. It takes in an albino monk called Silas, a booby-trapped cryptex, anagrams, the Fibonacci sequence, the Merovingian kings of France and Christianity’s darkest secret: that Jesus was married and had children with Mary Magdalene, and that their descendants walk amongst us still.

Demented. Brilliant. Perfect for a solitary lunch hour that would otherwise see you consumed with anxiety faster than you could consume the sandwich that you had used up all your courage to purchase from the basement cafeteria. But – as I had suddenly learned – you weren’t supposed to enjoy it. The Da Vinci Code, I mean, not the sandwich (though that wasn’t making any great shift for itself, either). Millions of people were wrong; you were supposed to sneer.

Now there is absolutely no case to be made for The Da Vinci Code as great literature. No book that contains the sentence ‘“The Knights Templar were warriors,” Teabing reminded, the sound of his aluminum crutches echoing in this reverberant space’ could hope to make such a claim. But as I read it, I didn’t notice any of its grammatical solecisms, tin-eared clunkers or simple madnesses (‘Only those with a keen eye would notice his 14-karat gold bishop’s ring with purple amethyst, large diamonds, and hand-tooled mitre-crozier appliqué’; oh yes, only the very keenest, for sure) that are strewn – I discovered on a second reading later, when a piece did indeed appear to be in the offing – with an astonishingly lavish hand. But then, how did I read it? Part of me thinks I read it as it was meant to be read: fast, uncritically, for pleasure (and just once). But maybe this was wrong? Maybe we should be bringing all our critical faculties to bear on a work at all times? Perhaps that’s how standards are maintained, how civilisation progresses?

On the other hand I was, and remain absolutely sure, that even if you do feel a book is undermining the foundations of civilisation – and I mean genuinely feel, not performatively state that you do, in order to prove that you have been to university/read a lot of Proper Books/are simply better than the person you are walking past who looks like she might be intimidatable enough to put a spring in your bullying step – you do not need to snot all over anyone who is enjoying it. You can keep your nose out. You can do your bit by sticking to Ulysses or Proust and shoring up such fragments against our collective ruin. Book snobbery is amongst the most dismal of all the snobberies.

Fortunately, the snotter soon went off to work at another newspaper and I never had to face him again. Because, even more fortunately, the Guardian offered me a job – first, as the editor of a Monday section called Office Lives, and then, incredibly, as a columnist. It was the luckiest, most undeserved break anyone has ever had, and there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t mentally prostrate myself in gratitude towards whatever combination of divine intervention, cosmic alignment and assorted arraigned forces prevailed, with various forms of unutterable privilege (which had given me good parents, a good education and enough money to gamble and be able to work for free) foremost amongst them. Sorry if that sounds sickeningly pious. If it helps, it really is how I feel.

8

Book Lovers: On Romance Beyond the Page

I was nearly thirty. Fate decided that now I had found the right professional path, it was time to push me out of my comfort-zone elsewhere and introduced me to the man who would become my husband. We met at the book launch of a friend, whose PhD about Ireland and the shires in the Middle Ages had been published by Cambridge University Press. As he said in his welcome-and-thank-you speech, ‘Film rights are still available.’

For further details of the meet-uncute, please refer to the book I wrote about our courtship and eventual wedding (entitled The Reluctant Bride and subtitled One Woman’s Journey (Kicking and Screaming) Down the Aisle), but here it will suffice to say that something about the corduroy-clad, prematurely grey thirty-something historian-by-training who confessed himself furious that he had had to come out tonight to support one of his dearest friends, when he had just started a book on the Suez Crisis that he had been trying to get hold of for ages, appealed to me.

On one of our early dates I mention that my own historical knowledge is so sparse that I had read the entirety of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase without realising that it was set in an alternative timeline, in which a King James III was on the throne. On our next date Christopher arrives with a bagful of his most accessible books regarding the history of England. I do not even understand the titles. He opens up another bag: ‘I didn’t want to offend you, but …’ An array of Ladybird books from his childhood is spread before me. ‘If you read these in the order I advise,’ he says, ‘we might get somewhere.’ And so we have. (I’ve read the Hilary Mantel Cromwell trilogy now and I knew who almost all the main players were, and roughly what was going on, almost all the time. So there.)

I do not, as the title probably suggests, have much marital (or indeed any kind of relationship) advice to give anyone. And if I did, each exhortation would probably begin with the word ‘Don’t …’ Don’t move in together until you can afford a place that allows you a room each. Don’t pretend to be anything other than you are, from the very start. Don’t ignore the creeping imbalance in any domestic or emotional labour within the partnership. Don’t give any of your precious time, or any other resource, to anyone who doesn’t know how to make at least seven different and palatable meals from scratch. And so on. You know. You know.

But Christopher’s unflinching and practical help in dispersing my ignorance – via books, not field trips, or course recommendations or even websites – was, I felt, a good measure of the man and formed a large part of my decision to allow the relationship to continue. Other good measures that I have discovered over the years (the few green flags I can suggest you look out for, even and especially if you are a congenital introvert who probably still would, all in all, have been most content alone to the end of her days) are:

Finding someone who knows where your spiritual home lies, even though, at the age of thirty, you have no idea, mainly because you have never dreamed of such a thing. When it came to planning our first summer holiday together (having already established that neither of us had passports, because going abroad is too much effort, and why would you go somewhere with bookshops full of stuff you couldn’t read?), Christopher said immediately, as if the answer was both obvious and long settled, ‘We’ll go to Norfolk.’

‘Why?’ I asked, full of the natural suspicion and mistrust that love had done nothing to attenuate.

‘You’ll see,’ he said calmly. ‘You’ll see.’

And I did see. Norfolk is calm. Norfolk is the countryside, but not twee – in fact in anything other than the very height of summer, it is bleak. Around the edges at first and then, as autumn and winter approach, the whole of it turns absolutely unforgiving. Norfolk is largely empty of people – and full of second-hand bookshops. Which leads me to point number two.

Someone who not only scours the Internet for second-hand bookshop locations and then draws up daily timetables and maps to enable you to visit them in the most efficient manner, but who can also sense – seeming to follow some kind of biblio-leylines, as the first readers must have done – where a dozen unmarked others are. Bookshops run from the front room of a house by an elderly couple who have never heard of the World Wide Web, but who have every Pevsner/green-liveried Penguin crime paperback in existence lining their sitting room, for your leisurely perusal. Or maybe a forgotten slip of a shop full of teetering piles of treasure, run by a man who doesn’t look up from his own book as he takes your money and hands you your change, possibly in shillings and sixpences. Or ones run from damp-proofed garages whose unassuming up-and-over doors hide behind them racks of shelves, upon which are displayed volumes comprising virtually the entire history of children’s literature, or multiple pristine copies of every horror hardback or scholarly tome on the Anglo-Saxons, or on tulip mania or chaffinch flight and feeding habits, ever published. To say nothing of the churches that run massive book sales, filling every pew with volumes tattered and new from local parishioners, which Christopher seemed to sniff the air and feel were coming: ‘Ah yes – books are gathering … Burnham Overy Staithe way. Two weeks, I say: Our Lady of Perpetual Succour or St Michael’s. Heavy on the legal thrillers, but’ – sniff, sniff – ‘I’m getting a hit of art and architecture too. Stay alert.’

Above all, someone who, when you panic or feel guilty about the number of books you are buying or the delirious happiness it brings, only encourages you to buy more and stake guilt through its black, black heart, as you should have done years ago. And who, when you return to the holiday cottage (the smallest and cheapest possible, to leave more money for books) with your respective hauls, lays them out on the floor in alternating rows – yours, his, yours, his – so that you can admire them all together, congratulate yourself on a job well done and then choose which one you are going to read that evening while he goes out for fish and chips.

And this, dear friends, is basically what we did every summer, Easter and – if we could manage it – Christmas holiday (dear God, the second-hand bookshops of coastal Norfolk are cold in winter; wrap up) for many blissful years.

I did get a bit delirious, I must admit. The combination of disposable income, an undiscovered country – or at least county – full of books and an enabler was a heady joy. But don’t we all go a bit mad at the beginning of a new relationship? And in Norfolk I had found my soulmate. Cambridge, it was soon clear, had been but the tip – and a remarkably clean, well-organised, tastefully curated tip at that – of the East Anglian bookberg. I set to exploring the remaining seven-eighths of it with a will, over the next decade or so.

I bought literally thousands of books over those years. It was the splurge to end all splurges. I did, despite Christopher’s best efforts, feel guilty about it – I still feel guilty about it, ten years on. Some people might say there was/is no need to. Second-hand book-shopping is one of the more ethically and environmentally sound pastimes available. It hurts no one, and maybe even helps a fraction of the economy. I wasn’t living beyond my means. It was my only indulgence. And it made me really, really happy.

On the other hand – what an indulgence. No one should be able to spoil herself as I spoiled myself during those halcyon days. I began perfectly reasonably. It was only right and proper that I took advantage of the sudden opportunity offered me by this great new-old world and addressed the gaps in my collection that had yearned for years to be filled. I mean, no one could possibly have meant for me not to buy my own, my very own, copy of Margaret Stuart Barry’s Maggie Gumption when my eyes fell upon it thirty years after I had tearfully put her back on the primary-school library shelf for the last time, can they? Similarly, I fell with a too-audible cry of delight on a copy of Joan G. Robinson’s (yes, Teddy R’s Joan G!) Charley, which I had only managed to borrow a couple of times from the school library before it went AWOL and had since forgotten about. But when I saw it stuffed into a low, overcrowded bookcase that was sagging dangerously beneath the piles of Puffin paperbacks atop it, two fragments of memory that only a child’s mind would have held onto came back immediately: Charley wins a paint box in a competition at some stage and keeps admiring it in secret (it was how I learned the word ‘gloating’) before she shows it to her family; and she runs away from home for a week and lives in a field! The novel was bought, paid for and safely stowed in my bag before I’d returned to full consciousness.

But then there were the swathes of stuff that fell into the category of Things I Feel I Might Like and Will Get to In the Fullness of Time, But Certainly Not Within What Normal People Would Call a Reasonable Period. A biography of Sir Walter Scott? Well, as I’m here – yes, please! Because I still have that copy of Ivanhoe from Galloway and Porter and what would happen if I started reading that, became obsessed with Walter Scott and didn’t have a biography of the UK’s first historical novelist to hand, hmm? Hmm? Yes, I am very interested in the history of the English language, so I will buy a couple of books on the subject in every bookshop that has a shelf devoted to the history of the English language, which turns out to be nearly all of them – what a pleasing dovetailing of demand and supply, except that now I seem to have enough to supply a bookshop in my own turn. Occupational hazard! Onwards! Wait, do you see this? You can get Folio editions nearly as good as new, but for a fraction of the price! Do other people know about this? Don’t tell ’em – at least not until I’ve got safely home these luscious copies of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate and Walter Scott’s – hey, maybe I’ll be reading him sooner than I thought – Waverley.

I did have a complex mental rule about Folio editions, which were still relatively expensive ways to acquire a classic book when paperback Penguins were generally strewn about, priced at a couple of quid apiece. They had to be beautiful to me (and there are some designs that have me standing in front of them rubbing my eyes in disbelief at the horrors wrought); books that I did not already have and drawn from the category known as ‘I don’t think I’ll read it unless there is promised a particularly lovely tactile and aesthetic experience to push me over the edge.’ This was a good rule. It was a tether on my ballooning appetites, something I could point to as proof of my self-restraint. The fact that it was the only remaining tether on my activities was neither here nor there.

There was only one other exculpatory factor, and this was the very real fear we had that second-hand bookshops were about to become a thing of the past, consigned to history as surely as candlestick-makers, coopers and blacksmiths, as the world marched remorselessly into the future of e-books, online sourcing, algorithmic suggestion and all the filtered, trammelled rest of it. Ordinary retail bookshops were already struggling, libraries were beginning their slow transmogrification into ‘community hubs’ as books became – at least in the eyes of those who make these kinds of decisions – obsolete baggage, a brake on progress; and even in the first few years of our peregrinations up and down the coast we would find ourselves many times paying for our second-hand treasures, only to be told by the owner that they would be gone next month. Looking back, I would say about one-third of the shops we visited in around 2005 have now disappeared – and in fact that is a lot fewer than it felt like would survive at the time, when technology was promising to turn every niche-point of human interest into a global free-for-all. Everything promised to be entirely dreadful for book lovers of the future.

So we bought as if laying in for a siege. Christopher concentrated on architecture, naval history and post-war politics, and I concentrated on interesting things. Forty-something years left (God willing) of reading life must be prepared for. Thus our motto became: if in doubt, buy it. A bookpocalypse was looming and, as any good prepper will tell you from the safety of his bunker in Montana, better to have something and not need it than need it and not have it. They are generally talking about hollow-point bullets or portable water-filtration systems rather than biographies of Mary Pickford or a back-up copy of Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, but each to their own, each to their own. Isn’t that what we’re fighting for?

Not that I want to give you the impression that this was anything but a peaceful protest. Second-hand bookshops make ordinary bookshops seem like a Friday karaoke night at Wetherspoons. Perhaps the peace, the stillness is greater because the nature of the undertaking is subtly different. Customers in a bookshop tend to come in knowing what they want. A few come in to browse, but most are after a specific title or author, or usually at least a genre. They are in the mood for a thriller, a romance, non-fiction about a new interest or hobby they have taken up, and will have a little look around to see what suits them best, buy it and head happily home to read it. Second-hand book buyers – they’re waiting to see what comes to them. Of course you know what you like, and you have probably got a list of what you want and give their likely homes a check first. But then … then it’s about finding new treasures, finding what you don’t yet know you like, what you don’t yet know you’ll love. The Internet has brought us many good things (I’d struggle to name five off the top of my head, but I’m sure they exist), but it has ruined the joy of serendipity.

The algorithms that increasingly govern and shape our lives often know you better than you know yourself. That’s how we get all the stories of women who start being bombarded with ads for baby merch before they have even bought a pregnancy test. Enough tiny changes to the past few weeks’ and months’ shopping, and viewing habits that match patterns already established by a trillion datasets, and voilà – our number-crunching overlords can see what’s coming before the puny human brain has caught up with anything.

But when it comes to reading, they can only offer you more of what they, and you, know you like. If you have bought five Karin Slaughter thrillers, say, it will present you with the option of buying a sixth or a seventh. This is kind, but probably something you would have thought of doing yourself. Or it may offer you another thriller that a lot of other people who bought five or six or seven Karin Slaughters also bought. This can save you a bit of time, but what are you going to do once you’ve read all the thrillers? Or if you go off thrillers? Or if you just get a bit … thrillered-out for a bit and want something different?

Algorithms effectively narrow choice, sending us all down aggregated pathways. It’s a kettling of minds and souls. A bookshop doesn’t do that. And a second-hand bookshop actively works against it, by doing you the great courtesy of not limiting itself to books that are recently popular and recently in print, but to those long out of favour and long out of print. And because books rarely fall out of print simply because they are terrible, but rather because nothing lasts for ever – tastes and fashions change, fate intervenes, authors die, publishers fold, injustices are done, luck is in or out – a pile of old books is as rich a seam of possibilities as any neat row of shiny contemporary tomes, and oftentimes more so.

In a dark and dingy second-hand bookshop – or a light and airy one! they exist too – you can pan for personal gold amongst all the unassuming piles, running your eye along shelves of faded spines waiting for something to snag your attention, to make you pull it out, open it up and find your next great love.

That is how I met Norah Lofts. One moment I was in total ignorance of the one-time history schoolteacher from Bury St Edmunds, but thinking myself happy and content enough with life, and the next I was ten pages into an unassuming copy of Knight’s Acre, pulled almost at random from a shelf in the Brazen Head bookshop in Burnham Market (it had a nice picture of a tree on the spine, which betokened a pleasing wraparound pastoral scene by a reasonably competent watercolourist), and life had entered a new and unknown phase. It was, I knew by page eleven, one in which there would be no peace until I read and consumed this woman’s work – minutely detailed, compulsive, filled with characters who lived, breathed, walked around your mind as fully and believably as any you had met in mere reality – in its entirety. I stripped the shelves of what they had: about half a dozen books, which I assumed put me in possession of the bulk of her output, though I looked forward to chasing down the rest.

If there is any joy like the joy of finding out that your new Best and Favourite Thing is a writer whose career lasted half a century and produced more than sixty books, most of them following the shape of the one you just fell in love with and that divided your world sharply into the Before Knight’s Acre and After Knight’s Acre eras, then I don’t know it.

Lofts was born into a Norfolk farming family in 1904 and spent a lot of time with her paternal grandfather, who bought her paper and chalks one holiday to keep the four-year-old chatterbox quiet. She drew houses and people and started telling him stories about them instead. When it came time for her to go home, he sent her back with a note: ‘This child should learn to read and write.’ Her father duly taught her. ‘And I think I may truthfully say,’ she wrote later, ‘that in the intervening 65 years I have never been a nuisance to anybody in the way of chatter or demands for attention. I take a book wherever I go. The train may be late, the queue at the doctor’s or the dentist’s long, but I don’t even notice.’ The bookworm’s bookworm.

Her father died when she was nine and the family had to move to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. As a young woman, she trained as a teacher in Norwich and, as befits a woman whose writing would centre around the idea of home and the emotional sustenance it provides, referred to this as ‘my first exile’. She was soon back in Bury St Edmunds and remained there for the rest of her life. Not just the bookworm’s bookworm, but the homebody’s homebody. I feel increasingly that we were destined to meet in that quiet, timeless corner of the Brazen Head.

She got married in 1931 and her husband bought her a typewriter as a wedding present. Her first book, I Met a Gypsy, was published in 1936, and from then on she produced roughly a book a year, gaining in reputation and popularity with each one. By the 1970s she had sold 2 million copies of her works in the UK and was even more widely read across the Pond.

Lofts set many of her books in and around the busy market town of Baildon (fictional, but based on Bury St Edmunds). Main characters from one book often make appearances in the background of others, and families recur and interlink across – as well as within – volumes. There is, always, a sense of community and closeness (for good or ill) and a shared past. Its ripples spread across time and space and make reading her a richer, deeper experience the more you go on. No man or woman is an island and it is impossible to become so, though many of Lofts’ more surly or sorrowful characters try.

All good historical novelists wear their research lightly (‘I would say to any aspiring writer,’ Lofts once said, ‘do it and forget it! … Sweat is a healthy thing but it should be wiped away’), although few work it in as plentifully, yet seamlessly – always subservient to the story, but integral to its success – as Lofts does. The texture of whatever bygone age she has chosen (often medieval, almost always agricultural) is minutely, beautifully and yes, apparently effortlessly, without stress or strain, re-created in every line, in every scene, on every page. You can immerse yourself without fearing that anything will break the illusion. No doubt her early, turn-of-the-century farming childhood helped her understand the economics and the practicalities of pre-industrial agriculture, but it is the imaginative entry into that world – quite how much energy a man can expend in one day for what reward; the difference that even the slightest injury or disability can make to a family’s fortunes; the impact that a dishonest worker, a lazy scion, a flighty or impractical wife can have; the thousands of tiny adjustments that have to be made to accommodate human abilities and inadequacies when there is nothing else to bear the burden or create some slack in an endlessly laborious system – that makes it so fascinating.

Lofts was known in her heyday as a historical-romance novelist – for want, one suspects, of any accurate category. Apart, of course, from ‘historical novelist’. But as a woman writing books that dealt with, amongst other things, the love interests of her characters as part of their holistically conjured and acutely detailed lives, romances they had to be – despite what any reader would soon come to know and admire as her trademark absence not only of happy endings, but of endings at all. The good sometimes end happily and the bad occasionally end unhappily, but more often a foul piece of treachery or a tragic accident or a murder does not arrest or change the course of a narrative. Life simply closes over events, as throughout history it more commonly has than not. Sins go unpunished, good deeds and good people go unrewarded, and the nearest a reader is likely to get to justice is to watch the cycle start again in the next generation of Reeds or Hattons or Tallboys and hope that it will all even out at some unknown point in the future. Lofts is no romantic – she is an un-embittered but clear-eyed and relentless realist. Publisher and author John Mitchinson once described her writing as Piers Plowman crossed with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I can think of no higher, or indeed more accurate, praise.

However, over the ten years that Lofts and I have been together now, as I have moved from my thirties into my forties, what I have come to appreciate most about her is not the content of the books (though I could write paeans of praise to them all), but the fact that she rescued, and continues to rescue, me from the vague fear that the best years of my reading life were behind me. And then suddenly there it was – this seam of treasures unmined, proof that there are always more books out there waiting to be discovered, fitting you perfectly, fulfilling a need you may not even know yet that you have. That is what I remember every time I pick up one of her brilliant tomes. And I enjoy it a hundredfold more. And I hope that in other, albeit lesser, areas of life the potential for delight and revivification remains too.

But my greatest discovery was one I should have made decades before. In Peter’s Bookshop in Sheringham an old, well-thumbed Puffin edition of Little House on the Prairie caught my eye. I had never read it, because along with most of my generation (in the UK at least) I largely associated Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book with the television series of the same name. And I did not like the television series. Or possibly my mother didn’t like it, which amounted to the same thing. I do remember that the opening credits alone put me off. Running joyfully through fields in plaits and a pinafore dress, while smiling parents looked fondly on, struck me as twee and emetic, long before I knew either word. Far more significantly, I hated Michael Landon’s hair. Feared it, even. To this day, I cannot find bouffant hair anything less than sinister. And yes, Wham!’s heyday was a very difficult time for me, thank you for asking.

(I don’t like or admire any of this in myself, you understand. I want to make that clear. I just know myself.)

But the books had been everywhere in my youth, and now here one was again. It had taken on the patina of nostalgia and, not incidentally, dated from a time before the television series and still had the original Garth Williams illustrations on the cover instead of anything, you know, modern. There was a roughness to his depictions of the Ingalls family’s life that was at odds with my impression of the Wilder world, a texture that suggested something different from laughing romps through wildflower meadows in bright white cotton frocks. So I bought the Puffin edition and headed home to see what was going on under this unexpectedly intriguing carapace.

Those of you whose faces were less firmly set against the possibility of whimsy, those of you possessed of free and open minds, those of you – you might say – more uncrabbed by prejudice from a depressingly early age will have known the answer to this for many happy, golden years since reading them in your youth, of course. I can only set those lost hours of pleasure against my intense delight at finding them in my late twenties as I devoured the autobiographical tales of frontier living as seen through the eyes of doughty, stoic, yet somehow spirited and irrepressible young Laura as she and the Ingalls family made their way across the west. And my delight intensified (I think it can only have been matched by the disbelieving joy I felt on discovering that The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was part of a series) when I learned that Little House is not the only book she wrote – merely the most famous. Laura’s story is in fact told across eight books published in her lifetime, with a ninth – The First Four Years – published posthumously and covering the beginning of her new life away from the Ingalls family and setting up her own homestead with her new husband, Almanzo Wilder.

I went second-hand hunting to secure the rest (I tried to get matching editions, but it wasn’t always possible – the need for the whole set was urgent and immediate and could not be sacrificed to mere aesthetics). The series begins with Little House in the Big Woods, set in Pepin, Wisconsin in the 1870s where four-year-old Laura lives in a log cabin with her family. An inspiration to late-starters everywhere, Wilder’s story was first published over six decades later, when the debut author was sixty-five. Her daughter Rose, a journalist and novelist herself, encouraged her to recast the autobiography Laura had written as a children’s book. Laura would later say of the Little House series, ‘All I have told is true, but is not the whole truth.’ There are countless books and investigations by her biographers and by Little House fans into what was left out of both the published version and the original memoir (usually very understandable things such as the death of a baby brother, or the times the family had to backtrack and restart an attempt to move at a more propitious time, or the time Ma and Pa had to – and I’m sorry about this – leave town discreetly because they owed rent they could not pay). But there seems to be virtually nothing made up out of whole cloth, and Rose’s suggestion that she gently rework her tales for a younger market was a good one. The disguised memoir (it is written in the third rather than first person, but with such authenticity and so clearly based on reality that I had to go back and check this was actually the case) for youngsters was adored from the moment it first appeared in 1932.

I don’t know a child who could resist. I don’t think I can even imagine a child who could resist. I know my inner eight-year-old instantly awoke and I read (and reread!) the series as I would have done back in the glory days – fully immersed in the new world of the New World, deaf to all calls, heedless of any outside cares. To feel myself slipping into that elusive state once more was almost as wonderful as the books themselves. And was marred only slightly by the realisation that it had become an elusive state – that at some point over the years I had lost the ability, the gift, the mental malleability, the porousness required to be able to open up a book and vanish instantly into it. What I had once undertaken as naturally, easily and thoughtlessly as breathing was no longer a given.

I wasn’t sure when that had happened. If it had been sudden, I would in all honesty probably have taken myself to the doctor and asked for a brain scan, fearing that only a physical rupture somewhere in there could have caused such a rupture to my life. But it had been gradual: an erosion by (one can only regretfully but helplessly assume) Life. But thinking about it would only spoil the rare – increasingly rare, one would equally regretfully but helplessly have to assume – treat spread out in front of me like a prairieful of golden wheat.

The vanished way of life that Wilder captures, in all its textured, granular detail, is endlessly fascinating. Director (of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid amongst many others) George Roy Hill once said that ‘audiences love “how-to”’, and I suspect this is even truer when the audience is made up of children and their unlimited curiosity about the world they have only just begun to explore. And I would defy anyone not to become absorbed by the process – enthusiastically narrated through Laura’s eyes – of extracting sap from the woods’ maples in the annual ‘sugaring off’, or how Pa makes the leather hinges for the door of their log cabin, or exactly how a pig is slaughtered and every bit (‘bar t’squeak’, as my own ancestors would say) cooked, smoked or otherwise pressed into service (an inflated bladder makes an excellent balloon, a crisp-roasted tail a fine savoury lollipop). The essence of the Little House stories lies in the fact that the pig’s killing is presented as matter-of-factly as the sugar- or hinge-making, and as the subject of just as much fun and interest. Emetic, twee, sentimental – the books are none of these things, and I am an absolute arse.

And Laura herself is as appealing now as she has been for the generations of readers who have lived with her in covered wagons, dugouts and log cabins along the western trail since she first appeared to us in the Wisconsin woods ninety years ago. Time, settlers and technology move on apace, but she retains all her charm. She is spirited, curious, hard-working (I shudder to think what a disappointment and burden I would have been as a daughter to Ma and Pa Ingalls) and uncomplaining in the face of hardship – but she is no smoothed and perfect role model for the young. Our heroine is always entirely human. Who cannot take to her bosom a girl about whom it is noted that, although her sister Carrie takes fully to heart Pa’s strictures about staying away from the railroad men so they don’t hear their rough language, ‘Laura would have liked to hear some, just once.’ Or who, when another goody-two-shoes sister (Mary) exclaims that she could never be as mean as the Ingalls girls’ nemesis, Nellie Oleson, thinks ‘I could. I could be meaner to her than she is to us, if Ma and Pa would let me.’ That’s the girl with whom you want to be trapped in a blizzard in winter or facing down a grasshopper plague in summer. The others would have you walking voluntarily into the snow/sea of locusts within hours. Even Laura agrees. ‘When she looked at Mary,’ she says at one point, when Mary has been good again, ‘she wanted to slap her.’

I’m afraid my inner eight-year-old won’t let me rest without making one further vital point: that The Long Winter is my favourite in the series. Little House on the Prairie is probably the best of them in technical terms and the easiest to love – all that colour, action and pioneer life fully on ever-fascinating show! – but The Long Winter is the one for introverts, depressives, pessimists and potential preppers everywhere. It’s amazing. It does exactly what it says on the tin. You get a brief time outside in the sunshine – just long enough for Pa to mention how thick the muskrats are building the walls of their shelters this year – and then wham!, the first blizzard hits. An old Native American man comes to the general store to warn the townsfolk that the hardest of hard winters is on its way (they come in seven-year cycles, and the worst of them all is at the end of the third, and the Ingalls have arrived in a twenty-first year) and Pa decides to move the family to town. And there, my dears, they stay. The snow and the blizzards arrive and get worse and worse and worse. Life becomes smaller and smaller, and families are soon housebound. When the trains can no longer run, food and fuel supplies begin to dwindle. Soon the Ingalls are spending their days grinding corn in a pepper mill, and twisting hay to make bundles that will burn for long enough to ensure their bare survival through another freezing day and night. It’s an absolutely masterful rendition of profound monotony and boredom suffused with dread – without ever becoming monotonous or boring, or too full of dread for its young audience.

We, the readers, leave town with brave Almanzo Wilder and his friend Cap Garland, who set out across the featureless, snow-covered wasteland in pursuit of a rumoured wheat store twenty miles away. And when I say snow-covered, I don’t mean yer paltry few inches that habitually gum up urban public transport or mean that you have to walk or drive a bit more carefully through beautiful countryside vistas. I mean covered in the kind of snow that sees your ponies disappear every few steps and have to be unhitched from your cart and dragged out by hand before you all freeze and die. That kind of snow.

Eventually they reach the store, persuade the hoarder to sell them sixty bushels of wheat (also, ‘bushels’ is the best word) to keep the town from starving and return – slowly, painfully, but eventually – in triumph. Once Pa puts the storekeeper, who is about to gouge them all on pricing, in his place, the town is saved. But I think about that storekeeper a lot. Eight-year-old me has him down as the very worst of humanity. Adult me wishes that were indeed the case, but adult me has seen a lot since then. Finally the thaw comes, the trains start moving again and the Ingalls family celebrates Christmas – complete with turkey and all the trimmings, which have been frozen in the railcar for six months – in May. Eight-year-old me is very satisfied with the extreme justice of this.

Rereading the books now, in my forties rather than my twenties, and with ten years of child-rearing under my belt and more toughened layers of adulthood for my inner eight-year-old to fight through, I find my readerly lens rather sliding over Laura (much as I still love her and her righteous sister-slapping instincts) to focus on the heroic insanity of Ma and, especially, Pa. On the one hand, what a mindset, what courage to pack up your family and make your way towards an unknown but hopefully better life, with nothing but your own hands, your own labour – endless days, weeks, months, years of back-breaking toil – standing between you and ignominious failure at best, and death at worst. What endless work and worry it must have been for Ma to keep the children and herself healthy, fed and safe, alone on the prairie all day, and for all the weeks and months that Pa had to leave and work elsewhere when the cash crops failed. We see some of it, of course, through Laura’s astute eyes and growing awareness, but it remains her story, and the full extent of adult anxiety and suffering cannot be part of it.

On the other hand, of course, there is the knowledge of what white settlers did to the Native Americans whose land they stole and whose way of life they destroyed, in pursuit of that distilled essence of blind privilege and entitlement known as Manifest Destiny. Wilder’s depiction of the ‘Indians’ that the family sees, or has dealings with, are best described as ‘of their time’ or possibly ‘not as bad as they could be’, but there can be no doubt that these days the Little House books would ideally be read alongside an equally accessible history or memoir (fictionalised or unfictionalised) of how all that space in America was really freed for picturesque log cabins, waving fields of wheat and gentle herds of cattle.

All this, and more – a jumbled collection of delights serendipitously gathered, which included Jean Webster’s charming Daddy-Long-Legs, Barbara Willard’s immensely satisfying Mantlemass series, Hitty: The Life and Adventures of a Wooden Doll, L. M. Montgomery’s lesser-known Emily-instead-of-Anne-of-Green-Gables series – I read curled up by a crackling fire. This includes the summertime. My suburbanite philosophy is that if you have rented a cottage with a working fireplace you must use it every evening, because then you are basically in a book, as well as reading one. Christopher went out for food in between reading his own latest acquisitions. I always knew this was the life I should be leading. How good it was to be proved absolutely right.

A break in our East Anglian holidaying routine came when I had, very unusually, to go to New York for work. We rolled our annual leave into it and stayed for three weeks. I did do the work I was there to do, honestly, but … we also went to the Strand Bookstore every day of the twenty-one days we were there, and had to buy another full set of luggage at Kmart to get the books home.

I must take a moment to talk about the Strand Bookstore in New York. To my everlasting regret, we were a few years too late to encounter that other famous biblio-landmark in the world’s greatest city: the Gotham Book Mart. In its heyday, at 41 West 47th Street (Frances Steloff founded the Book Mart in 1920 and it moved there in 1946, before moving to 16 East 46th Street in 2004), it functioned as much as a literary salon as a bookstore – but what a bookstore! It was a five-storey town house crammed with books in the middle of New York City. I don’t know what else to say except that yes, the image you have in your mind now is almost certainly correct, and if you do a Google search, then the lost glory of it all will pain you incalculably. Woody Allen called it ‘Everyone’s fantasy of what the ideal bookshop is’. It closed less than a year before we got to New York.

But the Strand remained. And it called to us like a beacon. We literally got out of the taxi from Newark airport, dumped our bags in the friends’ apartment where we were staying and headed out into this strange and yet – thanks to a lifetime of saturation in film and TV images of it – wonderfully familiar city, to find our true home-from-home. There, on the corner of Broadway and East 12th Street, were the bright-red awnings that proclaimed we had arrived: eighteen miles of books, over three and a half floors, lay before us. ‘Work to do,’ said Christopher, stretching his arms above his shoulders and cracking his knuckles as we walked through the hallowed doors. ‘Work to do.’ We didn’t leave the shop – or see each other again – for three hours.

(I forgot another important piece of relationship advice: get you someone whose book tastes only barely overlap with your own. You don’t want to keep bumping into them when you’re communing with new possibilities, or fighting over the real estate. Extroverts, or people who really like their life partners, may ignore this section.)

We went there every day of our three-week trip and took in most of the other remaining second-hand bookshops of New York too. I saw one of the world’s twenty-one (substantially) complete Gutenberg Bibles in the J. Pierpoint Morgan Library, after being inadvertently scooped up by the afternoon tour guide, a forthright seventy-year-old native New Yorker. ‘Sounds dull?’ he said as we set off, after he had listed some of the forthcoming sights. ‘Well, it’s not. It’s exciting as hell.’ And it was, from the Bible laid out in J. P. Morgan’s private reading room (man, bankers knew how to spend their money in those days), to the medieval manuscripts in the exhibition rooms, to the Stavelot Triptych, which caused our guide to stop, shake his head in wonder and say, ‘It drives ya crazy, the quality of this stuff!’ It did.

I know I also spent a morning in the New York Public Library, but was in such a haze of happiness and disbelief that I am not sure now what are my own memories of the place and what I have actually seen only in films. And we did the non-bibliophiliac delights too: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, Coney Island. And I took myself to Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum, because it had intrigued me ever since Dad came back from one of his trips to America when I was eight with a cheap, red-edged paperback book that laid out the back-stories of its treasures in comic-strip form. Plus it was mentioned in The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson, a person who hits my funny bone (as he does for so many) at precisely the right angle to convulse me with every sentence he writes, and so I felt the need to complete our connection.

On one of our daily Strand visits I bought Betty Smith’s semi-autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. That was in the morning. I took it back to the apartment, started reading and didn’t stop until it was finished. I must have eaten – I always eat – but I don’t remember what or how. I think it may have been the last book I read in one sitting and it was a fine, fine choice.

I was immersed, fully transported to the early-twentieth-century Williamsburg tenement with Francie Nolan and her picaresque but wholly credible Irish-American family, and their proliferating collection of neighbours. Then I went back to the Strand and bought everything else they had by Smith too (Tomorrow Will Be Better, Maggie-Now, Joy in the Morning). They are obviously all closely related in subject and themes, but reading them back-to-back didn’t give me the sense of a limited writer, but rather one wrestling with solutions for her own life – for that kind of woman’s life, in that period generally – that, although her lot improved over time, seem to have remained slightly elusive to the end.

Still, they must have left me optimistic about the marital state as part of the female experience overall, because when Christopher unexpectedly proposed on the last evening of our stay – not in Strand Bookstore, unfortunately (because he had no thought for what I might need thematically for a book on the subject fifteen years later), but by the edge of the lake in Central Park – I, almost equally unexpectedly, said yes. As we walked home we passed a place that advertised itself as an ‘all-you-can-eat sushi bar’. ‘To pervert an entire culinary culture devoted to the concept of an elegant sufficiency demonstrates a truly extraordinary dedication to immoderation,’ said my fiancé thoughtfully, and I felt – not for the last time – that I had either made the biggest mistake or the best decision of my life. But the sushi was good.

Six months later we got married. In a church, in London, with a do afterwards. It was a big fuss and I wouldn’t do anything like it again. One further piece of relationship-turned-marriage advice, if I may? However much of a church wedding you hand off to your mother, sister and husband (and I offloaded a good 90 per cent – I still don’t know what music I walked down the aisle to), it will still make stupidly, unexpectedly and unavoidably large inroads into good reading time. Also, if you are a congenital misanthrope and/or introvert, you are not going to transform magically for one day into someone who loves being the centre of attention walking down an aisle, and for hours afterwards. Stick to your guns and nip down to a registry office, in comfortable shoes and in a lunch hour. Thank me later.

We had, thank God, not been too consumed with wedding madness when it came to booking our honeymoon. Not for us a fortnight in the Maldives, a week in Paris or even a remote Greek island. But we did strike out for a new land – Wales. Or at least its borders. We went, for ten deeply needed restorative days, to Hay-on-Wye and its dozen or so second-hand bookshops, and I don’t think I spoke for the entire time unless it was to the kitten, which, excellently, the owners of our B&B had just acquired, and which took a shine to us and our room. I was too thoroughly peopled out. Over breakfast each morning Christopher and I would choose a shop to concentrate on that day, walk there, split up to sieve through our respective areas of interest in silence, and then walk back to our room with our new treasures and read until dinner, have dinner, then read some more before going to bed to start the whole thing over again. We did have some sex too, but overall it was a great ten days.

When we got home, a newly married couple, Christopher once again asked the question he had been asking every few years ever since we met. Was I was ready to merge our book collections yet? He has been trying it every few years since, too. The answer remains the same. It wouldn’t be merging our collections. It would be breaking mine up. An unnecessary intrusion – nay, a borderline act of violence. ‘I just don’t think we’re that close,’ I said. I agreed to have a baby instead.

9

A New Mother’s Life of Crime

Towards the end of 2010 and after some kerfuffle, what with me being so old and not liking sex very much because you can’t read through it,fn1 I finally got pregnant.

I did not buy or read one single book about anything to do with growing, birthing or taking care of a baby. That struck many people as odd. But here’s the thing. I felt I had, over my previous thirty-six years (that’s the age at which you are considered an ‘elderly prima gravida’, by the way – ‘old for a first pregnancy’; I translated it much more loosely, as ‘coming into the prime of my gravitas’, which made it a lot more palatable), absorbed enough about the whole baby business by osmosis. As I came from a Catholic family, there was always an infant somewhere in the vicinity during my childhood, and I was early schooled in nappy-changing, bottle-feeding and other practicalities. I was also the appalled but fascinated unofficial audience for all the stories that would be told by the mothers around me as I went about these ministrations. I shall not go into details, lest there are some non-prima gravidas of any age about, but let me just say that I cannot remember a time when I did not know – in full, graphic measure – what an episiotomy was and what it felt like to have one.

Above all, I had absorbed the knowledge that beyond the very, very basics, every birth is different, every baby is different, every mother is different and every era is different. Anyone trying to codify this into rules, or even general advice, is doomed to failure. And I had read, in idle moments, in hairdressers’ seats, in waiting rooms and so on, enough articles since then to know the truth of this. Every one contained something contradictory or another. Best, I thought, for sanity’s sake, to stay away from it all.

Plus, of course, I had my mother. She would know what to do and tell me, and I would do it. We would not break the habit of a lifetime. The only thing she really could not help with was the actual birth. Which was a shame, because it was terrible. A basically medieval experience from which the baby and I were lucky to emerge alive, and by which I was both physically and mentally broken.

Thus I have no recommendations on the books-about-pregnancy front. I was given a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting by a friend and read about six pages, to show willing. Then I literally threw it across the room. If it helped you – if it was your baby bible – I’m glad. We all need all the help we can get, wherever we can get it. For me, it was the epitome of all the smug, self-righteous, over-confident claptrap that surrounds the whole issue of … well, issue, and if I ever see my copy again (I think my quite frightened husband removed it from the house) I will burn it to ashes.

The recommendation I can therefore make to a pregnant woman is this: from eight-and-a-half-months’ gestation, only have short books on your TBR pile. Consider this your time to get busy with all the novellas and short stories you’ve ever wanted to read. Do you know what I was reading when I went into labour? Edward Rutherfurd’s London. Do you know what the problem with Edward Rutherfurd’s London is? It is the fact that it is 1,328 pages long. It is a book wider than it is tall, weighing a ton, and impossible to read without using two hands. Do you know how many hands you have free, once you have a baby? One, maximum. None, mostly. But in my addled state, I would not give up.

I do, after all, love an Edward Rutherfurd. Who else is going to distil every subject – unerringly, every subject; there’s even one about the New Forest since Saxon times! – that I particularly want to know about, but don’t have the time, energy or intelligence to research myself, into a supremely readable novel that captures every sociocultural detail you could hope for; and that doesn’t waste time, except insofar as the trickle-down effect shapes his characters’ day-to-day lives, dwelling on wars, changes of monarch, theological debates or any of the big world-shaping events that any fool can find on Wikipedia? No one, that’s who.

I had begun – as indeed had Rutherfurd (or Francis Edward Wintle, to give him his non-pen name) – with his 900-page debut, Sarum. Published in 1987, it spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, more than justifying his decision to jack in his job four years before and return to his childhood home in Salisbury to novelise the cathedral city’s 10,000-year history, via the criss-crossing trials, joys and relationships of six families from prehistoric times right up to 1985.

Onwards I went, to Russka (circa 1,000 pages, 2,000 years), through The Forest (900 pages, 1,000 years), on to Dublin and Ireland: Awakening (1,700 pages and 1,500 years, combined). But when my first contractions started I was halfway through London’s 1,328 pages and 2,000-year span, in paperback. No, it wouldn’t lie flat when I needed it to. Yes, the print was too small to be read easily when profoundly sleep-deprived. Yes, it was so heavy I could only support it in one hand for a very few minutes at a time while breastfeeding. No, I couldn’t really keep control of it at all times, and yes, it did fall on the baby, several times (no, not on his head, just on his heavily swaddled and nappied body). I figured it was something that he should get used to. And yes, a well-meaning friend did tell me I should be looking into the baby’s eyes and talking to him while feeding, instead of reading; and yes, it did take me a long time to talk to her again.

It became vitally important to me, as I slid further into post-natal depression, that I finish this book. That I prove to myself, and others, that life had not changed in any major way. That I was still me; that one of all the freedoms I feared had for ever disappeared remained intact. By the time I finished traversing London, I reasoned (to use the word entirely wrongly), life would be restored to normal. I would be well again and this terrible fog – even though I was so far gone by now that I could barely tell it was a fog at all, it felt so normal to be perpetually, affectlessly shrouded in grey – would lift. Unfortunately, although London is a long book, it wasn’t quite long enough.

My mother has no intuition (she doesn’t believe in it), but she knows me to my bones, and she knows me to her bones too. And so one day – I cannot remember how it came about, but it must have been a few months after the baby was born – she stopped what she was doing (a rare enough event to startle me, even through my haze of exhaustion and misery), looked me firmly – nay, somehow violently – in the eye and asked me what was wrong. What else was wrong, was what she really meant; she was up to date on the various body horrors that I won’t disturb you by detailing here, and she appreciated in full the general life-with-a-newborn-is-demented stuff. So I said, ‘I know it’s mad, but I feel like if I don’t read a book soon – properly, not merely a page at a stupid angle while I’m trying to feed him – I’m going to go mad. Like, actually mad.’

‘Well,’ she said, as if I was an idiot not to have realised this sooner, ‘of course you are!’ And so, in addition to all the other help she was giving me in the way of helping me nurse, bathe, change the baby’s nappies, change my nappies and all the literally bloody rest of it, she braced and heaved and somehow succeeded in creating another pocket of space for me to read in, too. I’d like to publish a picture book in her honour – showing a woman wrestling time and space with Marks & Spencer shirtsleeves pushed up, and teeth bared – and call it The Mother Who Saved My Sanity. I wept daily with gratitude (I just rolled it into all the other crying I was doing, so it didn’t cut into my reading time), but it took me until many months afterwards to realise that my parents, during this topsy-turviest of times, had themselves swapped roles. Dad, as he cooked and cooked and cooked all my favourite things to encourage me to eat, took care of my body; and Mum fed my soul.

It’s not that reading was the whole answer. All in all, it took two years and the application of prescription drugs to force the fog away. But it was the first time I found a way to admit that something beyond normal fatigue was going on and that I was struggling. And it was right that reading should have been the catalyst. It represented the whole of my former life, which had suddenly been stripped away and, because I was in so much physical pain and shock, not immediately replaced by something different, but better – or at least different, but just as good and interesting and rewarding – which is so much part of the implicit contract we make when we decide to have children.

However, we all survived. But I look at my chunky red copy of London now and see not (only) an immersive historical saga, but a life-raft, a beacon of sanity and a promise – eventually fulfilled – that things will get better, if you can hang on in there for long enough. It sits on my shelf, a quiet symbol of the unholy struggle that many of us have with the demands attendant on the semi-sacred role of motherhood: to retain (or reclaim) your own identity once you re-emerge from the all-consuming early weeks and months when you are essentially – you have to be – nothing more than a vessel or conduit for passing resources to your helpless dependent in order to keep him or her alive. What a thing. I mean, even now, a good decade after the event, I still boggle that I did it, that anyone ever does it. What a thing. What a thing!

Still. Since then I have powered my way through New York (1,000 pages, 400 years), Paris (850 pages, 700 years) and China (800 pages, seventy years), so both Rutherfurd and I must be doing something right.

I would be remiss, however, not to mention the two men who helped keep me on an even keel after I climbed aboard the medication life-raft: Lee Child and his inimitable creation Jack Reacher. Sure, my husband was a help, but as a living, breathing human being himself there had to be give and take there, the occasional negotiation, navigation of competing needs. With Reacher there was none of that. From Reacher I could, and did, just take and take and take.

By the time he and I met, Reacher had been around for about a decade. His first adventure, Killing Floor, was published in 1997, and everything you need to know about the man was there from the off. Reacher, honourably discharged from the military police after becoming ‘terminal at major’, thanks to his cool appraisal of (rather than blind obedience to) authority, stands six foot five inches tall, sports a fifty-inch chest whose slabbed muscle once literally stopped a bullet from reaching his heart and has fists ‘the size of supermarket chickens’. A few further details have been added by the books and years since (there have been twenty-four strictly canonical novels since then, plus some short stories), but not many. The core facts are repeated as faithfully as the Wakefield twins’ golden California tans, hair and lavalieres were at the beginning of every Sweet Valley High instalment and usher you as smoothly over the threshold into Reacher’s world as it did to theirs.

Since leaving the army, Reacher has kept all his self-discipline and pugilistic skills, but left everything else behind. He travels alone, all around America – by hitchhiking, rail or Greyhound bus as the mood takes him – staying in anonymous towns, eating at anonymous diners, sleeping in anonymous motels. He owns nothing but a folding toothbrush, a lapsed passport and the clothes he stands up in. Literally. Rather than find a laundrette, ever, he simply bins dirty outfits and buys a new set of jeans and T-shirt whenever he needs them.

I simply cannot tell you what a balm to the soul this man – this idea – was to me, as the mother of a toddler who, as toddlers will, was exploding my plans, my days, my mind at every turn.

Reacher keeps life simple. The only breaks in his routine come when the deadbeat town he’s landed in turns out to harbour a villain who is making innocent lives a misery and/or who seeks to run Reacher out of town. Then he makes it his business first to track down the villain’s henchmen and – no matter their number or martial prowess or armoury – to beat the shit out of them with his supermarket-chicken fists, and proceeds to deploy his ability to calculate a bullet or a punch’s trajectory within nanoseconds of the trigger or arm being pulled back, with rarely any significant damage to his massive personage. Then he tracks down the villain and, in various inventive yet efficient ways, ensures – before Reacher quietly leaves the bloodied town for ever – that he will villain no more.

Child’s writing is incredibly spare. You can imagine that adjectives cause him physical pain. He conjures up visions of forgotten towns and their cowed inhabitants, or the pool of warmth of a diner, or the growing hostility in a bar, with the greatest possible economy. And most of the time – and so often is the phrase used in the books that it has become his unofficial motto, and the title of a book about Child and his writing – Reacher says nothing. He just gets to work, making sure that the good end happily and the bad very unhappily indeed. He is, in essence, as the novelist and devoted Reacher-fan Paraic O’Donnell once unimprovably noted, ‘an itinerant preacher of artisanal fascism’. Yes. This is what we love about him.

I could not have known, when I picked up my first Reacher from the abundant stock of fat, tempting paperbacks in the Norfolk cottage we had rented for our first attempt at a holiday since the baby’s birth, that a dose of artisanal fascism – titrated at about fifty pages a night before I was finally defeated by sleep – was just what the mother of a young child (or, God help us, young children) needs.

Do you know how many times a day the mother of young children longs to beat the shit out of someone? Do you know how much she longs – however charming toddler chat can be, in small doses – to be in the company by evening of someone who says nothing? Do you know how much she longs to be able to bring, by the simple application of force, justice everywhere she goes? To travel fearlessly through a world that is suddenly more full of threat and danger than she ever imagined, because she has every form of self-defence mastered, mad gun skills and a non-breastfeeding chest big enough to stop bullets? Or how much she would give for the ability to sit alone in a diner, working her way uninterrupted through a pile of fried food and coffee that she gets to drink while it is still hot, before retiring – equally uninterruptedly – for a solid night’s sleep in a motel where no one can find her because she has no phone, no laptop and nobody who would want to do so anyway?

Oh, Reacher became my everything.

Once again, books had provided an alternative life to live. I returned from my solo wanderings so free from all physical, emotional, mental (Reacher thinks, but he does not overthink) and domestic responsibilities, thoroughly restored and without the criminal record – at best – in which any attempt to do so in the earthly rather than imaginative world would, alas, have resulted. As I oscillated between the two extremes offered by my reading and actual life, I felt overall that balance had been regained.

There were compensatory pleasures in reality, too, for the endless toil – that’s how toddlers survive of course, the wily little beasts. There’s the look of them (especially in dungarees) with their chubby little starfish hands and tumphy little waddling bodies and their heads making hilarious attempts to grow hair. They say ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’ and ‘Stop!’ and ‘More’ in endearing ways and then, just as you are beginning to tire extremely of the limited conversational options they offer, start to string words together in rudimentary but forthright and effective sentences.

And, of course, you get to introduce them to all the books you loved, and love. We had good picture-book years, the boy and I. We did all the classics, naturally. Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Judith Kerr’s Mog and The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Helen Nicoll and Jan Pieńkowski’s Meg and Mog, and it was lovely to revisit the gang and relive their magic through him. The mesmeric power of Carle’s creation munching through chocolate cake, salami, cherry pie and assorted other treats easily spanned the nearly four decades between us as we turned those delicately and yet vividly coloured pages. Meg and Mog were still somehow wonderfully simple and accessible, yet vaguely hallucinatory at the same time. The other Mog – Kerr’s cat – was much funnier than I remembered, now that I have known cats. My son, born into a two-feline household, seemed to understand her in the round.

The greatest revelation was how much I enjoyed reading aloud. This has never been my thing. It’s too much like talking, for a start, which I don’t like except under very narrow circumstances, within very specific company and for very short periods of time. I’m also no good at it. I can read the words, but my voice goes flat and monotonous by the third sentence and never comes back from that. And it takes too long. I just want to get on with the story. All this I have known since we were made to take it in turns to read The Starlight Barking in primary school.

But – but! – it turns out that picture books want you to read them aloud! It’s almost like they are designed that way. I boggled anew at the cleverness of the authors whose tricks I thought I knew inside out and whose works, I realised, functioned on planes I hadn’t come close to appreciating until now. The number of spins, when reading aloud, that you can put on the last lines ‘And it was still hot’ or ‘But he never did’, opening up or closing down possibilities, evoking the sense of this possible continuance beyond the last page – these were the things that kept me going on nights when I was so tired I would otherwise have left the child in a skip and gone home alone to sleep the clock round.

But there were also new friends joining the old. First – it’s designed for very young children – there was Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Each Peach Pear Plum. My son liked it very much, but I was an absolute goner from the first page. Its incantatory genius worked on me at an almost cellular level. My love for it is beyond reason and pretty much beyond words. It’s like Jane Austen being impossible to catch in the act of greatness. How is this thirty-four-page book, comprising just over 100 words, so enrapturing? How has it taken up lodgings in my soul, a beneficial parasite, a welcome succubus?

There are the gorgeously crowded, cosy illustrations on every right-hand page, which I could happily live in for hours. There is the puzzle aspect pulling you effortlessly along – where is this Tom Thumb that the narrator spies? – yes. But with every page evoking a new fairy tale, rhyme or archetype, an ineffable but powerful sense of promise seems to gather. An anticipatory glee shines just under the surface, which somehow becomes mixed with a yearning nostalgia at the same time. Look, it seems to say to the adult reader-aloud, look at all the stories he has in front of him, and that you have inside you. Look at the heritage he has been born into. Look at what awaits him, look what riches you have yet to show him. Look at these links that will bind you, that will bind all of us. It’s a mass of literary history you can hold in your hand, a nexus. It is, as you read it, a working artefact and embodiment of the thing literature promises us: that we are not alone. That we share stories, and we share them because au fond our minds are essentially the same. A book is shared humanity, and you are fitting your child for the world with every word of it. Glorious!

Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, is an American classic (published in 1947) that was unknown to us both, but exerted the same hold over me that Each Peach Pear Plum did. Despite being its complete opposite in every way, it had the same simple, extraordinary, evocative power. But what it evokes is … nothing. Or possibly everything. Or possibly madness. Or possibly the true essence of all things.

If you haven’t had the mystical pleasure/terror – and if you are British, you may well not have done, as the book has not conquered us as thoroughly as it has its native US, where seventy-five years on from publication it still sells around 600,000–800,000 copies a year as the new-baby gift, or roughly one for every five births there – let me introduce you.

The setting, as both written and illustrated by the author, is a ‘great green room’ containing a variety of quotidian objects: a telephone, a red balloon, two little kittens, a pair of mittens, with a small bunny in the big bed against the wall. Except … well, a telephone is a slightly odd thing to have in a child’s/bunny’s bedroom, isn’t it? And are we to assume that the balloon – which floats untethered above the bed – is left over from a party? There’s something sinister about any free-floating balloon, isn’t there? And something melancholy about any post-festivity detritus. But maybe only for adults, who have seen too many films where such balloons rank alongside a single tiny shoe in the gutter, or a smudge-faced doll dropped on the pavement, or a bicycle on its side with a wheel still spinning as a signifier that something terrible – usually the most terrible thing – has happened. So that’s fine. They’re only the ones reading the book to its intended audience. Everything’s fine.

The list continues. Comb, brush, bowl full of mush. A quiet old lady whispering ‘hush’. I mean, a bowl of mush is not exactly the comforting dish of deliciousness you usually find in children’s stories, but okay. The greater problem is exactly who this old lady is and where she came from. Her chair was empty a few pages ago. Again, we can infer it’s little bun’s grandma who had just popped out for a moment and is now back, but why is this not clear? Why is everything in this book slightly undercut, askew or otherwise made unsettling? I hate it. I love it.

On it goes, in much the same vein. We pivot to saying goodnight to the room, moon and balloon; to the clock and socks, comb, brush, nobody and mush. Wait, you say, what? Nobody? Yes. Nobody. As you are being lulled to sleep (child) and into a sense of order and security being restored (adult reader), Margaret Wise Brown yanks you away by putting ‘Goodnight nobody’ in between gentle, sleepy biddings to the brush and the mush. What a brutal, brutalising masterstroke. To a child, it can suggest unknown, unseeable – and yet, crucially, very much present – monsters everywhere in its room. To an adult, it represents (suddenly and all at once!) the essential unknowability of all things, the ultimate impenetrability of the human heart, the death of God, the existential void and the bleak reminder of the certainty that just as we come into this life alone, so shall we leave it.

The book goes on, saying goodnight to the old lady and ending with ‘Goodnight stars / Goodnight air’ and – in case you weren’t quite convinced yet that there are monsters under the bed – ‘Goodnight noises everywhere.’

Goodnight stars, air and noises everywhere. There aren’t many bedtime stories for tiny children that like to end on a note of infinite expansion and potential horrors, rather than soporific smallness and cosiness. This is counter-intuitivity taken to unprecedented, maybe actually diabolic, extremes. I love it. I hate it. The child is asleep. Is this reassuring or even more worrying? Goodnight, my own peace of mind for evermore.

It is, put at its very least, the oddest book. Brown claimed it came to her (entire) in a dream, which she wrote up as soon as she awoke and sent to her editor, Ursula Nordstrom at Harper (Brown was a prolific author who was published by many different houses), who accepted it at once.

It’s one of the few times the dream-origin story rings wholly true. It has that hallucinatory quality, a dream-logic that gives the book a sensibility that reminds you of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen and the night-time adventures of Mickey, located exactly in the sweet spot between narrative sense and nonsense. There is just enough comprehensibility to give traction, and just enough incomprehensibility for it to enchant and intrigue for ever.

The story of its author might do the same. What a gal! One line from the 1946 profile that Life did of the author, who by then had written about ten of the sixty children’s books she would see published before her sudden death a few years later, will give you the measure of the woman. ‘Except for clothes, champagne and flowers,’ it says, ‘Miss Brown is not much interested in spending.’ She spent her first-ever advance on a carload of flowers for a celebration that was going on in her apartment. She once accepted a first and low offer for another book because it happened to be exactly the amount she needed to buy a wolfskin jacket she had fallen in love with.

A few more wonderful and talismanic facts: she was prolific (her pattern, she said, was to spend twenty minutes on a first draft and then two years polishing it – she was buffing twenty-three books at the time Life interviewed her); she wrote the first draft of her first bestseller, The Runaway Bunny, on the back of a ski-lift ticket (I like to imagine she was also on the ski lift at the time – her biographies suggest this was not impossible, given the reckless glamour of a life lived at madcap speed); and she died after doing a high kick in front of a nurse to prove she was well enough to be discharged after an emergency appendectomy. It dislodged a blood clot that travelled to her brain and killed her almost instantly.

She left behind more than seventy manuscripts, around forty of which have been published since. She was not, she said, particularly fond of children. ‘I admire their absolute integrity, their dignity, their strength, their individuality,’ she once wrote. ‘But I am not going to become maudlin about them just because they’re little.’ She also astutely noted that ‘To be a writer for the young, one has to love not children but what children love.’

The older – and deeper into motherhood – I get, the more tired I become; and the more Instagram accounts that crop up unprompted in my feed, extolling the virtues of ‘present parenting’ and people’s ‘sweet babies!’, the more gratefully I fall upon any bracing acknowledgements of the truth of the matter. Wise Brown’s wise words are a great comfort to me.

But I don’t want to leave you with them, in case it gives the impression that her work was an exercise in cynicism – a monetisation of a handy skill that she had of seeing the world from a child’s point of view. It was more than that. ‘She was the most creative person, male or female, I have ever known,’ said Clement Hurd, who illustrated Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny and many more of the 100-plus books altogether that Wise Brown wrote. And to her long-time lover, Blanche Oelrichs, Brown herself wrote that ‘The first great wonder at the world is strong in me.’ Isn’t that … well, wonder-ful? To stay open, to stay awed, to stay enthused and – we may infer from those sixty books published, and easily as many again in preparation when she died – inspired by everything the world has to offer all your life … that’s a gift. I suspect it’s one shared by all the great children’s authors, if only because it’s probably one shared by all great people. The rest of us have to settle for channelling it temporarily, through the words and the books they give us. Maybe if I can just read fast enough, one day they will all join up and the wonder at the world will stay big in me too.

I would like to mark the end of this paean to these new discoveries of mine by stating explicitly that it is not at all necessary to have children in order to read or enjoy them. The little blighters leave, in fact, little time for either. I say: keep buying books and knocking back the Microgynon tablets until the last moment possible. No need to get maudlin, remember.

I think Daddy’s Sandwich by Pip Jones was our first thoroughly modern read (Each Peach came out in 1978) and the first newcomer to be loved by us both equally. It has a brilliantly simple and simply brilliant premise: what do you put on a sandwich for Daddy if you are, by the looks of the lively illustrations, four or five years old? Everything he loves, of course! And Daddy loves cheese and tomato. Which is yum, you can agree in sober, rational fashion with your young reader, isn’t it? But he also loves his slippers. And shampoo. And the newspaper. And television, and his bike … Look, things are getting crazy now! And in a way that will survive repeated (and repeated and repeated) readings intact. Until finally, in the vital final paying-off pages, the little girl triumphantly puts what Daddy loves best of all into the sandwich. All together now: ‘Meeeeeeee!’ It is rollicking fun and manages to appeal to children’s monstrous sense of ego, without getting them completely fired up and out of bed again when the whole idea is that they don’t; and allows you to get outside for a large gin instead.

Don’t look at me like that. Gin is the only constant. Gin is a cliché for a reason. Gin is the thing – sometimes the only thing. Between the years of 2011 and 2015 you could have put it in any sandwich and I would have eaten it. Jack Reacher and gin: these guardrails protected my sanity. Strong recommendations for both.

Then there was the sensational Weasels by Elys Dolan. This is like an episode of The Simpsons – layers of comedy at various heights of sophistication, which reveal themselves gradually to the child as you read it again and again over the weeks, months and years, but which even at its most grown-up manages that rare feat of making the child laugh without resorting to snark or cheek.

Weasels are plotting world domination. But just as the countdown to takeover begins, the machine upon which their success depends breaks down. ‘I’m broken,’ it says on its screen, so there can be no doubt. Some weasels want to solve the problem with hammers. Others take a more circumspect approach and head off to the laboratory. Eventually the problem is solved – this is a spoiler-free zone, so I shall say no more. But while the main narrative is kept simple, the pages are crammed with pictorial detail and gags (the weasels’ headquarters is a Bond villain-ish lair with an unmistakeable municipal-office vibe that kills me) and inter-weasel snatches of dialogue as they sort out their spilled coffees and wonder aloud what to do next, which make every one and every reading a new delight. Also endpapers that depict our mustelid future, so consider yourselves on high alert from now on. You won’t be able to say you weren’t warned.

As we moved out of toddlerhood, we moved into even richer fare. You want art that blasts past all our superficial differences and unites us all in our profound common humanity? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Day the Crayons Quit, in which each of young Duncan’s crayons bids him farewell via a letter explaining its particular reason for going. Red needs a rest – he is overused and even has to work holidays, because of colouring in Santas at Christmas and all the hearts on Valentine’s. Black and grey, meanwhile, feel desperately neglected and unloved. Peach wants to know why Duncan has peeled his wrapper off and left him naked. Yellow and orange would like him to settle their argument about who is better, and pick that one for colouring in the sun. It is a book instantly to be taken to the heart of anyone – which is surely, psychopaths aside, everyone – in whom there ever stirred the slightest anthropomorphic instinct. Do you remember, now, once worrying about crayons feeling left out, or injured when their wrappings were picked off? Didn’t you feel the weight of decisions made, when they and their fates were in your hands? Weren’t you once porous, empathetic and open to a different world of possibilities? Read Drew Daywalt’s book, with its wonderful illustrations by Oliver Jeffers (very satisfactorily better known as a genius in his own right, and we devoured his Stuck, Once Upon an Alphabet and The Incredible Book Eating Boy with especial delight), and feel your inner child, your more tender, better self awaken.

And then, at last, although I had never heard of it before a friend gave it to us for Alexander’s fifth birthday – let alone knew it was a book that would lodge in my heart for ever – we met Michelle Knudsen’s Library Lion.

Library Lion is the new Dogger. It is one of those books that makes you want to grab your child by the hand, crush him to your bosom and simultaneously whisper with passionate intensity into his ear, ‘This is life! This book – it is life! It is all of life! Here, in forty-eight evocatively and sensitively illustrated pages and 1,001 words, is all of life!’ I have loved this book from the first moment we read it, and have worshipped it from the second. Were there any justice in the world, it would be revered as a sacred text, shaping human minds and souls from their earliest encounters with it. Or at least embraced – à la Dogger and Where the Wild Things Are and The Tiger Who Came to Tea – as a keystone text for that age group.

Let me try to explain its numinous beauty, fathomless wisdom and unfailing charm, although I have only the paltry resource of the written word at my disposal.

It has a simple and immediately attractive premise. A lion walks into a library. (Even more attractively, at least for parents – or at least for, ahem, a certain kind of parent, perhaps one resentful of change and considering the word virtually synonymous with ‘ruin’, ‘destruction’, ‘foul corruption and decay’ – the lion walks into a library that, although it has computers on desks and other signs of modernity discreetly locating it in the present day, is essentially an old-fashioned library, as the sepia-toned illustrations show, full of books and energetic quiet.)

Librarian Mr McBee runs down the hallway to tell head librarian Miss Merriweather (grey bun, sensible shoes, heart – as we will see – of a lion herself) to tell her about this unexpected advent. Not with awed delight, but with the gleeful officiousness of the small-minded. Parents nod sagely and bitterly, recognising his type in every word and every lineament of his strutting form. This is the book that will lay the first vital foundations for learning not to take these people at their own estimation ever.

‘No running,’ Miss Merriweather tells him. But, Mr McBee tells her, there is a lion in the library! Is he breaking any rules? asks Miss Merriweather, who has not yet looked up from the work she is doing at her desk, thus instantly establishing herself as a feminist role model and the proud bearer of the Miss Read torch. Mr McBee must admit that the lion is not. ‘Then leave him be,’ says Miss Merriweather.

The lion, left in peace, behaves exactly like a lion in a library, and in a book, should – which is to say, exactly like a giant cat. After prowling around and gently investigating his new surroundings, he curls up and goes to sleep in the story corner. There is no rule against that, either. When it is time for the storyteller lady to take up her post, she is wary but does so – an exemplar of courage in the face of the unknown.

When it is time for her to go, the lion objects and roars. Now must Miss Merriweather step in and explain the rules. If he cannot be quiet, he will have to leave. A little girl checks that he understands. The lion does and becomes a quiet, indispensable part of library life. He dusts books with his tail, licks envelopes with his mighty tongue for Miss Merriweather and generally makes himself useful before settling down for story time, the reward for his labours. Mr McBee’s resentment grows. You know – you know in your bones – how it would.

One day Miss Merriweather falls and breaks her arm. Our stoic icon asks the lion, quietly, if he could go – without running – and inform Mr McBee. The lion tries, but Mr McBee ignores him. So he is forced to roar! I leave you to imagine the delight that swells Mr McBee’s tiny, petty soul at this undeniable breach of the rules.

The lion too knows that he has broken his promise to be quiet, and pads – woebegone but true – out of the library. He doesn’t hear Miss Merriweather (who, while waiting for Mr McBee, has doughtily fashioned herself a pillow out of nearby books) explain to her colleague that sometimes there is – clearly – good reason to break the rules. And so the lion doesn’t turn up the next day, or the days after that. The life goes out of Miss Merriweather and out of the library. And Mr McBee’s conscience (that etiolated organ carapaced by self-righteousness) begins to prick him. He goes out and searches for the lion. When he finds the lion, forlorn, in the rain, looking through the windows of the library after closing time, he tells the beast – and I swear, if you listen very closely, you can hear the tearing sounds as the words are wrenched from his unwilling but determined breast – ‘I thought you might like to know that there’s a new rule in the library. No roaring allowed, unless you have a very good reason – say, if you’re trying to help a hurt friend, for example.’

The lion returns. Miss Merriweather runs to greet him. ‘No running!’ says Mr McBee with a smile. She doesn’t listen. ‘Sometimes,’ runs the last line of the book, ‘there is a very good reason to break the rules. Even in a library.’

It is a perfectly plotted, perfectly weighted, perfectly sublime thing. It is a perfect reading-aloud experience too. You find your voice automatically shifting into a pushy, prissy register for Mr McBee, and yourself sitting up a little straighter when you voice Miss Merriweather, as if a little extra strength is entering your spine and soul.

And it is the perfect bedtime story. It is a book about true fairness, true justice, the power of self-discipline, independence of thought, unobtrusive courage, nobility and finding the bravery to admit when you are wrong. Look how we warm to Mr McBee as he redeems himself in the last few pages! Feel the warmth of the forgiveness that floods your heart when he makes his little speech to the lion in the rain, and how much better it feels than holding onto grudges or nursing hatred does! You can read it before bedtime and know that everything is right with at least one small portion of the world, and renew the faith that if we can produce it between covers, perhaps there is hope for everyone beyond them too. Your child won’t understand much of this, of course, but that doesn’t matter – I’m talking about reading it before your bedtime, not his. Miss Merriweather for ever!

I think perhaps I fell so hard for so many of my son’s books because they were the only fiction I was really reading through the toddler years and on into his early childhood. I had entered a non-fiction phase, partly out of necessity and partly out of guilt and/or hormonal imbalance. Necessity – toddler-chasing, feeding and general wrangling – is not conducive to immersive reading. And once he stopped napping, novels were totally out. Only being able to read a few pages of a good story at a time makes me murderous. So non-fiction, which could be picked up and put down at any time without sparking homicidal levels of resentment, became the order of the day (and the night, when I could not stay awake for more than another few pages, much as I wished to). A few facts slotted in here and there is more rewarding than trying to slip back into an alternative world and assimilate the next sliver of plot (not to mention remembering it until your next chance).

As for the madness induced by guilt and/or hormonal imbalance … well, I became seized with a compulsion for self-improvement. This is wholly out of character. I am far too lumpen and low-energy, under normal circumstances, to care what I (let alone other people) think of me, and I have therefore never felt the need to work on the raw, lazy goods. It’s all I can do nowadays to have a daily shower and keep the outer shell basically presentable. My interiority is a pig sty. But once I was in charge of another being, especially one who kept looking trustingly at me as if I had a clue as to what I was doing, a hitherto-dormant homunculus in my brain starting hissing at me all the time, ‘Stop sitting doing nothing! Be better! Be productive! Be learning!’ It’s the voice that gets you puréeing organic vegetables at stupid o’clock at night, and the voice that sees you sitting down (because eventually it’s that or fall down) to read Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, Keith Houston’s The Book or Trollope’s autobiography instead of falling asleep or whacking on Brooklyn Nine-Nine to give yourself a proper break.

Not that I regret any of my non-fiction choices, you understand. The Gombrich clarified the plentiful but blurry-edged historical knowledge I had gained from Jean Plaidy and co., which I’m sure is just how the revered Austrian scholar intended it. I followed it up with his more famous The Story of Art, which proved three things: one, I have no visual sense whatsoever and people who do are as gods to me; two, it is truly miraculous how much one expert can communicate to an absolute ignoramus, if he or she really wishes to do so and sets aside all ego in order to concentrate on passing on, rather than showing off, what they know (it is both a spectacular act of generosity as well as a technical achievement); and three, as I remember precisely nothing of the book, apart from the awe and gratitude it induced, I must reread it as soon as possible and see what a difference doing so without two years of sleep-deprivation behind me makes.

Houston’s The Book is an absolutely exhaustive book about the history of books and the making of them, which keeps you turning the pages (about whose cutting, printing, binding and stock you could now write your own book) as if it’s a thriller, and still wishing, after 448 of the octavo-sized buggers, for more.

And Trollope’s autobiography was … a blast. I picked it up in a virtual stupor, without having ever read an actual Trollope novel. All I knew about him was the myth(?)/legend(?) that he wrote for a set time every day, and if he finished a novel before that time was up, he simply put a new piece of paper into his typewriter and started another one.

Should not having read an author be a bar to reading about him? It’s more usual to discover someone’s work first and then have an urge to find out more about its creator, but it works just as well the other way round. There’s something to be said for breaking the ‘rules’ sometimes. It did this time anyway, because … well, it turns out that Trollope can really write, you know? I was enraptured. It was one of those utterly bizarre, unexpected reads that reminds you exactly why you love these big papery things so much and keep them in such piles around you. They’re magical! There are some books that remind you anew of that miraculous truth. Yes, I was alternating between stupor and delirium, but I would occasionally look up and grin at the fact that I was simultaneously sipping instant coffee in an armchair in a leafy London suburb in the third millennium and travelling on horseback through mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, vitally remodelling the postal system in between banging out the early novels that will lay the foundations for me to become one of the most popular writers of the age. All thanks to the recombinant properties of twenty-six letters and one man’s indefatigable spirit and gift for putting them down in a pleasing order. Amazing!

I would like to report that I went straight from there to tearing through Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, but alas, no; life, as I have said, was not conducive to such warm, lengthy pleasures. But, and here’s the other great thing about books, which is responsible for a greater and greater proportion of my love for them as I get older and the intrusions on my time by other factors increase: books wait. I know that I want to read Trollope. I’ve known that for five or six years now – I just haven’t been able to get to them yet. But unlike bills, parents’ evenings, contributions to school fetes, fancy-dress costumes for parties, cervical smears, renewing the house/car/contents insurance, they can wait. They are on my shelves, not demanding attention but biding their time, full of promise, instead of recriminations or threats of excommunication from the PTA or visits from the bailiffs. They are simply there, offering silent support and a vision of a future in which I will be able to take down The Warden and start what I am sure will be the beginning of a glorious journey through Barsetshire – uninterrupted. When people ask why I keep quite so many books around, this is a large part of the answer.

An unsought and even more unwelcome side-effect of the self-improvement drive, though I hardly realised it at the time, was to abandon rereading, as well as fiction. ‘Must get on, must get on, not go backwards!’ hissed the treacherous little horror in my brain. And this, somehow, has become an enduring policy, no matter how much time I spend reiterating to myself that it is an objectively and subjectively astoundingly stupid decision. Adults need succour and comfort from well-worn tales at least as much as children do. My only defence is that I am in a perpetual state of sorrow and despair about this stupid decision, and I am ever in the process of trying to unmake it. I am perpetually aware that I am one-and-not-done; that at least 50 per cent of what I read deserves to be pored over again and the other 50 per cent doesn’t, but I would love to reread it nevertheless. And if only people would stop writing and publishing so many irresistibly intriguing new books every year, I might stand some chance of succeeding.

But … but I love reading new stuff so much too! It is, almost without exception, so good. And how will I find new comfort-reads, new old favourites, if I don’t keep moving through my piles – and piles and piles and piles – of alluring treasures? Answer me that! Please, please, answer me that. I’m running out of time.

10

A Library of One’s Own: On Curating a Book Collection

‘I suppose it’s this one then,’ said my husband as we stepped into the garden.

‘It is,’ I whispered, a covetous gleam in my eye and lust in my soul. ‘It is.’

Around 2018 or so we had come to the decision that we would become one of those unspeakable couples and buy a second home – with the slight compensatory gloss that we wouldn’t be renting it out while we weren’t there, and that it would only temporarily be our second home. As soon as we could get various ducks in a row, we would move there fully and permanently. We had been dating Norfolk long enough. It was time to get engaged and start planning the wedding for some unknown but genuinely looked-for day. Since then, we had looked at every house that had come on the market within our budget, and beyond. None had been right, except for the one really far out of our budget that made us laugh with its ridiculous grace, beauty and acreage.

The one we now stood in front of wasn’t perfect, either, but … running along the width of the bottom of the garden was a former cart-house that the current owners had made into two rooms. One was big and was employed in putting up grandchildren and sturdy guests (it was not warm) overnight, and one was small and used as a study. There were plastered walls, a flagstoned floor, three sets of French doors opening onto the garden: it was, clearly, a library-in-waiting.

The potential fulfilment of the only ambition I have ever held in life was standing before me: a room of my own, with every one of my books (about 10,000 by this absurd point) around me. In truth, though, I had never dared to dream so big – a library separate from the house. ‘Your fortress of solitude,’ said my husband, considering me with a mixture of emotions as I struggled to contain my glee.

We bought the house. We unpacked the basics – kettle, beds, child’s iPad, adults’ TBR piles, Pot Noodles – and then I called my carpenter friend, Al, and told him that the time had come. Down he came from West Yorkshire and took in the glorious sight. Or site. I was so happy I was even making puns.

‘I just want to line the whole place with bookcases!’ I said. ‘Every wall, floor-to-ceiling. Then I want to paint them green, because that is the proper home-library – home-library! – colour, and then I want to fill them with books and be happy for ever.’

Al nodded. We have known each other a long time. He has heard my plans many times before.

He got down to the business of designing something that was not only up to the job of supporting 10,000 volumes, but could take in the various beams and bits of jiggery-pokery with which an old structure likes to scupper simple plans, and looked beautiful too. Meanwhile I measured book heights, estimated my numbers – or my yardage – of each format and worked out the spacing needed between shelves. Al suggested all the finishing details, including having the deepest, bottom compartment marked out by an unpainted oak shelf above. That would, he noted, break up the monotony, give me somewhere to perch, rest piles of books and place cups of tea, as needful.

While Al measured, sawed, planed and generally made timber do his bidding, I embarked on the task of refining my artistic vision. Which is to say that I scrolled through Farrow & Ball’s Instagram account, kept a tally of greens that I liked and ordered eight litres of the one that came out ahead: Calke Green. Then I asked the very nice, very posh lady attending the customer-service line what yellow she would put on her walls if she had Calke Green shelves. She said, ‘Sudbury’, so Sudbury it was.

I wish I had a more glamorous decorating journey to share with you. But I have no style and no taste, you see. There’s nothing I can do about that, any more than I can do anything about being five foot two inches or hating mushrooms. I can only mitigate potential disasters by keeping my options narrow and by asking advice from them-what-knows. To prove all the above points, I will tell you that I got cocky thereafter and went with my instincts in choosing the paint for the doors, and they look disgusting. I haven’t repainted them yet. I keep them there as a reminder of my hubris, and because otherwise the sheer happiness I feel every time I enter the room would leave me prostrate on the floor and good for nothing.

It was amazing to see it all take shape. I mean, it’s incredible enough to watch a craftsman at work, creating something useful and beautiful where before there was nothing, out of talent, skill and years of honing both; but when it is something you have had in your mind’s eye – or lusted over in the pages of Sunday supplements about impossibly glamorous people’s impossibly glamorous houses – for nearly forty years … well, it’s quite overwhelming.

When all was painted – and Al had extracted a blood-vow from me not to fuck everything up by starting to shelve my books before everything had had at least a week to dry – we toasted the achievement with champagne, and the next day he went home to Yorkshire and we went back to London.

And then the pandemic arrived.

It is not often, actually, that reading fiction prepares you in any very direct way for specific life experiences. Sure, it may effectively warn you that good-looking, charming men are not to be trusted, that people are complicated, that adolescence is a mindfuck, that bereavement is a weird and convoluted thing and not just ‘epic sadness’, that you are not alone in experiencing throughout life heartache, joy, bewilderment, a craving for adventure or security by turns, hatred for your thighs or neck (or both!), bizarre sexual fantasies and the myriad other properties that constitute a human life.

But rare is it that you find a trope hitherto only encountered in fiction that is rapidly coming to life around you, making you the protagonist in a narrative that you have met many times before on the page, but which was never, ever supposed to escape it.

And yet here I was, on 18 March 2020, trawling through the house, packing food, toiletries and assorted other practical items into bags and suitcases that Christopher then took quietly to the car, as we discreetly planned to flee an oncoming apocalypse.

Lockdown – or the first lockdown, as it would come to be known – was imminent. The closing of schools had been announced and it was widely understood that nationwide constraints on free movement would follow hard on its heels. We decided (and I will never be proud of this, but I am so grateful that we could do it and that Christopher insisted we did) to leave for the house in Norfolk.

And so we became Those Characters in every pandemic-/zombie-/A. N. Other-world-upending-based apocalyptic story I’d ever read. Fragments of early scenes from all of them – The Stand, the Darren Shan saga, Noah’s Castle, nine million self-published e-books by US survivalists, How I Live Now, Alex Scarrow’s Last Light and oh so many more – burst from whatever mental locker I’d been keeping them in and leapt onto a carousel that kept spinning in my head, reminding me not to panic, to try and think independently, not to follow the herd, not to trust the government (I didn’t – not because I was a conspiracy theorist, but because there was already every sign that they were dangerously-to-the-point-of-manslaughteringly-incompetent), not to waste time boggling at the bizarreness of the situation but to accept the truth now, quickly, and boggle later, when we were safely in our Montana bunker. Or, you know, Norfolk cottage. It reminded me to be ruthlessly practical when it came to choosing what to take, and to leave anything of merely sentimental value behind.

Christopher had been to the supermarket for various things, but came back almost empty-handed because all the shelves had already been more or less stripped. And I didn’t panic – as he did – because I already knew how this story went. Bare shelves were step one, enabling the reader to begin to appreciate the fragility of the modern global system and the start of the emergence of the once-maligned weirdo-hoarder, or ridiculed prepper, as a new leader of the bewildered local community. I needed to prioritise food, obviously, but then it was toilet paper, toothpaste and tampons. (I’d have checked my guns and ammo first, of course, if we’d been in America, but this was England, so I contented myself with throwing a penknife into my rucksack and a pair of secateurs into Christopher’s).

Disinfectant, wipes, soap, hand-sanitiser. Clothes, especially underwear. Candles and matches, because even largely automated power-supply systems have a de minimis requirement for human help, and if the zombies – sorry, virus – takes out too many people, they will go down. Every pill, plaster and tincture in the house, because the NHS was already on its knees. There would be no going anywhere near a hospital with anything less than Covid or a compound fracture. And of course every Lateral Flow Test. Towels. Blankets. One small bag for the child, with Lenny the lion, Bruin the bear and a couple of his other favourite toys and books, because what parents, even in the bleakest opening chapters, don’t give in on that score?

It was surreal. Whatever your specific personal experience of lockdown was, that sense of disbelief and disconnection from reality was surely common to us all. I bagged up all the items we couldn’t fit in the car with us (the amount of stuff that secretly abides in the average middle-class and above-averagely disorganised home is, when you dig it all out and place it in on the kitchen table, astonishing) and left it quietly outside neighbours’ doors in oblique apology for our good fortune, an attempt at atonement for our cowardice, and for assorted other reasons I didn’t want to look too closely at. And then we set off, diverging from the traditional The End of the World as We Know It scenario insofar as the roads were not impassably full of cars full of people fleeing the city (or crashed vehicles and swarms of the undead), but rather were quiet. Eerie enough, though, in its own way.

We got to Norfolk just before lockdown was indeed announced and holed up for nearly three weeks, using up our supplies and going no further than the garden, so there was absolutely no chance of us passing on the virus to anyone else. One thing to run away, I felt. Quite another to be the selfish assholes who spread the plague to a whole new population. Apart from anything else, they always get their comeuppance by page 200 at the latest, and it’s always gruesome.

If there was ever a time when books saved me, it was in lockdown. Not that I was alone. The UK’s fiction sales leapt by 16 per cent (or £100m) in 2020, and audiobook sales shot up by more than one-third, despite bricks-and-mortar shops largely being closed.

Every spare minute I had – in between washing the groceries, scouring the Internet for news and for supermarket-delivery slots for my shielding, borderline-octogenarian parents (and Dad in particular was frailfn1), keeping the child occupied and exercised mentally and physically (he is not, alas, a boy you can simply turn out into the garden to run around by himself for the sheer fun of it – his genetic inheritance on both sides militates against all unnecessary exertion), doing my job, gibbering in fear for Mum and Dad and their indisputable vulnerability, avoiding obsessing over the possibility of a mutation that would see the virus set about children as comprehensively as it was doing weakened adults, and convulsing in rage at our own and other governments around the globe, which seemed to have no plan, no plan at all – I took refuge in reading.

At first, if counter-intuitively, I wanted resonance. I wanted to shore up my mental reserves, see this new reality reflected in my books, so that I could begin to come to terms with it. Out came all my ‘plague books’, so that I could draw strength and sanity from Eyam’s determination to isolate itself, from La Peste’s fight against existential dread as much as germs, from the resourcefulness of the children in After Tomorrow and Boy in the Tower. I pulled other fare off my to-be-read shelves. There was Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, which I’d bought in hardback six years ago, waiting for me. Cometh the hour, cometh the tale of art and the human spirit triumphing, eventually, over suffering.

It didn’t quite hit the spot for me – I was in need of more down-to-earth, less rarefied takes on the situation – but I was still glad to know that it had, and would for other people. I did need to know that there were others around still capable of appreciating sophisticated stories, of wrestling with problems, of thinking in broader and higher terms than I could, as I staggered through each exhausting day of our new and ever-shifting reality. When we read, I realised, we are not just in dialogue with the story. We are in touch with so much else. We can take comfort in the evidence of greater minds than our own at work, from an author’s intelligence and curiosity, and hand off some of our (over)thinking to them. Likewise to the readers you know will be out there, responding better than you currently can to them.

Reading may look like the most solitary activity you can undertake, but in fact you can be in communion with an army. When reports started coming in over the next few weeks of how sales of Camus’ La Peste, Stephen King’s The Stand (set after the world has been ravaged by a superflu) and Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness (a 1981 tome about – I kid you not – a virus called Wuhan-400, ‘China’s most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade’) had all gone up by between 150 and 300 per cent since February, when Covid started taking hold of global life, it felt like a genuine point of communion, as everything else was threatening to fly apart.

As the weeks and months wore on, however, the present became an increasingly oppressive thing. Once it became clear that my son’s year would not be returning to school before September and that home-schooling was now our lot for ever, I began fleeing desperately into the past. I began with the obvious: the final part of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, which was probably the last book I had bought – it came out in March, a beautiful marine blue-and-green liveried hardback – before the world shut down. But it was a false start. Much as I wanted to, much as I could see that I was going to admire and adore it, when the time was right, as much as I had Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, it was unquestionably a book that demanded substantially more bandwidth than I had available to me at this increasingly strange, socially distancing, grocery-washing, unknown-unknowns-filled time. I went back to Norah Lofts and reread anything set before the Industrial Revolution rot set in. I even found – O frabjous day! – a couple I had missed in my first frenzy of adoration.

These were books that in an endlessly uncertain time, when every headline and article was raising new concerns and dreadful possibilities, when every call from my parents or my sister had me scrambling for the phone in panic in case this was The Call telling me one of them had been felled by the virus and taken into hospital, possibly never (such were the restrictions at the time) to be seen again, grounded me. They gave me a connection that I needed; they reminded me, with every page, that we are merely a tiny part of humanity’s history and that there is nothing new under the sun. Even plagues. Especially plagues. We didn’t start here and – hopefully – we wouldn’t end here.

It helped, in unmoored days in which you could easily drift into despair, to acknowledge that mankind had – overall – made progress. We no longer toil from dawn till dusk in fields, tied to our feudal lords and labouring only for them (‘No,’ says my sister, leaning over my shoulder as I type, ‘we just give away our data for free to people who control the democracy upon which our relatively new and still-fragile freedom depends.’ Ignore her; she thrives in the real world and is an unnatural beast). We don’t usually die aged twenty in childbirth, at thirty of sepsis after a scratch from a rusty nail in the pantry or at forty of simple exhaustion.

Life, for almost all of us, is better than in most periods of yore. People had been at the mercy of madmen before, though they tended to be kings or local barons instead of presidents recommending injections of bleach as a Covid cure, or Brexiteers. People, as a whole, had survived. Here we were, after all, writing and reading about it. Books exist, and remain restorative, precisely because people endure. Even when the world seems to be in meltdown, we still want to make sense of it, to connect with and draw strength from each other. And books enable us to do that across time and space. They laugh in the face of social distancing, drop ice-cubes down the vest of existential fear.

And then Dad went and got himself diagnosed with stomach cancer. I was in the sitting room when he rang. I knew immediately there was something wrong, precisely because it was him ringing. It’s always Mum – except, it turns out, when it’s Dad, letting you know that he’s going to have a gastrectomy, but probably only has six months or so to go after that.

‘I don’t like to make a fuss,’ he said, ‘but I thought you ought to know.’

‘Probably best,’ I agreed. ‘Thanks.’

‘Do you want to speak to your mother now?’ he asked.

‘Not just yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you back in a bit.’

I went down to the bottom of the garden, opened the library door, pulled it gently closed and started howling. Well, what else was I going to do, and where else was I going to do it?

And then I started shelving. I mean, not right away – I told Christopher the news, spoke to my sister, who was already searching the welter of rules and regulations for loopholes about visiting the sick and the dying, in and out of hospital (‘There aren’t any,’ she said; ‘if he dies, he dies alone)’. I took another trip to the library, cried till I thought I’d ruptured an organ, then returned to the house, decided not to tell the child anything except that Granddad was having an operation; that sort of thing – all the weirdly practical housekeeping that follows terrible news, plus a little extra Covid-’n’-cabin-fever spin. Then I started shelving.

First, I sorted them. The children’s books were already in separate boxes, because they had been in a separate room in the old house. They went into my study. The ones from my own childhood, plus the cloth-covered pre-war editions of Dimsie that I had bought from the Haunted Bookshop in my university days, and the various beautiful hardbacks for children – still largely unread but promising much – that I had collected during the early denuding of Norfolk’s second-hand bookshops filled the wall to the right of my desk. So now, as I work, the Ruggles family, the Soppists, William Brown and all the rest stand sentinel, supportive (especially Kate), gimlet-eyed (especially Erica) or baffled by my industry (dear William, though probably Ethel too), according to temperament.

I try to ignore the siren calls of the unreads. ‘I will start Alice Mary Hadfield’s Williver’s Luck/Rosemary Sutcliff’s Knight’s Fee/Captain Marryat’s The Settlers in Canada when I have filed this piece/completed this draft/done my VAT,’ I promise myself. But of course by the time I have done this I need to eat (or to feed someone), or some other life admin has accumulated in the time I have foolishly taken to concentrate on my paid job, or the cat has done a poo somewhere it shouldn’t have done a poo, and so Williver must wait another day.

By the time the children were settled (and all the books about them that I used when writing Bookworm), Dad was preparing for his operation. I turned my attention determinedly to the remaining boxes – all 250 of them – and began the long task of sorting them into fiction and non-fiction. The big room has a beam about halfway along the back wall, which made for a natural dividing line between the two schools. Then I unfolded a large picnic table and started sorting the fiction into alphabetical piles. Whenever one got too tall, I put it on the wide ledge (thank you again, Al) at the bottom of the bay in which I thought that letter would end up. Even as I sobbed through most of it, I felt better for bringing a tiny bit of order to this chaos at least. The soothing power of a satisfying project with no deadline by which to accomplish it should not be underestimated.

What a difference a few years, a global pandemic and a pending death in the family make. As I sorted through my books, I started voluntarily laying some aside. Just in case I didn’t have room for them all, I thought vaguely, or wanted to leave some space for new ones … If it came to it, if it really came to it, they were the ones I could bear to box up again and live without easy access to. And then, as more (and more and more and more) were unpacked – so many that I was desperate to read as soon as possible, so many bought and that had slipped off the radar, but were now restored to and gleaming in my sight, juicing my reading glands and filling me with longing – it became easier and easier to lay others aside. And rather than box them up (selfish that, really, hoarding against some unknown but unlikely day), I could give them away, let them find new homes, fulfil their destinies.

Voluntary culling is a state of mind. You can’t induce it, you can’t dispel it. Like menopause symptoms (and I suspect there’s a monograph to be written here about the possible connection – see, also, love of gardening), it creeps up on you. Even a few years ago, during an early and ultimately futile attempt at a cull, I hadn’t been able to imagine that I could have enough books. But it’s true: you can. You reach a certain stage of life and a certain number of books, and the numbers no longer add up. It is an equation whose answer is simply, ‘Enough.’

Literally enough, first of all. I had for some time owned more books than I could possibly read in a lifetime. I’d realised this several years ago but, like everything in bookworm life, the knowledge moved only slowly through me. Most bad news takes time to percolate, and never more so than when it includes intimations of mortality and truncation of the activity, and loss of the things you love most in the world. I’ll hold all that at bay for as long as possible, thank you.

Then ‘Enough’ in the sense that your mother always used it. In fact, if you’ve reached this stage in your biblio-life, it’s probably the way you use it in your turn with any children you’ve got now, too. ‘Enough’ in the sense that things have gone far enough now. More than the mortality maths, it was the fact that I started to feel like I’d lost control of my collection that spurred me on to start looking at things in a different way. The sheer number of options, of unread responsibilities, started to oppress rather than thrill me. And the proportions were wrong.

Like normal people do with friends, every bookworm has a core collection of ride-or-dies. Whether they number in the dozens, hundreds or thousands, there is never any question of culling these. Or lending them to anyone. Of course it includes your beloved children’s books and all those you have taken to your heart, read and reread for as long as you had time to reread since. They are your long-time companions – you are devoted to each other.

Then there is the second circle surrounding that vital nucleus. These are good books. These are books you really, really want to read, and the ones you have started and know you love, but had to put aside because life insisted on getting in the way for too long. But they’re there, waiting patiently, occasionally plucking at the edge of your consciousness just to remind you how good it’s going to be, until you can pick them up, re-immerse yourself and enjoy. Each of these must stay. You are old and wise enough now to know, even if you still don’t know how it is that you know, that their time will come.

Then there are … the others. The ‘maybes’. The ‘That might be good’ and ‘That might come in useful’ (non-fiction; we wouldn’t, I don’t think, be in this situation if we were the kind of people who thought of fiction in terms of utility). The ‘What’s the harm in having it?’ You know the ones. They were bought on a whim or to commemorate an event (my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky was bought in the company of Sally Hawkins, after I interviewed her when she had just been cast in the television programme) or in a state of externally induced high excitement/low depression, rather than because you and it locked eyes over a crowded bookshop and knew you had to be together. There may even be some that were bought because you were in a strange mood – combative, optimistic, sensation-seeking perhaps; whichever is most alien to your natural state. Mine generally result from a passing desire for change, to force myself outside my comfort-zone and try and decalcify my stiffening mind and thickening thoughts (hello, Amélie Nothomb!).

These titles had, while I wasn’t looking, diluted the concentration of soulmates to an almost homeopathic degree – aided further by the existence of miscellanea like unwanted presents, accidental doubles and … well, books that simply didn’t ‘take’; that I read and, sure, enjoyed as far as they went, but that didn’t linger in the memory or come to mean anything to me – and sparked no memories of either plot or purchase, when next espied upon the shelf. If you’d told me as a child that this could happen, I wouldn’t have believed you. And this is right and proper. No child should be able to envisage a time when a person can have accumulated enough stuff, and become so dead inside, that there is no longer the capacity for passionate engagement with every book – simply because it is a book, a glorious thing! – that comes along.

As a mother, I sigh and eye-roll with the best of them when I attempt to divest my child’s bedroom of its plastic clutter and he makes fervent argument in favour of keeping every minute piece of crap he’s ever touched. But really, who wants to meet the child who relinquishes his possessions without a fight, who doesn’t see endless treasure where we see only the relentlessly mundane? I mean, I wish he could feel as strongly about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as he does about the plastic sword that fell off a figurine he won at the amusement arcade in Wells-next-the-Sea four years ago, but at least it’s all in there somewhere. He hasn’t started calcifying yet. He’s just got his priorities wrong.

In adulthood, though, everything is different. Even I can now acknowledge – reluctantly, sullenly, probably kicking a skirting board like, ironically, a mutinous teenager as you drag it out of me – that there are books that … aren’t worth keeping. That have come into my life and can also go from it. The series of remarkably similar stories about doughty Lancashire women and their ambitious daughters fighting their way out of the cotton mills and cobblestoned streets wi’ nobbut rudimentary contraception and a dream created by an equally doughty saga-spinner may not, to the outsider, differ much from my Sweet Valley High collection. But only the latter reminds me of my happiest school days with my best friend Sally, of innocence cusping, of a time when sex meant kissing and nothing bad could ever really happen, because whether under lowering Catford skies or the unfailing Californian sun, we were all aglow with youth.

These lesser, insignificant (to me! only to me! I’m not making value judgements here; you’ll know when I am) volumes were obscuring my vision. I could no longer see the trees for the forest. My core collection needed to be restored to its rightful prominence, so that I could keep myself and my choices in order. A necessary callus formed. I was able to look with greater and greater clarity upon the remaining shelves.

So the great culling of my mid-forties began. It was a long job and it couldn’t be subcontracted out, because the decisions could only be taken by one individual – me, hi! – one individual book at a time. As we see from the Lancashire Ann/SVH example, you can’t cull by category, simply sweeping all sagas or sci-fi off the shelves at once. There are simply too many exceptions to every rule.

But I was mistress of my domain. I took my time. I was working at a micro-level here. I held each book in my hand and wordlessly communed with it. Marie Kondo (I had her books somewhere, but I had never read them and – I don’t think she’d laugh at this – could not find them now) would have been proud. If we still had something to say to each other, if we still had a connection, the book stayed. If there was silence, I thanked it for its service, wondered who the killer had turned out to be after all and pitched it into the charity box. Not without a pang at first. I occasionally had to stand over the box and imagine the discarded books going off, bringing hours of distraction and pleasure to others, before going back into the system until they found their true home or, yes, reached their battered end. I won’t say I didn’t take a picture of one or two, either. I won’t say I didn’t retrieve a few others and make a new pile to give to Dad, not because they suited him, but so that I could see how I felt about them once they were at least out of the house. But the great bulk of them went. They left the building and I managed not to buy them back from Oxfam over the next few weeks.

Eventually the survivors (for the avoidance of doubt, that’s about 95 per cent of the originals) were all positioned beneath their most likely bays, and we were ready to make the inaugural placement. I called husband and child in as witnesses, got the latter to get Al and his family on Zoom, and everybody watched and cheered as I climbed the stepladder and placed Jane Austen’s Emma ceremoniously on the topmost shelf of Al’s beautiful creation. In my memory there was also a champagne toast, but I may be making that up. But if there wasn’t, there should have been. And then everyone left, to allow me to continue my life’s greatest work uninterrupted.

A few weeks later, in London, Dad was out of hospital, recovering at home and learning the limits of life with only one-third of a stomach and minus some lymph nodes, while the powers-that-be tested the latter to see if and how far the cancer had spread. And in Norfolk all my fiction was in place, neatly filling the left-hand side of the room. There didn’t seem to be much – well, any – room left for new books, despite my brutal 5 per cent cull, but that seemed to be a problem that could be dealt with at a much later date. In the meantime I simply gazed in awe and adoration at the vision before me. Like a mother at a newborn baby, if she isn’t crippled by PND, I imagine.

Fiction-by-alphabetical-order-of-author is only the beginning, of course. Once I’d pushed Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity home, it was time to turn to non-fiction. Out came the picnic table again. Now a cleansing fire began to spread through my veins. I began to sort the innards of the remaining hundred or so boxes into subjects, which yielded some unexpected results. I knew there would be a lot of medieval social history and books about language and writing, but I didn’t realise I had amassed quite so much on other subjects.

What did the ancient Greeks tell us? ‘Know thyself’ – one of the three Delphic maxims inscribed in the forecourt to the Temple of Apollo. Well, all right then, I thought as I stood before the serried ranks of books on every subject that had ever snagged (however fleetingly) my attention over the previous four decades. All the stuff on language, words, writing: that can stay. I’m never going to tire of it. But if there’s one thing I know about myself by now, it is that I am never going to read any more about psychology. My interest was briefly sparked by a compulsory paper for the second half of my degree, but it was soon smothered by other things. And now, when I open my ancient textbooks and skim their still-pristine pages, I realise that I have reached the ‘But that’s just common sense!’ stage of life, and there’s no coming back from that. They can go.

So too can anything on the history of cinema. I’d love to know it all, but unless someone can plug a flash drive into my brain like they did for Keanu Reeves and his kung fu in The Matrix and download the lot in thirty seconds, I ain’t never gonna. The biographies of film stars and moguls from the Golden Age can stay – my appetite for tales of glamorous excess and insanity remained un-slaked – but the rest can find a place with real aficionados of the art.

And let’s take out a handkerchief and wave a slightly tearful but courageous goodbye to every history book about the eighteenth century that I have bought since my love for Jane Austen first took root. When it comes to historical facts, fashions, intrigues, politics, lives and lifestyles, I like medieval stuff and the Tudors, and that’s it. Everything was basically sorted by the Regency period. Once everyone’s got a parasol, your civilisation is in essence a self-perpetuating machine. Life loses texture. Give me the granularity of the proper beforetimes. Pigs and ploughshares, up to Protestant queens – that’s the stage I like.fn2

In fact everything from the eighteenth century and afterwards can go. I know enough about the Victorians and the Industrial Revolution. Reading about the World Wars ever again, now that I’m old enough to appreciate the magnitude of the suffering (and imagine sending my own son off to die, when he’s only a handful of years older than he is now), would break me. Let other people do their thing with them. They will never reach their full potential here.

I say everything can go. Obviously I keep a representative few from each subject, to look at in much the same way (I imagine) that a former jock looks at his high-school athletics trophies. They remind me of past pleasures, aptitudes, capacity long fled, and that these are all things we just have to come to terms with. Really I should release Jerry White’s London in the Eighteenth Century to fulfil its destiny elsewhere. But when I bought it, I was young enough to be: a) thrilled that I could afford a hardback; and b) still sure that I would move through the record of history in orderly, linear fashion, finding each era precisely as interesting as the one before, not knowing that the heart wants what it wants, or that mine would want to go backwards. It is a book that represents both financial and personal growth, at least one of which makes me very happy to recall indeed.

As I started to shelve my non-fiction, I discovered that I had amassed quite a few books in other categories too: Under the ‘New York’ heading there was Dorothy Parker, of course. She was a late discovery. I had possibly been put off by the number of times I heard a variant of her quote ‘Boys seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses’ in my youth. I wish I had come across her earlier. Not only would I have had years more pleasure in reading her, but if I’d known that it was possible to be bookish and a mess, then I might have let myself go a little more. But probably not. Almost exactly the same applies to Anita Loos. I fell in love with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and perhaps even more with But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, in my early thirties.

‘New York’ books comprised those by, and about, other Algonquin Round Tablers too, plus histories of the city, of the astonishingly rich, glamorous and/or bonkers families that dominated early Manhattan, and many more. I couldn’t remember the provenance of each one, but there wasn’t a single volume I regretted having.

Similarly, when it came to assembling the gardening section, I knew I had Beverley Nichols. And what joy his books about creating his gardens had given me. But other titles, such as Tulips by Anna Pavord and Kate Colquhoun’s biography of Joseph Paxton, were rediscovered. I did not appear to have given them conscious thought since I bought them, but I could feel now (see menopause/gardening above) the deep rightness of doing so.

And I had no idea that I had bought quite so many books about how money evolved and works – or is supposed to work – in the wake of the credit crunch, but I do look forward to learning, if a little belatedly, all they have to teach me.

And that, of course, is why we buy hundreds more books than we can ever read each year. It’s like laying down wine, but it’s you who changes and matures until you’re ready to consume your stores. And it suggests a deep, unsuspected order to at least your inner universe; in some way or other, whenever I bought Pavord or Christopher Lloyd or Beth Chatto, my subconscious knew me, and the latent interest in gardening within, better than I knew myself. How profoundly consoling is that? Even at the best of times I would have welcomed this sign of some form of meaning and logic to the universe, and as we waited to see whether Dad would recover fully from his operation and what the monthly scans thereafter would reveal, I clung to it like a drowning woman to driftwood.

And at the end of this process – spread over many, many evenings after food had been cooked, Zoom-snags unsnagged, schoolwork checked, theories about Transformers’ Energon requirements entertained, husbandly rants about office politics absorbed/ignored and gin taken – I stood back and admired my handiwork. Possibly for the first time since the baby had arrived, order had been brought out of chaos. An almost forgotten sense of peace settled in my soul. I could breathe. My shelves, my books, could breathe.

The core collection and its back-ups could be seen more clearly and more temptingly. I could attend to them better now and – at a time when it increasingly felt that no one else was bloody going to – they could attend to me. It’s much easier to match a book more precisely to your mood once they can all be seen in the round. I felt that an important support network had been patched, mended, made robust enough once more to catch me if I fell. And I had far more stuff about life in medieval villages and castles than I’d thought. The past and its pigs and ploughshares offered new succour. God, but books are great.

So, fiction organised alphabetically. Non-fiction divided into subject and then shelved according to – well, the names of those subjects, I suppose. But … but … And this is where things started to get a little blurry, where my mental furniture began to rearrange itself and my internal gimbals clank and whirr with increasing agitation. Because it was at this point that I began to question the rules, because it seemed to me that not all subjects were created equal. I had far more immediate interest in, for example, my books about language than in my books about sociology. I wanted to get to the latter eventually, of course (that’s why I bought the buggers), but it wouldn’t be for a while yet. And couldn’t my needs – shouldn’t my needs almost – be reflected in my library? This collection of books, alone amongst every other thing in the universe, could be arranged entirely to suit me.

I became momentarily light-headed at this realisation and had to cling to a batten for support. How often, after all, is such a power granted to an ordinary mortal? Actually it strikes me that ‘almost daily’ is the answer most men could legitimately give, but that’s a thought for another time. Let’s stay here, with me, a middle-aged wife and mother of one, in the middle of a book-lined room and an epiphany.

And so I began to deviate from set paths. I moved the language books down to a lower, more accessible shelf and put the sociology ones up top. I set up a ‘Books I Want to Read Next’ section, which included many proof copies, and took a moment to boggle at the fact that I had reached a point in my life and employment status when I am sent proof copies of books. That’s early copies of books! And free! I don’t think the thrill and the gratitude will ever leave me. My friend Sali Hughes, an author and beauty journalist who gets sent literally sackfuls of free make-up and skincare products from brands every week, says she still, twenty years in, appreciates every last piece of it. Blasé about our amazing good fortune we are not and, I suspect, never will be.

Perhaps I should put all the proofs together? But no. They were individuals to be evaluated accordingly, not lumped together by virtue of format. That would be unfair. They might rightly be upset. Did I mean that? Yes, I think I did.

I began to assert myself further. I gathered all my books on medieval history together, added my various editions of The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Piers Plowman, Chaucer and Mallory biographies and then – with a sudden rush of blood to the head – crossed over to fiction, plucked out anything set between 1300 and 1600 and threw them onto the pile, which I then firmly shelved above my desk, in pride of place and heedless of the boundaries being crossed. And I felt only exhilaration. And while I was over in fiction, I also took out Norah Lofts and promoted her to a study shelf too, in recognition of how much I love her and the beginning of the push for her literary due, with which I intend to fill my days once the child no longer needs feeding and the cat is dead. I pulled out all the dystopian fiction I had – because it is not authors that matter so much, when you are in the mood for a certain genre, it’s the genre itself – and put it all together on a bottom shelf. I briefly contemplated moving it into non-fiction, now that they pretty much counted as reference books, but in the end let it stay.

The To Be Read section became a mass of subdivisions, unlabelled but instantly known to me – recent, more recent, most recent, further back but not forgotten, further back still but not forgotten, furthest ba—Ooh, do I have that? Going to put that with the most recents! Actually, going to move it into the Books I Want to Read Next section entirely. Really do want to read that next.

I put all my Jane Austen books (fiction, biographies, critical works – oh, I was unstoppable now), my Brontë books (ditto – to hell with everything!) and my books about Bess of Hardwick together on one shelf, because I love and/or am fascinated by these women in the same way and degree. They live in a shared space in my head; now they would do likewise in my library. I added my surprisingly large collection of Robin Hood tellings, retellings and supporting apparatus to my medieval section because they all give me the same feeling of safety, security and continuity that gave me special comfort at the time.

For a goody-two-shoes who has spent a lifetime cowering in fear of punishment despite bending to authority’s every whim, this wild behaviour was indisputable evidence of the immense therapeutic power of the entire endeavour, and of the extraordinary personal growth I had achieved. Most rules are human-made – did you know? I didn’t. I can still feel my inner self uncurling and stretching itself before the warmth of this knowledge. Also, when I started sorting out the Books About Books section, I came across a biography of Melvil Dewey (of Dewey Decimal-system fame) that I’d completely forgotten I had, and it turns out he was an absolute shit. So my glow of satisfaction only shines brighter.

What a panacea the whole endeavour was. I’m not saying that sorting and shelving my entire book collection totally banished all thoughts, worry and anticipatory grief about Dad and his stomach, or the world and its novel coronavirus. But I am saying there could literally not have been conceived a better distraction from my sorrows, or balm to my soul, than the task of passing 10,000 beloved volumes – every one a cache of memories and delights to me – through my hands and up onto an appointed, appropriate place somewhere along 300 feet of bespoke, be-Farrow-&-Balled bookcase. Every evening, when the hurly-burly of working, cooking, home-schooling, Joe Wicks-ing, hours outside walking, calls back and forth to Mum and Dad (well, to Mum about Dad, who did not see the need to change his Trappist ways for mere cancer), food ordering and assorted other chores had been completed, and after shit o’clock (child tea-bath-story-bed-time) was over, out I would go to the annexe and fall gladly into a fugue state in which all that existed was me and my thousands of supportive and blessedly silent, unchanging friends.

Just as my system was chopped up and rearranged to its overall betterment, so, I am pleased to report, did Dad’s prove to have been. By the grace of God, science and socialised medicine, he improved and remained free of cancer. It was a miracle set in the middle of decidedly unmiraculous times and I still cry with gratitude every time I remember it.

By the end of lockdown, the library was in good order. I don’t say its organisation was complete, because one of the greatest realisations I had – probably as I was sub-subdividing my TBR bay – was that although its existence was indeed a lifetime’s ambition fulfilled, it is something that will never truly be finished. There will always be another reshuffling required, a better shelf to build (metaphorically; there is literally not another inch of actual wood than can be squeezed in here; wait – unless we build out at right-angles, into the middle of the room? hang the fuck on!), a further refinement to try, so that they better reflect the ranking of the entire 10,000 that live in my heart.

There was also, by the end of the pandemic, an unshelved pile of books in the corner that had helped me through the final stretch of those strange, shifting months of uncertainty. Crime novels. Or thrillers, if you prefer. I haven’t been able to find an agreed-upon distinction between them, and I have often found the same titles in different categories in bookshops, so let us ape the US Supreme Court Justice’s famous definition of porn and say we know it when we see it.

I can say that one feature that helps to define them, as it does perhaps all genre fiction, and the one that drew me to them like a desperate moth to the only flame in the darkness was that they … well, I want to say ‘privilege story over style’, but that inevitably suggests that they lack style, which is not true at all. So let’s say instead that they give greater weight and importance to plot and narrative than literary fiction tends to do.

There is an odd assumption generally that as people/readers get older, they don’t need or don’t want a story. The notion gains currency and starts to morph into the idea that providing a narrative with a beginning, middle and end – a problem, a conflict worked through, a resolution – is crass, the sign of an unsophisticated second-rate mind and/or craven mentality. Much better, reasons a certain kind of writer, to do away with all that babyish stuff and dwell entirely on the minutiae of your navel-gazing characters’ inner worlds, or – at the other end of the scale – talk in great, sweeping terms about the state of the nation, constructing laborious analogies and allegories for everything as you go.

Which, you know, is fine. Everybody should write what they want to write, read what they want to read – this is the way to tranquillity. I like to read a pure ‘ideas’ novel now and then, or a mood-piece. It gives me the same feeling as when I occasionally try to do my son’s maths homework, now that he is in secondary school. Rusty, underused parts of my brain have to crank up and put themselves into motion and it feels interesting, and definitely good for them and me.

But the idea that jettisoning plot is the mark of a Serious Writer – that extra plaudits go to those who have chosen not to do the very hard thing that ‘lesser’ authors make sure they deliver – has always struck me as odd. It’s the equivalent of thinking Ginger Rogers is a worse dancer than Fred Astaire because she did it all backwards and in high heels. It makes no logical sense.

The prejudice runs deep, though. Even writers internalise variants of it. I’m friends with a brilliantly successful novelist who writes lush, beautiful, successful novels that garner both critical and public praise, that thrum with emotion and intelligence and are full of plot as well as ideas. She is one of the cleverest and most interesting people I’ve ever met – and she still wasted a year of her precious writing life seeing if she could produce a ‘proper’ book: a lean, virtually plotless anatomisation of a character’s Inner Life and Thoughts. Because … well, because, she became convinced, this is what she had to do to pay her literary dues, to be accepted as a ‘real’ writer, before she could return to her ‘self-indulgent’ novels that, amongst many, many other things, dare to tell a story.

Sneering at genre fiction because it bothers to provide a story is ridiculous. Even more ridiculous is assuming that because it is genre fiction it provides only a story. The best in the business combine immaculate and propulsive plotting with convincing characters, psychological acuity, emotional nuance, social commentary and everything else you can think of, but generally with a lighter touch and less of a need to show off how clever they’re being.

I’m sorry. This is all because I’ve read two Ottessa Moshfeghs back-to-back and have been driven to fury. Let’s call a halt and let me calm down.

I say that thrillers helped me through those months. I mean ‘rapidly formed a mental pillar upon which, along with the library project, my sanity had come to depend, as all the ordinary ones had fallen away’. I had until this point been someone who read perhaps two or three crime novels/thrillers a year – generally the most obvious ones. Silence of the Lambs in 1991, when the film came out. John Grisham when everybody discovered John Grisham. The Da Vinci Code, of course, and so on. I have no natural affinity with them because I am not one of life’s problem-solvers. I am far too passive and lazy. I will put up with a mystery, work around it, wish like hell it wasn’t there, but solve it? No. It’s why I can’t see the appeal of crossword puzzles. Why have you put these obstacles – clues, you say? okay, whatever – in my way? I feel thrillers really belong to those whose minds work in quite the opposite way. To people who love to work things out: get a jump on the protagonist, see if they can get there faster than the author intended, really drill down, pay attention to all the telling details and sift them from the red herrings.

Come lockdown, I flung such niceties of feeling out of the window and started tearing fast and furiously through a fistful of thrillers a week. I don’t think I have ever read so hungrily, so needily. Such perfect fare for the times: a pile-driving plot guaranteed to hold your attention and distract you from anxious, dismal, narrow and narrowing reality; new people to meet (a good crime story or thriller will present you with some of the most instantly credible characters you could hope for, because there is too much going on to fanny about with delicate psychological traceries and personalities revealed by the manner of replacing a teacup and musing upon the eyelashes of a sleeping child – crime writers do it all in quick, firm strokes that bring them to pulsing, recognisable life and then get on with the job in hand; their novels are an illustration of need, power and skill of distillation as recognised in Blaise Pascal’s famous apology to his correspondent, ‘I am sorry this letter is so long. If I’d had more time, it would have been shorter’). And of course, most vitally of all, thrillers offer resolution, catharsis, justice. Good will win out over bad – not wholly, not without compromise, not without personal ramifications in later books for the detective, PI or ordinary Joe forced by circumstance to become a protagonist and hero perhaps, but in a way decisive enough to satisfy the reader in a manner that real life rarely does. It’s a contract that you don’t hesitate to sign, especially when the world’s gone mad.

I was not alone in this hunger, naturally, any more than I had been in my earlier craving for dystopian resonance. I know this partly from actual statistics: various surveys and polls showed that people were not only reading more during lockdown (up from three-and-a-half hours a week on average to six, according to one), but that by a few months into lockdown the comforts of crime were the first port of call for a large proportion of them. And I know it partly from personal experience. Twitter (which, before it went entirely to hell, I loved for providing me with exactly the right mixture of connection and yet distance from my fellow man) was full of pleas for advice on what to read next, and equally brimming with recommendations. I even became part of a messaging group that had the same tastes and provided a filtering service for one another. It was a measure of quite how well suited we were that it never evolved into a book club. Exchanges ran roughly thus throughout:

Just read The Burning. You would like, I think.

Thanks. Will read.

Did you enjoy?

Brilliant, thank you. Have done rest of series. What next?

Blood Orange.

Thanks. Will read.

And that is how I became educated in the ways of Jane Casey, Harriet Tyce, Paula Hawkins, Gillian Flynn, Louise Candlish, the exquisitely detailed and acute Tana French, Gillian McAllister, Lucys Foley and Atkins, Catherine Ryan Howard, Sophie Hannah, Lisa Jewell, Susie Steiner and – for particularly stressful times when something a little stronger and bloodier was called for – Lisa Gardner and Karin Slaughter, with the latter turning out, fairly incredibly, not to be a pseudonym.

It took me a while to notice that all the recommended authors were women. Perhaps this was less surprising in light of the fact that our message group was all-female, but still … you’d have expected some variation in there, wouldn’t you? There were no rules about recommendations, and none of us were anti-men or on a mission to redress any historical wrongs at the time (dealing with a global and paternal health crisis was quite enough to be going on with, thank you). And yet – there it was, and it did make an indefinable kind of sense to me. It felt right.

Crime-writing was, as with most things, originally a male preserve. Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is generally thought to be the first modern detective story (the word ‘detective’ itself only came into use in English in the 1840s, first as an adjective, then as the noun we know todayfn3), with Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone becoming the first detective novel (after its serialisation in Charles Dickens’ journal All the Year Round) in 1868. The genre really took off, however, with – I know: you know already, it’s elementary – Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. A Study in Scarlet came out in 1887 and three more novels and fifty-six short stories followed before the last was published in 1927. Conan Doyle actually deliberately killed off his wildly popular detective just six years after he first appeared, so that his creator could concentrate on the historical novels he wanted to write. Conan Doyle sent Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls with his arch-enemy Moriarty in the 1903 short story ‘The Final Problem’. But such was the public outcry that he had to resurrect him. He reappears in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I cannot shift the mental image of poor Arthur dragging his plus-foured bum over to his desk and turning, with one last longing look at his plot notes about whatever era/monarch/war campaign had piqued his writerly interest, towards his typewriter and, muttering ‘FFS’ under his moustache, wearily beginning to bash out a first draft of what the people wanted. ‘There was a bloody great dog, all right …?’

To be fair, when the women turn up, they really turn up. The 1920s gave us Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey, who were the mainstays that gave the next twenty years the soubriquet of the ‘Golden Age of Detective Fiction’.

Now here I have a terrible confession to make. I have never read an Agatha Christie. I had, somehow, never come across her in my youth, and so the first time I became properly aware of her was through the BBC Poirot series and ‘le monsieur’ and his ‘leetle grey cells’ made me want to put my fist through the telly. Adaptation-induced prejudice is the stupidest reason on Earth to avoid a book (or books), and yet so powerful a hold does my Suchet-aversion have on me that I have not yet managed to overcome it even slightly, and in fact have let it put me off reading the Marples too, and the stand-alones.

I am an idiot. I know. I know and I’m working on it, now that the whole thriller/crime/mystery world is opening up to me. But in lockdown I was not looking for that cosy crime vibe. Possibly the last thing I needed, as I hunkered down in a picturesque English village that seemed to offer the last vestige of safety as the world went to hell around us, were writers that depended on splintering that security into a thousand tiny pieces, so that their leetle Belgians or suave ruminators (I managed one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, Have His Carcase), or assorted other professional or amateur detectives, could put them back together again over a succinct 250 pages or so.

Fortunately, while the Brits were specialising in cosy crime, the Americans were ramping things up. Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled 1930s detective fiction produced Raymond Carver’s harder-boiled output of the 1940s, then full-fledged noir (both fed and cannibalised by film), and on into bleaker and bloodier branches that used and discarded tropes in more and less sophisticated ways, courtesy of Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane and many, many more.

It’s not that I never read men (please see my aforementioned and abiding love for Lee Child and Jack Reacher). And when I do, I enjoy them greatly. But my natural, if subconscious (I have never knowingly chosen any book by a woman over that of a man, or vice versa, in any genre), inclination is towards the distaff. It is partly a matter of trust. I trust, at some visceral level, that a female author is treating the violence – particularly towards any female characters – with the respect it deserves. That they are not (to be a bit crude for a moment) getting off on it. I mean, I’m absolutely sure that most male authors aren’t, either. But not as sure as I am about the female ones.

There is also the ineffable sense in the female writers’ books that violence is not an anomalous outrage, as it appears elsewhere. There is an understanding that, actually, it is everywhere and the visible, inciting incidents of the stories are not one-offs to be righted by a solitary avenging figure bringing the universe into alignment. They are just bubblings-over of the hostilities and rage simmering under normal life everywhere. It recognises the degree and kind of fear that women live with and takes that understanding, that mood, as its departure point. Whatever their superficial location – Dublin, London, east coast, west coast – they are set in my world. And when I read them I feel joined to the author (as well as the characters she has created) by a mutual need for the resolution and catharsis we so often lack in real life.

I’m talking in broad-brush terms, of course. There are exceptions to the rules on both sides. And perhaps I am reading more into books that I know are by women than is actually there (and failing to do so with the blokes’).

On the other hand, when you come across some of the published writing by men attempting to get inside the heads of female characters, you really wonder if you’re not giving them too much credit already. There is a wonderful collection of examples on Twitter, in a thread that periodically resurfaces when another particularly demented example needs adding, called #MenWritingWomen. There’s Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, in which a lady called Deety is having some negative feelings. ‘Deety was staring down at the corpse and did not look happy – her nipples were down flat … My darling keeps her feelings out of her face, mostly – but those pretty pink spigots are barometers of her morale.’ Me and my spigots disagree that this is how things work. But perhaps she is related to Jeffrey Eugenides’ character in The Marriage Plot, who is also upset. We know this because ‘Her breasts, of which she was normally proud, had withdrawn into themselves, as if depressed.’ I am becoming more depressed with every word, but my breasts seem to be okay so far. Still, perhaps I should follow James Patterson’s advice in The Coast-to-Coast Murders as to how to improve my mood, à la one character bolstering herself for another day’s work ahead: ‘At least my boobs looked good. I gave the nips a tweak. I could always count on the girls.’ In Stuart Woods’ Desperate Measures a dead lady is discovered to have a tiny handbag in her vagina, ‘just big enough to hold her driver’s license, a credit card and a few bucks’. To be fair, this is not an attempt to enter the mind of a female character. But my shifting, stirring spigots and retracting boobs tell me it does not augur well if, and when, he ventures towards the lady’s cranium.

This is the extreme end of the disconnect between the sexes, of course (though examples clustering not nearly far enough from that end of the spectrum can be found in Stephen King, John le Carré and many other rightly esteemed and respectable writers). But the experience, in milder form, is an almost constant one if you are a female reader. From the moment you can read (or indeed follow a television programme or a film) you are asked more often than not to identify with a male character. It doesn’t take much adjustment when you’re young – a tiny boy’s adventures and perspective on life are not that different from a tiny girl’s – and your training to make the mental shift over the years, to get yourself out of the way, take on the view of the man as standard (the one from which all others deviate over the years) is so quiet, so consistent and so in keeping with all the other messages you’re receiving from the world about your secondary status and innate malleability that performing such a function soon feels as natural and unremarkable as breathing.

But when something different comes along that doesn’t require you to make that leap, however automatic it has come to be, you notice. It’s like when you inherit someone else’s office chair and it feels perfectly fine, until weeks or months later you make some tiny adjustment and suddenly your sitting-life is transformed. Who knew this level of ease was possible!

Consciousness-of-kind is real, and it is a real comfort. And with crime fiction (and crime fiction as a refuge in times of crisis particularly), it turns out that I like to be in the company of those who stand where I stand. Which is as close to well-lit areas as possible, keys poking out of fisted hand and two nines already dialled on my phone, just in case.

So lockdown wore on. And on. And on. My piles of Jewell, French, Slaughter et al. grew around me. ‘You look,’ said my husband when he came into my study one day, ‘as though you’re building a cave. Or rather,’ as he looked around the book-lined room, ‘a cave within a cave.’

I was. I had to do something. There was much talk at the time about how hard lockdown was for extroverts, even in its loosening form, which still precluded almost all proper socialising. And when I think that it was the equivalent for them of me being forced to go out every single night for months on end, I feel for them, I do. But let me tell you: introverts trapped with their families were having no fun, either.

Did you know there was an increase in cats treated for depression during lockdown because they couldn’t handle their owners being around all the time? I am, in all senses, a cat person.

I started to go very quietly out of my mind. I mean: someone was there, either right in my face, needing or wanting something from me (be it food, chat, education, more food, company, opinions or yet more food), or not nearly far enough away for their presence not to be felt and act as an imminent threat to peace all the time. All the time. All. The. Time. There was just no way to get far enough away for long enough to restore my depleting resources, and soon I was running on fumes. It was a more all-encompassing version of when I had become deranged after having my baby because I didn’t have enough time to read. Unfortunately this time even my mother couldn’t do anything about my predicament, so I continued to withdraw into silence, increased my time spent in the loo and screamed internally in fury and despair when anyone approached me with human interaction in mind (our two cats, in all their mighty indifference, by the way, I came to love without limits).

Debbie Tung’s Quiet Girl in a Noisy World: An Introvert’s Story saved my sanity. Almost certainly my marriage too, and probably my hitherto-unblemished status as a non-murderer also.

Records show that I ordered it from Amazon, but I don’t remember how I found it. I think by that point I was suffering some measure of depression and my memories are consequently murky. I think I was looking – for the first time in my stupid, stubborn life – for a self-help book that would give me some clues and pointers on how to deal with the fact that I could no longer bear people, even though there were hardly any people around. I suspect this proved a small target to hit and I started to look more widely for books about introversion. What surprises me is that I didn’t choose something like Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking or Sara Maitland’s A Book of Silence (both of which I was aware of), but lit instead upon Tung’s miniature biography, which is told in illustrations. She and others refer to it as a comic, but when you are as old as I am, this conjures up a very specific image of … well, comics, dammit. The Beano, The Dandy, Bunty – comics! And it’s not that. But it’s not a graphic novel, either, because: a) it’s non-fiction; and b) there’s no narrative. It’s a series of vignettes capturing the very essence of introvert life and laying out our shared mentality so cleanly, clearly and identifiably that I fell upon it and wept.

As you are probably aware by now, I am primarily a words person. If a picture is worth a thousand of them, I always thought, I’ll happily do the reading. I don’t have much visual sense or appreciation. A beautiful sentence can fill me with joy, but rarely so a picture of any kind. It is a great lack, but it seems to be how I’m made, and although I’ve tried to inculcate some feeling and sensitivity towards various forms of non-written art over the years, the effort seems to have been in vain. So Quiet Girl was my first-ever graphic-anything. And every frame was worth a million words. There I was, in each one. Silently, deeply recognised; silently, deeply comforted. You could read this book, I thought, and know me. More importantly, you would know that I wasn’t simply being a stroppy cow when I had no words left to chatter with in the evening. You would know I didn’t want to be uncommunicative, but that my channels were collapsing under strain. You would know that I wasn’t shutting down out of choice, but out of necessity. You would know, above all, that I was one of a known type, not simply a turd of a person.

I carried that book around with me like a child with a teddy bear. My comfort and my mainstay. I made Christopher read it. I jabbed at particularly accurate pages and cried, ‘This! This, though! This, see!’ It helped, a bit. It helped enough. And it was a valuable and wonderful reminder that when it comes to books – and possibly art, and possibly life – there is always more to discover and nothing to dismiss. You are unlikely truly to hate or ‘not get’ any whole field of human endeavour. You probably just haven’t found the right key for the lock yet.

Anyway. In the meantime, fellow introverts – hie yourselves to Debbie Tung’s Quiet Girl. You need never be alone again. But in a good way.

The increase in book-buying under lockdown (and perhaps more importantly the reports of increased hours spent reading, which are not quite the same thing) to my mind prove one simple truth about the activity: reading functions not just as an escape from life but into others. We each only have one allotted span, one temperament, one upbringing, one set of experiences. To get more than you can accrue by yourself alone (however lively, driven or ambitious you are), you have to read. The physical constraints we lived under for two years drove that home like nothing else has ever done or could ever have. The urge to cheat time and space grew like never before. How could it not?

My son had free run of my children’s book collection, of course (and Christopher’s, though that was limited to the terribly serious non-fiction members of the Ladybird guard), but of course, in the way typical of children, he opted almost entirely for audiobooks instead. I had been trying to keep them apart (except on long car journeys, to enable my travel-sickness-prone child to pass the time in a manner that would not fill the back seat with vomit). Why? Well, for several reasons, some more justifiable than others.

The first: simple Luddite prejudice. Anything involving setting up an online account and downloading things is anathema to me. I had taught him to open a book the right way. I felt this should be enough. Second: less specific prejudice. Listening to an audiobook is not reading – as you can see from the fact that we call it ‘listening’ to an audiobook. Listening, especially when you are little, is easier than reading, and I worried that it would drive a wedge between him and the harder thing before he had time to become fully at ease with it. Also, if you’re not seeing the words on the page, do you learn how to spell and punctuate properly? Moreover, when we read we automatically, and mostly without realising it, do a lot of backtracking – between 10 and 15 per cent of our eye movements are quick checkings-back over what we have just taken in, presumably as an aid to comprehension and absorption. And that’s aside from all the conscious times when we reread to make sense of a complicated sentence that we know we haven’t understood, or go back over a beautiful one we want to savour. You might occasionally do the latter by rewinding an audiobook, but not as often or as easily as you would with a book (or e-book). And the automatic mini-consolidations cannot take place at all.

In the same way, if your mind wanders while reading a book, it is easy to go back and find the place you parted company and pick up again. With an audiobook it is far more difficult and you are far more likely – especially if you are, say, eight – not to bother. Plus there is the fact that I – 50 per cent of his DNA – am bad at audiobooks. My attention drifts almost as much as it does when I’m listening to the radio. I don’t seem to be able to get immersed in the story, be transported. My experience remains superficial. What if he was the same?

I say we lost the battle. It was more of a light skirmish. I am not so far gone that I truly believe that, in the grand scheme of things, much harm is going to come to a child who listens to audiobooks more than he reads real books (though I reserve the right to call real books ‘real books’). He solved the backtracking problem by having the reflexes of an eight-year-old and the dexterity of a digital native, and listened and re-listened to them with such avidity that even I could not argue against his state of full and delighted absorption. I’m glad he loved the entirety of the Narnia Chronicles and Diana Wynne Jones as much as he did, and I loved to hear him laugh his way through Maz Evans’ Who Let the Gods Out, whatever format it came in. At the same time it’s just another log to drag over to the growing bonfire of maternal ideals and watch with a sigh as it burns. But we have some lovely conversations about the White Witch’s malevolence, Howl’s moving castle and those crazy gods around the crackling flames.

And whatever else happens, I will still have my – literally my – library. There is simply nothing like walking in there and feeling a deep peace settle in my soul, no matter what life is throwing at me outside its four book-lined walls. I think part of me really does believe that all the answers are here.

11

Like Father, Like Daughter: On Dad

Lockdown eventually ended and normality reasserted itself. A normality in which I no longer kissed my parents on the mouth, just in case, and got shouted at by strangers for still wearing a mask on the Tube. A normality in which people were grieving for loved ones who had died unnecessarily, mourning broken relationships that might have survived if they hadn’t been put under extraordinary, unprecedented pressure, and generally trying to process the experience of having lived for two years in a state of emergency.

I got back to London, to work, to taking the child to actual school in an actual building, and started writing this book. Domestic equilibrium, at least, was restored.

Then in late 2022, at the beginning of December, something strange started happening with Dad. He had been frail for some time and was in chronic, though almost entirely unmentioned, pain from arthritis and other infuriatingly untreatable conditions, but now he started forgetting how to work his computer, and becoming a little more hesitant and confused every day by ordinary things. He was still entirely himself, but eventually the things he forgot how to do included walking, so he took to his bed, and Mum – with help from my sister and valiant attempts at the same from me – nursed him from there. Shortly before Christmas it became clear that he had to go into hospital, where he was diagnosed with a subdural haematoma.

‘I suppose we’ll have to stop shouting at you for being daft then,’ said Mum.

My sister pointed out that, after nearly sixty years, such a sudden cessation would probably only disorientate him more.

‘Good point,’ said Dad. ‘Good point.’ On one of his better, most lucid days, he signed all the forms you need to sign when you are eighty-one and ready to go, in order to prevent doctors trying to treat you if, and when, things start heading south.

After Christmas – and a bout of Covid, which ratcheted up the tension no end, but through which Dad actually passed without trouble – he went into a local nursing home. It was as good as it could be, which is to say that it saw us praying every day that when it was our turn to go, we would pass away peacefully in our own beds and would gladly euthanise ourselves to do so.

Mum visited every day, I visited most days, and Emily came up from Devon and stayed for as long as she could each time. It was in the home that Dad finally lost the ability to read, and the days – and nights, because he didn’t sleep well – became intolerably long. We did try reading to him (he couldn’t work the iPad well enough to manage audiobooks), but although on good days he could follow a newspaper article, anything longer was beyond him. He preferred to listen to our daft conversations and chime in when he could. And when he got too tired for that, he would just lie and gaze happily at Mum. She had been, after all – for fifty years and more – always his favourite story.

But when we couldn’t be there, Dad was lonely and unhappy – uncomplainingly, of course, but we knew – and we were afraid that he would have to go on like that for years, but three weeks after he arrived, I got a phone call one evening from one of the staff to say that his breathing had changed markedly and perhaps we would like to come in. Five minutes later she called back to say that she was sorry, but that he had died. ‘But you only called me five minutes ago,’ I said, because you say only sensible things at such a time. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, and I thanked her and put the phone down.

Emily was back in Devon, so Mum and I went together to see Dad that night. The next morning, when he had been taken away by the people who take your people away, we went back to pick up his stuff. Dressing gown, toilet bag, little radio, cardigan that I pressed my face into, before I put it in the suddenly misnomered Sainsbury’s Bag for Life, and the books that had come with him from the hospital when he was still able to enjoy them. As there had always been, for at least as long as I had been old enough to keep interested track, there was a theatrical biography (Jonathan Croall’s on Sybil Thorndike) and a thriller (Simon Mayo’s Tick Tock). I suddenly realised that I didn’t know whether Dad read a bit of each one every night or if he alternated between them – one night theatre, the next night thrills – and now I would never be able to ask him. I had to put my face in his cardigan again.

He had left detailed instructions for his funeral – including where to source the pies (Bowen Pies, Chorley, in case you’re ever in need – hungry, I mean, not necessarily catering for a wake) and had written a farewell speech for his best friend, Phil, to read out on his behalf, so that was all quite simple.

And then – well, then you have to get on with life without them, don’t you?

Grief is an intensifier. It doesn’t often – despite what films and television would have you believe – cause you to act massively out of character. Like motherhood or any other massive life upheaval, its actual effect is to strip away the nonsense and leave your essential nature, your core, not just intact but now unobscured by everyday concerns and frivolities.

So all in all, it was no real surprise to find myself, in the immediate weeks after Dad’s death, flinging myself into books. I would have done so literally, if I could. I wanted to gather my physical books into a wall – or better yet, another cave – around me that would both protect me from this new reality and let me cry in peace within it. Failing that, I took metaphorical/mental refuge in them instead.

I read like I had never read before. I read like a chain-smoker smokes, turning the last page of one book and immediately opening up the cover of another. I had books lined up before me to make sure I didn’t go a moment without. None of my usual leisurely picking and choosing, reading blurbs and reviews, feeling my way into what would best suit my mood. Because my mood was simple, uniform and deeply miserable, and what I needed was new stories and characters ceaselessly streaming into my cortex and banishing, for as many seconds at a time as they could, the fact that outside those pages the unforgiving real world no longer had the gentle, wry, witty form of my dad in it.

Every moment that I was not inescapably occupied (with work, with Mum, with making sure life carried on as normally as possible for my son), I was reading. And when I was vitally occupied, I was longing to read, burning to in a way I hadn’t properly felt since I was a child. It felt so odd to have arrived at the same place via sorrow, rather than joy. Adulthood sure can be the pits sometimes.

Anyway it was all odd, and difficult, and my heart goes out to people grieving harder and more complicated losses than that of an elderly father who went peacefully, and on his own terms, when it was absolutely time to go.

The retreat from the world didn’t last as long as I had expected. I felt at first like I would be floored for ever. But now – and I’m writing this six months later – I spend a lot of the time feeling bad that I don’t feel worse in the absence of this man whom I, quietly but unreservedly, loved so much, who knew me so well and who loved me, even more quietly but just as unreservedly, right back. But it’s because I still feel him with me – which, as someone with no religious faith and no goddamn spiritual side either, I really did not expect. But he’s there. Or it’s there; or something’s there anyway. I do really feel, as the poem has it, that he has only gone into the next room. Mum says it’s because we are so much alike. This evolution of the exasperated cry ‘You’re exactly like your father!’, when she found me next to some set chore abandoned because I’d been distracted by a book, which pursued me throughout my childhood, both charms and grieves me. But I hold on to the idea that it’s true.

And I have discovered romance. Not in real life, obviously. Yuck. But the genre, once forsworn, is now very necessary to me. Once I stopped feeling quite like I would be floored for ever, I started being drawn towards books with light, bright covers that promised distraction, uplift and – above all – a happy ending. I realise this is not a psychologically complex phenomenon. But however obvious the route, the comfort they offered was real and wonderful. Especially as the first three I came across – Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, Stephanie Butland’s Lost for Words and Harriet Evans’ Happily Ever After – were all about the world of books, bookworms and bookshops and formed the perfect bridge to cross into this new, unexplored region.

There also seemed to have been, in the twenty-odd years since I had last surveyed the landscape, a move away from the ditsy/hot-mess heroines that sprang up post-Bridget Jones (amongst those seeking to cash in, rather than those who had already been ploughing their own furrows, but now with more success as the audience opened up). The new generation of protagonists all had their problems – particularly Loveday Cardew, whose emotional withdrawal after her repeated battering by life is carefully and compassionately depicted by Butland and further explored, with great consistency and credibility, in the sequel Found in a Bookshop – but they weren’t chaotic collections of neediness and neuroses held together by the offices of devoted friends, who in real life would have been well within their rights to have deleted these succubi from their phones years ago. They were properly funny, properly thoughtful, capable – often even maintaining professional standards day in, day out at the office! – and generally life-affirming, rather than life-depleting, people to hang out with. I felt like introducing them to some of the long-suffering best friends in earlier books. ‘Look, this is what you deserve! Enjoy!’

It was a reminder – though I do try to stay aware of it anyway – never to write off any field, any genre, for ever, for the simple reason that even if it doesn’t evolve (and sometimes, as with the hot messes above, it does), you do. You toughen up a bit here, break down a bit there, learn this, rediscover that, have children, have cancer, move jobs, move countries, are opened up to more experiences, more possibilities, live through more world events, governments, relationships, McDonald’s menus, Kardashian exploits and iterations of the Strictly Come Dancing panel – all these things change you and change what you need, what you want and what you bring to previously discarded books, when you pick them up again.

Romantic/popular/commercial fiction, whatever you want to call it, picked me up on bad days, brushed me down and sent me off again with a loving pat to get through the next few hours, days, weeks until I collapsed back into its arms again. It’s a trust fall. The writers of commercial fiction know their audience, are often part of that audience (Evans is a lifelong fan of Georgette Heyer, for example, and I suspect none has come to the job without an early affinity with the genre and an absorption of its rules, both the obvious and the ineffable, into their bones) and consider it their duty to deliver. I think of them now like a quieter, more studious version of the A-Team, except that if you have a problem, if no one else can help (or if you have soaked all the available shoulders with tears and need to give them a bit of time to dry out), you can always find them, these soldiers of romantic fortune.

And when I need further bolstering – when, for example, I reach that stage of grief everyone passes through at some point, where it starts to feel absolutely infuriating that your loved one is still dead, when you have missed them quite enough, they have proved that their absence really is a bad thing and it really is time that they came back, because carrying on like this is too hard, really beyond a joke – I stop buying new books and look to my library shelves. Not just the children’s section, though of course that is where any number of my strongest and favourite memories of Dad reside.

As anyone who has read Bookworm will know, Dad made sure I had all the classics, for a start, from the Narnia chronicles to Tom Sawyer. But there are so many others alongside them too.

Catherine Storr’s Lucy books (of course!), which along with Jill Tomlinson’s The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark were the ones that ushered me across the threshold of independent reading. I love to think of the moment Dad must have seen them on the shelf in Foyles on the way home from work, or maybe Dillons, and bought them because he had a Lucy at home, like so many other fathers must have done before and since. Dad read them all to me, but the rereads (and rereads and rereads) were all my own work. Although it must be said that when I look at the two Lucy books now (one called Lucy, one called Lucy Runs Away, and the latter was by far my favourite) I also remember not confining myself to enjoying the main character’s name, but also declining (not outwardly – passive resistance has ever been my game) to read Storr’s more famous Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf on the grounds that nothing with a Polly in it instead could ever be as good.

I think of this – and of the moment, much later in life, when I rejected a book because it had marigolds on the cover, and I can’t stand marigolds – whenever I get a press release from a publisher or, latterly, when I am sitting with marketing teams and designers trying to make decisions about my own covers and titles. And I have to stop myself gibbering in terror or throwing myself out of the window in despair at all the mad, unknown, tiny, impossible-to-predict, fool prejudices that may lead a potential reader to reject a book out of hand.

Elsewhere there are the Bullerby children. Dad bought me a slim set of tales entitled – and, probably wisely, about – The Six Bullerby Children for (appropriately enough) my sixth birthday. I fell on them eagerly because I already had and loved another book by the author, Astrid Lindgren, called Lotta, about a kindergartener with a Ramona Quimbyish spirit, a stubborn insistence that her cuddly toy pig was a bear, and a penchant for plastering the windows of trains with salami from her sandwiches because ‘it sticks better than meatballs’. Oh, to be young and foolish again, I laughed wryly to myself.

The Six Bullerby Children, written for and about slightly older children who are less given to faux pas, was even better. It related in clear but never condescending prose the high jinks and domestic adventures of Lisa and her older brothers Pip and Lars, the sisters Britta and Anna, and an only child, Olaf.fn1 They live on three neighbouring farms that comprise the entirety of the tiny Swedish village of Bullerby. It makes you happy just to say the name, doesn’t it? Such a lovely rounded, friendly sound, punctuated by little detonations of delight – Bullerby! I was obsessed with the children’s adventures (which were built around a sweet tranquillity at the heart of their lives). When for Christmas a few months later I received the omnibus edition containing its sequels, Cherry Time at Bullerby (Bullerby!) and Happy Days at Bullerby (Bullerby!), I thought life had well and truly peaked. A dozen new stories about Scandinavia’s answer to Milly-Molly-Mandy. A very heaven.

Together the books cover about a year in the children’s lives, so all the standard excitements are there – birthdays, Christmas time, Easter-egg hunting, welcoming in the New Year – and given a fresh twist for the British reader by the addition of Swedish trimmings. But it was the tales about their ordinary (and yet so extraordinary!) life in between that I hungered for most. Imagine having turnip-thinning as one of your chores! Imagine being allowed to sleep in a barn because there are six of you, and because your parents constitute your entire village and it’s perfectly safe! Imagine taking shelter, when the heavens open one day during turnip-thinning, in Old Kristina’s house further past the fields, and her cat has just had kittens and you get to take one home per family, and your parents let you keep them because the countryside is like that, I guess! I couldn’t imagine anything better; at least until the chapter about lambing season, in which Lisa is given a lamb to look after when its mother’s milk fails.

The real magic of the books, the enduring charm, I think now, lies in the detail and the seriousness with which the childish pursuits are treated. In one chapter Olaf has a loose tooth and everyone gathers in convocation to decide on the best method of extraction. Another revolves around the girls overhearing the boys’ secret rituals for opening their mysterious Chest of the Wizards. It is largely full of the children’s lost baby teeth, but Lindgren never mocks what every child knows to be a still-august repository. And although I first read about Lisa moving into a bedroom of her own in a chapter called ‘My Happiest Birthday’ more than forty years ago now, I still remember the moment when she puts her collection of bookmarks on her shelf, ready to swap at school the next day. ‘But my 20 special bookmarks,’ she adds, ‘I wouldn’t swap with anyone. My best one was a large angel with a pink dress and wings.’ In the creation of an elite corps of beloved bookmarks is the perfect evocation of the seven-year-old mind.

The Bullerby children, however, barely get a look-in in any summary of their prolific creator’s life or work. Astrid Lindgren was, and remains, more than twenty years after her death, one of the most translated authors in the world, having sold more than 170 million copies of her books. The most financially-valuable prize in children’s publishing bears her name, and when she died in 2002 Sweden gave her what amounted virtually to a state funeral, in recognition of her work not only as a children’s writer of exceptional talent over nearly half a century, but as an activist in children’s and animal rights.

Lindgren’s most famous creation for children was her first. In 1944, soon after the publication of her debut novel for adults (The Confidences of Britt Mari), she sprained her foot and was confined to bed. To pass the time, she started writing down the bedtime stories she had made up for her daughter Karin a few years before, when the child herself was bedbound with pneumonia. Karin had asked her, out of the blue, to tell her a story about a girl whose name she had just made up: Pippi Långstrump. Or, as the English-speaking world would come to know her, shortly after the book was published the next year to instant acclaim, Pippi Longstocking.

Pippi Longstocking is a carrot-haired semi-orphan who lives with her monkey and her horse and is strong enough to lift the latter with one hand. She is practical, independent, fiery, a brilliant swimmer and utterly exhausting.

I was a child who lacked the lawless spirit required to respond to the energetic adventures of Pippi Longstocking as she fought off the local villagers’ well-intentioned efforts to get her to calm down, conform and go to school. I liked order. I liked peace. I disliked anyone who would seek to thwart me as I sought these twin ideals. In fact when I recall my early years, it sometimes seems to me that I must have been born nine-tenths bread-pudding.

When I reread Pippi now, however, I am glad that normal, anarchically inclined children have always been in the majority, and that Pippi has been revered across the lands since her inception in 1945. From my vantage point as an experienced reader, I appreciate her as a heroine of rare and genuine idiosyncrasy, and the kind of bold, free spirit I would like all children – especially girls – to find in their books. And as a weary middle-aged woman/borderline hag, I find Pippi’s anarchic energy and refusal to mould herself to the shape of the world revivifying. When the good little girl and boy next door first meet her, Pippi is walking backwards down the street and they ask her why (it is so that she doesn’t have to turn round when she gets home). These days when Pippi replies, ‘Why am I walking backwards? It’s a free country, isn’t it? Can’t I walk as I please?’ I don’t side with Tommy and Annika and wish for the restoration of order. I cheer Pippi on, and wish there was more room in my life for walking backwards when I felt like it; and I feel glad that enough people appreciated her sufficiently to keep her in print and alive long enough for me to come to my senses too.

But Dad is there in lots of other books too. Murphy’s Boy – all the way over in adult, non-fiction, look! – by Torey Hayden was my first-ever true-life tale. I tried to buy it after seeing the film based on it (Trapped in Silence, starring Marsha Mason and a very young Kiefer Sutherland, fact-fans), about a neglected child who refused to speak or communicate via other means in the wake of his abuse and was eventually ‘saved’ by psychologist Hayden, who specialised in the phenomenon of elective mutism. It could be seen as a forerunner of the misery memoir (and indeed many of Hayden’s other books were packaged or re-packaged as that, when the David Pelzer-led trend took off in the mid-1990s), but, like most forerunners of popular trends, it is much better than the thing it became – written with a compassionate but clear eye, redemptive and uplifting, but without recourse to easy answers and written by a working professional with an interest in pragmatic problem-solving, not psychobabble or sentimentalism. It wasn’t available in England at the time, so Dad asked one of his American friends to buy it for me and, when she handed it over next time she visited, I literally could not believe it. I stood there turning it over and over in my hand while she and Dad looked on – she possibly slightly bemused by the extent of my delight and my effusive thanks; Dad not.

There’s also Grace Metalious’ proto-bonkbuster Peyton Place (with, thanks to my freedom-loving, boundary-busting new mindset, her biography right next to it), reminding me of when I was seven or eight and first heard Jeannie C. Reilly sing ‘Harper Valley PTA’. I had to take the line ‘Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites’ to Dad for elucidation, and he told me all about this very famous and bestselling book, which I pledged to myself I would read as soon as I was old enough. I forgot about it until I came across a battered copy in Norfolk’s Brazen Head books and pounced. It was even better than the song.

The run of Philip Roth reminds me of one of our rare disagreements. I was home for the university holiday and Dad came across me reading the newly published American Pastoral. This was just after he had read Claire Bloom’s memoir Leaving a Doll’s House, in which she details her long relationship with the volatile, controlling and verbally abusive author. Dad felt that, at the very least, I should read his books in the light of this knowledge; and, maybe, choose not to read them at all. I, at twenty, felt that I could – and should – separate the man from the art. At thirty, when I was about to start reading a book I had bought by William Mayne, a much-lauded and respected children’s author whose heyday had been the 1950s and 60s, I discovered that he had pleaded guilty in 2004 to multiple counts of child sexual abuse dating back decades. I couldn’t open the book, and although I wouldn’t impose the decision on anyone else (any more than Dad, of course, stopped me reading Roth), I understood Dad’s position much more clearly.

More upliftingly, I spy Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent – a complex, gentle, yet sinuous story about a woman freed by her violent older husband’s death to start life anew. She moves to the Essex marshes to follow her long-denied interest in palaeontology and give her autistic son the peace and freedom he needs. Her scientific mind finds a strange resonance with the local rector’s attempts to stop the village community turning from God to the supernatural when it appears that the monstrous folkloric serpent has returned to the marshes. I read it, loved it and passed it to Dad. It’s a book about all the different forms of love there can be, and how they enrich a life in different ways. When he returned it, he said he had thought it as wonderful as I did. I told him that some reviewers – perhaps because you don’t at any point actually get a scene in which a giant sea monster rises out of the waters and lays waste to a village – had dismissed it as a bit of a book about nothing. ‘But,’ he said frowning, ‘it’s about everything.’ And that is why I loved him, and that is how he enriched my life too.

Conclusion: Bookish: A Life in Books

So here I am, about half a century into whatever my allotted span should turn out to be, and I’m very happy. How could I not be? I’m sitting in a room finishing writing a book about books, surrounded by beloved copies of my own. From my childhood hoard to my gleefully-purchased-whenever-the-mood-took-me-after-the-age-of-twenty-one-thanks-to-independently-earned-disposable-income items (otherwise known as adult acquisitions), they sit on shelves that line a thirty-foot-long room, to create a 10,000-volume library that I can call my own (one day, Strand Books, you and I are going to have a showdown). Fiction and non-fiction, biography, autobiography, gardening, language, medieval poems and history – all of one human life is here. The books still unread will see me safely through to the end of any possible allotted span. I have maxed out my tsundoku as surely as I will one day soon max out my Kindle.

Looking around at these thousands of cracked spines, I am ambushed by as many memories. For me, books have as great a power to evoke particular, often even pivotal, moments of life as any scent or photograph might.

Austen and Binchy are side-by-side – both mistresses of the minutiae of life and of women’s lives especially, in their own way, and both instrumental in showing me how often women are missing from a narrative and how often the minutiae can be everything. Nineteen Eighty-Four – on the dystopian shelf that I’m thinking of renaming ‘Current Affairs’ – still sends chills down my spine when I remember not only its terrifying story, but the scale of the ideas that were in there, the glimpse into the great depths and dimensions that adult literature could hold. Perhaps my collection is a tiny attempt to measure them.

The books on Chaucer and various translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight bring with them a rush of memories – good and bad – of university, but en masse they remind me that growth and personal progress (even if you seem, as the years wear on, actually to be going backwards) are possible. What once was bafflingly opaque and difficult is now clear and an increasing joy.

Hundreds and hundreds of books bring up a picture of Dad, of course, quietly handing them over for no more reason than that he hoped I enjoyed them. One of a thousand million connections between us, and seeing the serried ranks of his gifts – only the tangible tip of all the intangible ones he gave me – brings him closer.

There’s Dan Brown and there’s Dickens. I have read the entire oeuvre of one of them. No one in the friends group I now have despises me for which one it is. Or if they do, they do it openly, honestly and with love. I am more than content with this.

I can see representatives, on shelf after shelf, of just about every genre and from just about every decade of the last two centuries, and I thank my stubborn book-nature (which is so much better than my nature-nature) that I have only ever read to please myself. Not to impress others, not under a completist compulsion, not to please someone or to try and make myself amenable to them – God, if I (if we) could only learn to apply this everywhere … then I cannot compute the energy we would save, the happiness in which we could dwell!

There are the Harry Potters that I bought with my Waterstone’s discount during the first job I got by following my bookish instincts, the first job I ever enjoyed and certainly the first job in which I ever genuinely helped a customer.

Following your bookish instincts, I realise now, is advice for life. A love of books is something ineradicable that so many of us have at our core, but which we are taught is mere preference, a hobby easily dismissed, a side-salad rather than the meat. But if you let yourself be led by instinct (a little bit, and only in book-instinct – anything else and madness follows), you will make fewer attempts to embark on fundamentally unbearable jobs, grant favours to fewer unsustainable men, and know to the precise percentage point how much more likely your just-begun thriller is to bring you happiness than going to the planned party this evening.

Books bring us joy and comfort all our lives. It’s possible the former dominates in childhood (or at least a happy childhood) and the latter probably comes into ascendance as adulthood wears on. Escapism is fun as a child. In adulthood it becomes a frequent necessity. Plus we have so many good reads to go back to, the older we get – our comfort-reading options simply become too good to ignore.

But on the whole, I find books to be an increasing comfort and joy. There is always something new and brilliant being published; there is always a new recommendation from a friend, always a new genre, author or – in second-hand bookshops – out-of-print gems to discover. And of course there is always that tsundoku to work through. I’ve come to realise that possibly the greatest of books’ virtues is patience. They will wait for us to get to them, they will wait for us to return to them, they will allow as many repeat visits to their pages as you ever want. They are a precious constant in a life that increasingly seems to have too few of them. Keep reading, bookish army. We may triumph – quietly – yet.

Lucy’s Bookshelf

A note on these lists: I’ve added a few titles of books that I was led to discover by those already mentioned in the relevant chapter, in the hope that we share enough of a reading sensibility for you to find something you enjoy amongst them too.

1. Flies, Rats and Mole: On Formative Novels

Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe

Miss Ranskill Comes Home – Barbara Euphan Todd

Julia – Sandra Newman’s take on Nineteen Eighty-Four from the point of view of Winston Smith’s partner-in-thoughtcrime

News from Nowhere – William Morris, a story of a utopia, to restore you

Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a 1915 vision of a feminist utopia to restore you yet further

Light relief, if Adrian Mole’s not still doing it for you:

Cheaper by the Dozen (and the sequel Belles on Their Toes) – memoir by Frank B. Gilbreth Jr and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey of growing up with ten siblings and two parents who were world-renowned efficiency experts

Not Working – Lisa Owens

I Was Told There’d Be Cake – Sloane Crosley

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – Winifred Watson

The Dud Avocado – Elaine Dundy

Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

The Plague and I (and the sequel The Egg and I) – Betty MacDonald, a memoir of life in a TB clinic and on a farm, but really funny, trust me

Village Diary and anything else by the prolific Miss Read

Miss Buncle’s Book and anything else by the equally prolific D. E. Stevenson

2. Mass Market: On the Joys of Genre Fiction

Children’s/YA:

Witch Child – Celia Rees

Newes from the Dead – Mary Hooper

Children of Winter – Berlie Doherty

The Lie Tree – Frances Hardinge

A Calamity of Mannerings – Joanna Nadin

The ForestWife trilogy – Theresa Tomlinson

Dark Quartet and Path to the Silent Country – Lynne Reid Banks’ novel sequence about the Brontës

The Taste of Sorrow – Jude Morgan

Uncle Paul and anything else by Celia Fremlin, who has all of Tey’s cool psychological acuity and eye for detail

Any Marian Keyes – more comically inflected family sagas than Binchy’s, but all of human (especially female) life is still there

Wideacre trilogy – Philippa Gregory’s historical saga

3. The Tyranny of Set Texts: On Reading the Canon

Jane’s Fame – Claire Harman’s Austen biography

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical – Helena Kelly

The Real Jane Austen – Paula Byrne

Helen – Maria Edgeworth

Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World – Fanny Burney

Jane Fairfax/The Youngest Miss Ward/Emma Watson/Mansfield Revisited/Eliza’s Daughter/Lady Catherine’s Necklace – Joan Aiken. Yes, the Joan Aiken!

A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf

4. Dystopias, Decisions, Departure: On Academia

Termush – Sven Holm: a rich elite shelter from the apocalypse in a hotel

Severance – Ling Ma: nothing to do with the TV show, though it is part-satire; an office worker must survive a plague that sweeps through Manhattan

I, Robot – Isaac Asimov, with a much better ending than the film

The World Without Us – Alan Weisman, non-fiction; how quickly nature would reclaim the Earth that we’ve tried to make our own

Earth Abides – George R. Stewart

The Death of Grass – John Christopher

The Children of Men – P. D. James

The Knowledge – Lewis Dartnell: every basic principle you will need to know to rebuild the world from scratch

I Who Have Never Known Men – Jacqueline Harpman

5. Dark Academia: On Studying the Classics

The Wordhord – Hana Videen

Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words – Jenni Nuttall

The Etymologicon – Mark Forsyth

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – J. R. R. Tolkien

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – Simon Armitage

Medieval People – Eileen Power

Life in a Medieval Castle/Village/City – Joseph and Frances Gies

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert – John Drury

Or, instead of going to university, read:

The Western Lit Survival Kit – Sandra Newman

A Little History of Literature – John Sutherland

How to Read a Novel – John Sutherland

How Novels Work – John Mullan

6. Guilty Pleasures: On Bookshops and Bonkbusters

The Best of Everything – Rona Jaffe

The Thorn Birds – Colleen McCullough

The Hotel New Hampshire – John Irving

A Time to Kill – John Grisham

The Stepford Wives – Ira Levin

Red Dragon – Thomas Harris

The Debutantes – June Flaum Singer

Anything by Liane Moriarty

7. By the Book: On Starting a Career

Nice Work – David Lodge

Katherine – Anya Seton

The Mysterious Benedict Society – Trenton Lee Stewart

A Countess Below Stairs – Eva Ibbotson

The Ballad of Lucy Whipple – Karen Cushman

The London Eye Mystery – Siobhan Dowd

Hatchet – Gary Paulsen

Caddie Woodlawn – Carol Ryrie Brink

The Giver – Lois Lowry

Whisper My Name – Jane Eagland

8. Book Lovers: On Romance Beyond the Page

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder – Caroline Fraser

Metropolitan Life – Fran Lebowitz

Here at the New Yorker – Brendan Gill

Here is New York – E. B. White

Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby Jr

It Can’t Happen Here – Sinclair Lewis

A Mouse is Born – Anita Loos

9. A New Mother’s Life of Crime

Short books!

Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 – Cho Nam-Joo

The English Understand Wool – Helen DeWitt

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros

The Life of Hunger – Amélie Nothomb

And a great Jack Reacher alt, the Orphan X series – Gregg Hurwitz

10. A Library of One’s Own: On Curating a Book Collection

These should meet your crime/thriller needs, wherever they fall on the gore/psychological drama scales:

Sabine Durrant

Riley Sager

Shari Lapena

Freida McFadden

Nicci French

Helen Fields

Cara Hunter

Belinda Bauer

11. Like Father, Like Daughter: Dad

Show People – Kenneth Tynan

The 24-Hour Café – Libby Page

Someone Else’s Shoes – Jojo Moyes

The Burnout – Sophie Kinsella

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid

Sylvia’s Second Act – Hillary Yablon

The Woman Who Ran Away from Everything – Fiona Gibson

Strange Sally Diamond – Liz Nugent

Sad Janet – Lucie Britsch

Conclusion: Bookish: A Life in Books

Books I couldn’t leave you without having mentioned:

Marigold and Rose – Louise Glück

How I Won a Nobel Prize – Julius Taranto

Cecily (and sequel The King’s Mother) – Annie Garthwaite

The Sweetpea series – C. J. Skuse

You’d Look Better as a Ghost – Joanna Wallace

Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood

Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls – Danielle Wood

Babel – R. F. Kuang

Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata

Matrix – Lauren Groff

The Clementine series – Sara Pennypacker

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore – Robin Sloan

Acknowledgements

With a million thanks to Marianne Tatepo, Emily Martin and everyone else at Square Peg who has helped create this book and get it into readers’ hands.

To my agents, Juliet Pickering and Louise Lamont, thank you for dealing with matters not just contractual but emotional/neurotic too.

To all my friends and to Dad’s friends – thank you for everything you said and wrote to me, Mum and Emily. You gave us new memories of a beloved father and husband and helped us so much as we learned to live without him.

To Christopher and Alexander – thank you for staying out of the way. I love you when you do and when you don’t. But more when you do.

Read Boldly. Think Differently.

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First published in the UK by Square Peg in 2025

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Footnotes

1: Flies, Rats and Mole: On Formative Novels

fn1 These were – and indeed remain – a series of wooden slatted-door cabinets that my mother had, at some misguided point in the 1970s (if that’s not a tautology), stained an aggressive shade of green and which line(d) the short wall of the playroom. This was the room in the house in which my sister and I were allowed to play. The rest, including our bedroom, was off-limits. I don’t know why. You’d have to ask She Who Must Be Obeyed, And Was, Without Question.

fn2 Nineteen Eighty-Four was also the first of the tiny handful of books I have come across in my life that made me wonder if reading was the wholly, unequivocally, inarguably Good Thing I had always been taught and believed it was. Because I do sometimes look at my sister and my mother – committed non-readers all their lives – and am awed, as well as baffled, by the optimism with which they face life. They seem to have no conception of the seeds of misery and depravity that lie in every human soul. Every time they go out, they come home with shocked expressions and a story about how some member of the public or other has failed to be friendly, or sensible, or aware in some way of what the best thing for him or her to do is in some rapidly evolving social situation or retail transaction, and they need time and a coffee to recover from this bruising disappointment. Whereas I basically arrive home always vaguely surprised that no one has tried to force a cageful of rats over my head. If books do shape us, then they can also shape us negatively. You can perhaps be given too close a look at the blackness of a man’s heart, too young. Occasionally I wonder if I would be happier – only slightly – if I had never read Nineteen Eighty-Four at all.

2: Mass Market: On the Joys of Genre Fiction

fn1 It remains my firm belief that if you have a teenage daughter obsessed with Wuthering Heights you should send her to her room now and not let her down until she’s thirty. Save you a lot of bother overall.

fn2 I was making the kind of calculations you’re supposed to apply to clothes, but with cost-per-read factored in instead of cost-per-wear. Binchy’s books were large and that bit more expensive, but the equation’s result was never in doubt.

3: The Tyranny of Set Texts: On Reading the Canon

fn1 I would be marked lower for this than the boys I usually beat because – as I was told when I queried the results – the teacher in charge of Shakespeare ‘didn’t like to give high marks to girls’. It’s not that this fuelled my animus towards the Bard (my ire was properly directed, albeit silently, at Mr S and the teachers who shrugged at what they apparently considered his charming idiosyncrasy). But it didn’t help.

fn2 Also, possibly, rape. But unlikely.

4: Dystopias, Decisions, Departure: On Academia

fn1 And I do mean in the singular. The idea of buying more than one at once literally did not cross my mind, even as a theoretical possibility. I don’t know if that’s how I’m made or how my mother made me, but we are where we are.

5: Dark Academia: On Studying the Classics

fn1 The slightly longer answer is: anyone who confidently declares in the first book of the dozen that he has planned (in which he intends to do no less than explain the entire Bible to all the lesser beings who need him to) that his purpose is to fill the world with better Christians is likely to be all kinds of arrogant, including the patriarchal kind. And when his take on the creation of Adam and Eve sets out its stall with this:

… though both

Not equal, as thir sex not equal seem’d;

For contemplation hee and valor form’d,

For softness shee and sweet attractive Grace,

Hee for God only, shee for God in him

then you can pretty much consider the sexism deal sealed, even without knowing that his daughters (which he had with a woman he married at seventeen, and who ran away from him shortly afterwards and stayed away for many years before he eventually got her back) hated him. It is generally considered that Milton neglected both their emotional and practical – particularly educational – needs and desires, but what I remember most vividly is that he not only forced them to read aloud to him for hours at a time, but to do so in languages they did not even understand. If you can imagine anything more tortuously, terminally boring, please do not let me know.

fn2 The word ‘diversity’ had not yet really entered the cultural conversation, but everything about the educational curricula – from reading lists to supervisors to lecturers – points to its value as a concept and a practice, its vital nature. Simply put, when it comes to combating marginalisation of any kind (be it via sex, sexuality, race, class or any other characteristic) and the internalised feelings of inadequacy it causes, nothing beats seeing a successful version of yourself represented in art, literature or real life. Nothing is more effective at raising your consciousness, at awakening you to the pressures – so constant they almost seem natural – that you unwittingly live under and the energy you expend just living in a world not designed for, or eager to accept, you than seeing it on the page or onscreen or onstage. Anywhere that proves to you that you are not alone, that connects your sensibility to others’ and that maps out alternative paths to the ones you have been subtly told all your life are the ones appropriate for you.

6: Guilty Pleasures: On Bookshops and Bonkbusters

fn1 It did, and it does: 9 St Edward’s Passage. G. David is still there too, a few doors up at no. 16. Two minutes’ walk from King’s College Chapel. Everyone have a good day out, now. Coach goes from Victoria, train from King’s Cross or Liverpool Street. See you there.

7: By the Book: On Starting a Career

fn1 Much animus surrounds Starbucks et al., but I will always have a soft spot for the coffee chains because they arrived right at the time I needed a comfortable place – they had pleather armchairs! We were in awe, like post-war children seeing a banana for the first time: to sit for an hour with a single coffee and a book, without feeling guilty about cutting into a family joint’s profit margins. I did not, of course, know then that I was tilling the soil for various hostile invasive species that would drive out independent cafés, homogenise the high street, pay no tax and generally become the Amazon of caffeinated beverages. But then I didn’t know about Amazon yet, either. Happy days. Sort of.

fn2 My stance towards adaptations of books has, unlike most of my other attitudes, mellowed over time. I used to be purely and simply against them. Why mess with perfection – of form, at least, if not always of content (even I could not pretend that every book was a flawless creative diamond)? Why fix the characters’ looks in people’s minds for ever? Why elevate and popularise one interpretation over the multitudinous others that freely arise in readers’ minds? Go away! Now, though, I’m a bit more forgiving. The book does, after all, endure unchanged however many versions are made of it. And film and television adaptations undoubtedly reach more people and bring them to the book than any other method of reaching those who would not naturally pick it up ever does. I still always try to read a book before I come across it in any other form – I like to have that pure communion with the author’s words first, before a scriptwriter (however sensitive, talented and acutely observant) gets to work, and before everyone else’s creative interpolations obscure the original further. But now I try to see adaptations as their own thing, living alongside a book rather than riding roughshod over or corrupting it. I do still secretly believe that. But I’m working on myself. I’m working on myself.

9: A New Mother’s Life of Crime

fn1 Well, you can – but God, the fuss when they find out!

10: A Library of One’s Own: On Curating a Book Collection

fn1 An unexpected extra benefit of our cowardly retreat to the countryside was that, although I was spending much of my time searching for supermarket-delivery slots for my parents, Norfolk had simply slipped gently back into the old ways. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker (all right, fishmonger) started making their own deliveries again. You simply rang up, placed your order – ideally of restocking-the-freezer/larder proportions, because the butcher in particular didn’t look kindly on dicking about with single chicken breasts or one packet of sausages – and you’d get it as soon as they were out your way again. The butcher did eggs, milk and butter as well and, once he started supplying bread flour and I remembered we had a breadmaker in one of our still-packed boxes, I was able to dispense with the baker’s services and feel as though we were barely distinguishable from the Ingalls on the prairie.

fn2 You may think this is a dreadful return on the investment made earlier via Jean Plaidy and her ilk. I would beg to differ. They taught me enough not only to know the basic facts and a rough sense of how we got from there to here over the centuries, but also enough to sift.

fn3 It is often said that Poe’s story is the first time the word ‘detective’ appears in English literature, which would be deeply satisfying, if a quick CTRL+F of the tale on Project Gutenberg’s website did not reveal that the word appears nowhere in it. I curse the technology that dismantles all our most pleasing myths and pub-quiz points.

11: Like Father, Like Daughter: On Dad

fn1 Or at least this is how they were known in UK editions in the 1980s. Nowadays they have got their real names back – Lars and Pip are Lasse and Bosse, and Olaf is Olle once more.