The book I am currently reading
Uncommon Arrangements by Katie Roiphe. It is about all these extraordinary marriages and cohabitations in the interwar British literature scene, and shows how difficult it is to get marriage right. Most well-known authors seem to have got married life unbelievably wrong; they could write about it, but couldn’t do it.
The book that changed my life
I remember thinking, at 14, I was the first person to have read Tess of the d’Urbervilles and to have discovered how agonising it is and my mother saying: “Don’t be ridiculous, everyone feels like that about Tess.”
The book I think is most underrated
I always felt Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety should have established her as a writer. It took her until Wolf Hall to really get going, but her earlier novel was an astounding depiction of the French revolution.
The last book that made me cry
Books don’t make me cry much any more. They used to; I remember being in floods on an aeroplane with my copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. The man next to me said: “Well, if it makes you feel like that, why are you reading it?” But feeling like that is the point!
The book that changed my mind
James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I found almost intolerable to read. It is not quite as incomprehensible as Finnegans Wake, which I have completely given up on. I read Ulysses and understood the significance of Joyce – but I just couldn’t get it and I realised I didn’t need to. Joyce and Virginia Woolf might be titans, but I don’t want to read them.
The last book that made me laugh
Lawrence Durrell’s Esprit de Corps is wildly funny, as is Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, particularly the scene where Laurie takes the ape to church and it won’t behave.
The book I give as a gift
I have just given True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey to a 17-year-old grandson because I think he needs that tough, bold, slightly piratical wit. I’ve also given my goddaughter Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends.
The book I’d most like to be remembered for
I don’t think there is one particular book. I’d like to be remembered for something more general: that my novels were an enormous comfort to a lot of people who felt despair or jealousy or whatever it was. I want my books to say: “It’s OK, we all feel like that.”
My earliest reading memory
The earliest books I read were the things my mother and grandmother read: Frances Hodgson Burnett and E Nesbit. I remember reading The Secret Garden and Five Children and It, which I thought was really funny – I still do.
My comfort read
If I’m distressed, I read a 19th-century novel – as far as I am concerned, that was the golden age of fiction.
