The Dublin-based writer of the acclaimed novels "Ghost Wall", "Summerwater" and "Names for the Sea" picks her favourite books. Her new book, the memoir "My Good Bright Wolf", is out now.
The Grasmere Journals
This been in my pantheon since I was a PhD student trying to reconcile my subversive respect for domestic skills with scholarly ambition. In a time and place where it seemed that baking and research were inimical, and that no one would take seriously the research of a woman who made jam, it proclaimed that kitchen work, sociability, art and scholarship could be interwoven as the stuff of a good life.
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A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf, 1929
Woolf seems to offer the opposite view, that without property and solitude there can be no writing, but it's much more radical. She returns to the body and its needs, insisting on the necessity of pleasure, of abundance rather than adequacy, and she's way before her time in describing the inseparability of patriarchy and white supremacy.
Ordinary Notes
Christina Sharpe, 2023
Sharpe's book is, among other things, "A Room of One's Own" for modern times, exploring the conditions in which we might practise decolonised, anti-racist art and scholarship. It's a work that invites return, reflection, rereading. I'm still near the beginning of my conversation with it.
All My Puny Sorrows
Miriam Toews, 2014
There are many novels I reread, but most of them are predictable. I ration my returns to Miriam Toews's "All My Puny Sorrows", a model of how to look darkness in the eyes and giggle. It's about a single mother, her friends, her suicidal sister and their mother. It's sad and smart and funny and I quote it at sad and smart and funny moments.
The Book of Delights
Ross Gay, 2019
I didn't read "The Book of Delights" for ages because I thought it would be sentimental. I was wrong. Each essay is a delicious little controlled explosion of joy, which is activism in a broken world.
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