Born in 1969 in St Albans, Vermont, Chantal Joffe moved to the UK at the age of 13 with her mother and brother, both also artists. She studied at Camberwell College of Arts and Glasgow School of Art, before graduating with an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2006 she received the prestigious Charles Wollaston award from the Royal Academy of Arts. Joffe’s towering paintings, mostly portraits of women or children, have been exhibited in London, New York, Bologna and Venice, and a number are held by the Saatchi Gallery. Her exhibition Beside the Seaside is currently at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings.

Book: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

I have been reading Wallace Stegner, an American writer whose books have come back into print. He is quite unusual in that he writes narrative novels which have an Updike-like precision, but are set on the west coast. Angle of Repose is about a woman who goes out west at the turn of the century, and her complex relationship with her husband. Looking at it, I wouldn’t have thought I would like it, but the writing transcends the story and [the reader] gets an amazing sense of a whole life.

Radio: The Corrections (R4)

Radio 4 just did a really good dramatisation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel. The voices have been chosen exceptionally well. The Corrections reminds me a bit of my own happily dysfunctional family. I love the radio because though you hear a bit here and there and can’t always remember the beginning or end, something stays. It is a kind of collage in which you can’t anticipate what will come next, whether it will be Will Self talking about the Large Hadron Collider, or a piece about sperm donors and super-sperm. It is so creative and strange, it just goes into your head and kind of lives there.

Place: New York

It is hard to say why I love New York because everything is like what you see in movies or on TV, so feels almost unreal. But I was there a couple of years ago walking to the Met from midtown – which is a very long walk – and it was as though I was being carried on a tide of difference: everybody and everything seemed new and fresh. I love London too and New York feels kind of like London’s big brother. I am thrilled by the yellow cabs and buses, the cafes, restaurants and diners, by walking and getting my shoes wet in the pouring rain between the soaring buildings.

TV: Girls

Girls has amazing visuals. I was watching an episode the other night and one of the characters was wearing a green bikini, and she was so awkward it was brilliant. The show reminds me of being in my 20s, and of the ugliness and friendships that created that special urgency of striving for something else. Lena Dunham shows you the underside of that life: of young women and men who are vulnerable, desperate and ugly in so many ways. The best thing about it is that it is open-ended and the characters aren’t lovable, which is like real life. I find it incredibly touching as well, and think it’s a brilliant programme.

Poet: Emily Dickinson

I love Emily Dickinson’s poetry. There’s a beautiful book that has come out recently with photographs of the poems she wrote on envelopes, which are like sculptures that follow the form of the paper. They are amazing, like architects’ models, or like models of the synapses in our brains.

I am also very interested by Dickinson’s biography: she was a recluse who did not even go next door to see her brother. It is quite a tragic life in one way, but was also an incredible life lived in the head.

Art: Egon Schiele – The Radical Nude, Courtauld Gallery, London

The exhibition reminded me of what it was like to see when I was 19 or 20, because Schiele couples absolute directness with an excited urgency that makes it seem as though he needed to make his drawings. The economy of the pictures is so completely moving – I am thinking particularly of his drawing The Sick Girl. I have looked at his work a lot in the past, but the exhibition allowed me to experience it again because it was installed so beautifully: it was very quiet, like a contemporary art show, which suited the radical images.