The books that made my life

Less embarrassing and more revealing than teenage diaries: my notebooks of books

It occurred to me that in spite of calling this newsletter ‘Your Fellowes Reader,’ I haven’t written anything about the books that I read, or have read.

Reading was something I did a lot of from a young age. I wore hearing aids from the age of two a half, and as marvellous as they were (are), listening to people was (is) tiring. Retreating to the sofa with a book and a hot chocolate, warm from the heat of the fire in the hearth, undisturbed for hours, was (is) an intense pleasure. On holiday in Ireland, where I still go, we stayed in our cottage on an island, shared only with a flock of sheep, and I would read a book a day. Today, distracted by my phone and that weird ol’ beast we call ‘LIFE’ with a roll of the eyes, I read less but nothing brings me as much peace as ‘taking out my ears’ (I say this to my husband every night – ‘I’m taking out my ears now’ – to signal there will be no more conversation and he can turn up his podcast) so I can read with only silence and the words of the page in my mind.

I don’t read an enormous amount – much less than I did before phones got in the way. (Sigh. But true.) I finish about thirty books a year. I start, and don’t go on with, about as many again. I used to be very determined about finishing a book once I’d started it, but then I decided life was too short to read a book that I was not getting on well with. Sometimes it’s because the books are plain awful but not always. For many books, you need to be in the right frame of mind for them – there are quite a few I’ve begun and abandoned more than once, then suddenly hit in the right moment and loved them. (And some bad books I’ve enjoyed for the sheer hilarity of their awfulness, such as The Bridges of Madison County.)

I started the first notebook to prove I was reading more than my textbooks when I was doing my A’levels, and then realised it was handy because my memory has always been shot and I often forget the titles and names of authors, even when I’ve loved the book. I’m pretty useless at remembering plot points and character names, too. I once read a book and only when I got to about three chapters from the end, did I realise that I’d read it before. (Another time, a friend sent me an extract of my own writing and I didn’t realise it was mine for fully five minutes. When I’m old, I’m going to have Post-It notes all around the house that say: ‘You never could remember anything’ so I don’t blame it on my age.) But the thing I don’t forget is how a book felt – the emotional entanglement of where I was when I read it, how it made me feel, how I felt about it. In this way, these notebooks have become a diary of my life.

It begins in 1991, the year I turned 17. I read a lot of plays – Ibsen, Pinter, Shakespeare – because I hadn’t quite let go of my desire to be an actress. Days that should have been spent revising, were spent reading novels. The World According to Garp by J. Irving made me gasp with laughter at both its humour and daring, the first book that made me want to go to the middle of America (which I did, extensively, when I toured lectures about Downton Abbey). And I can see in my re-reads a reluctance to let my childhood go: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend; Lisa & Co by Jilly Cooper (a comfort book throughout my teenage years – each short story featuring a plump, shy girl transformed by fishnet stockings and a kiss).

In 1993, the year I went to Colombia for three months I read in accordance with my surroundings: The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende; Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the great man himself thrillingly glimpsed in a bookshop on a trip to Cartagena). What Am I Doing Here? by Bruce Chatwin, the travel writer who was not a travel writer.

Three weeks in Ireland, staying by myself in a mobile home by the sea, nursing a broken heart – remembered because I can see A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Swiftly followed by Hardy’s Jude The Obscure, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. The perfect companions to long days of instant coffee and Silk Cuts, staring out at the churning tides.

The start of university: Immortality by Milan Kundera, of course. It was all about magical realism in the mid-90s (when we weren’t listening to Blur). More studenty pretensions: Existentialism & Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre (I was reading philosophy), In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (and also criminology). Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks – I cried into my pillow at my grandfather’s house as I finished this, and wrote to Faulks to tell him (and he wrote back). It was a turning point for me: history but not as facts, as stories. My grandfather’s face, suddenly pale and serious: ‘War is not the way to turn boys to men.’

My love of Nancy Mitford begins when I am 20, and through my university years I work my way through Evelyn Waugh’s entire opus, as well as watching the entire series of Brideshead Revisited in a single weekend, before binge-watching was a coined phrase. I think we fancied ourselves as a bit Brideshead, living in vast, freezing but beautiful flats in New Town, no one carried a teddy bear around but we were young, thin and gorgeous, in love with love. My father came to see me, post a flatmate’s 21st birthday party, empty bottles of Moët lined up on the mantelpiece. ‘For most people, life after university gets better. For you lot, it’s going to get a whole lot worse.’

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby seemed to thrum out my lovelorn hopes on my very skin, and came just at the time my father moved to North London, so I knew those record shops, those nerdy men. Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson made me look at my fellow Englishmen with sympathetic humour (my biggest regret: not realising he was living on campus when I spent a term at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire). And here, as predictably as pickle on cheese, is Bridget Jones by Helen Fielding – one of six copies I was given that year. (Drinking too much wine, obsessed with calories and boyfriends, moi?)

The summer I graduated: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, which I thought was a real memoir, so gripped I sat in a car for three hours to finish it, while my friends danced in the field we were parked in, handing me hash brownies. Wild Swans by Jung Chang – a hidden history revealed, and when I heard Chang was going to be at a party my aunt was invited to, I begged to be taken too. I met her: my heroine. And I realised then that if I was going to write, I’d want to write like that. But it hadn’t yet seriously entered my head.

Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling. A friend newly employed in a literary agency gave it to me – ‘everyone’s talking about it’ – and I assumed it was about philosophy because she and I had been to university together. Was most unimpressed to realise I’d read a children’s book.

Oh! My first Anne Tyler – A Patchwork Planet. A seminal moment: great American storytelling, about nothing very much and yet sublimely compelling. Here’s my first clue that I must have been (subconsciously) thinking about writing myself because next on the page is Teach Yourself Creative Writing by Dianne Doubtfire, and The Art of Fiction by David Lodge. The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd gave me hope that modern writers could write like the writers of the past I admired so much. That little seed sown.

First proper job in London: working as an Editorial Assistant (dogsbody) for Night & Day magazine, a supplement for the Mail on Sunday. And here I see that I am reading books by journalists… this tells me, again, that I must have been thinking about doing this long before I knew I was: White City Blue by Tim Lott, A History of Insects by Yvonne Roberts, My Life on a Plate by India Knight, Man & Boy by Tony Parsons. And then here’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers and White Teeth by Zadie Smith – young, brilliant writers blowing us all out of the water. (I was on a photoshoot with Zadie Smith, then still so young and nervous, newly acclaimed winner of the Orange Prize, in tears because the stylist sent over skirts that were far too small. I told her to wear her own and we put her CD on while the camera clicked, and the pictures came out great.)

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman – the book that made me realise history could be written as grippingly as a novel. Those greedy men of the 18^th century still existed two centuries later: Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. We were watching that greed in the mid-Noughties, even taking part in it ourselves. I was flown to Las Vegas, to Delhi, for three-day press junkets, given champagne and rose petals in my bath, because I was a journalist who might write something nice about them. It was bonkers; it was FUN.

My hedonistic life, with no proper plans or thought for the future, still out dancing twice a week, working as a gossip columnist, ran a parallel with those between-the-wars authors I consumed. Having read the entire works of Evelyn Waugh, Scott-Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham and Dorothy Parker, I start on Graham Greene, the treat I’ve been saving myself. All these jigsaw pieces slowly, slowly starting to form the picture of what my writing life will be in a few years’ time…

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young, read twice. Perhaps unsure where my career was going, I took succour in this portrayal of success dressed as failure: what did any of it mean, anyway? (Sat next to him at a press dinner. What a prize arse.) I leave the Mail, go to work at Country Life magazine as the deputy editor, a place where ancient skills and people were sacrosanct. (The stalwarts at the magazine aghast at my appointment: they typed my name into Ask Jeeves and up came an article I’d written about celebrity knickers.)

The year I met my husband. It took us a while to come together but I can see that in those tentative months, quite by coincidence, I read one of his favourite books: Any Human Heart by William Boyd. Now I can see that younger version of myself thinking about writing properly because I’m re-reading favourite books and as much good new fiction as I can: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebbold, Light on Snow by Anita Shreve, We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, Small Island by Andrea Levy. Ugh, and Seventy Two Virgins by Boris Johnson. (No, not doing a link for that one.) What can I say? We all make mistakes when we’re young.

As I grow older and the friends I know grow older too, they’re getting published and appear in my reading list. Harm’s Way by Celia Walden, Past Imperfect by my uncle, Julian Fellowes, City Boy by Geraint Anderson, The Boy with the Top Knot by Sathnam Sanghera, Tabloid Love by Bridget Harrison. I haven’t written a book yet but I’m beginning to feel.. .it’s possible. In truth, I’m driven by jealousy, too – I want this. If they can have it, can’t I?

But then – Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, set in a period I know so well and yet so perfectly written, how dare I try to write a novel? In 2010, the year I got married and had my baby, I’ve retreated again to my comfort reads: Austen, Jerome K Jerome, Mitford, Waugh. But I’m thinking that if I can’t write a novel, then maybe I can do ghosting, it’s a form of journalism after all. Here’s Ghost by Robert Harris, Mommie Dearest by Christina Crawford, Ghostwriting by Andrew Crofts, Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me by Lucia van der Post. And now I’ve left Country Life magazine, maybe I can do something with that insider knowledge? Cue a lot of Joanna Trollope: The Rector’s Wife, The Men and the Girls, A Passionate Man. I start dreaming about Agas and making jam, a child that can run in a garden, a thing that doesn’t exist in my tiny one-bed flat.

Me, with my first novel. I got there at last!

I think 2010, the year of marriage and becoming a mother, marks the end of that chapter of my reading in some way. Alongside which, my career becomes something I love and am engaged in. I read a lot for research, start to slowly think again about writing a novel, eventually manage it. I’ll write some other time about the books I read as a writer but I’m pleased to have set out this little narrative, the books that shaped my young adulthood. What, I wonder, were yours?

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