The How to Be a Woman author on emptying the humour shelves at her local library, her ‘Dickens Plan’ and why she loves ‘chatty’ Herman Melville
The book that changed my life
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I read it when I was 11, and even though I was a girl in Wolverhampton in 1986 wearing a polyester blouse from a jumble sale, and she was a girl in a castle on a moor in a year I assumed to be roughly “Bonnet05 AD”, I could hear her talking to me. Of course, every girl who’s read Jane Eyre has had that feeling. That’s why it’s one of the greatest books ever written. But because the first “serious” book I ever read was a girl, a “plain” girl – not beautiful, not a princess, not a temptress or a cipher or a “sassy” kung fu scientist, but a plain, poor girl – just talking to anyone who picked up her book and wanted to listen, I had no idea that women were thought to be lesser writers than men, or that great literature was still thought to be a man’s game. I just presumed there must be millions of books out there where girls would tell you their stories. I thought that’s what books were. And, as it turned out, I spent most of the rest of my life only reading books by female authors, so I was right.
The book I wish I’d written
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy is a combination of absolute mechanical perfection – the way the research into candles and cookery and economies and murder works as a series of perfectly interlocking counterbalances and flywheels – and Milky Way starburst genius. There are millions of books I wish I’d written, but this is the most recent. And three of them! WE GET THREE! It’s like a Kinder Egg of literature. Chocolate, a toy and a surprise when Cromwell does actually die. I am foolish and in love with him enough to hope that, at the last minute, she’d rewrite history, pop him in a spaceship, and fly him away.