The Books That Made Me
From the moment I could read, I hid inside books. They were my escape and my comfort when life became challenging or too difficult for me to cope with. The type of book didn’t really matter to me. It could be one of the Narnia series, a collection of HG Wells short stories or my well-thumbed copy of David Attenborough’s ‘The Living Planet’. If I was reading, I was happy.
Because my parents both worked full time, I usually headed to my nan’s house after school, where she had curated a collection of paperbacks on the G Plan bookshelves in her bedroom. A mix of classics, pulp crime and Dennis Wheatley novels with cover art that both terrified and compelled me. If you were looking for me during the mid-to-late eighties, there was always a good chance you’d find me reclining on my nan’s pink, nylon bedspread and devouring ‘Great Expectations’ or ‘To The Devil A Daughter’ in between gulps of sugary tea.
It didn’t dawn on me to start writing my own stories until the late eighties, when I encountered Sue Townsend’s ‘The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 and ¾’. Until then I’d thought of books as things that just happened somehow, never questioning the means of their production in the same way I never wondered about the purpose of stinging nettles or where my new underpants came from. I certainly never thought that someone like me would write them. But the Adrian Mole stories changed all that. I had never related to a book, or a character, more.
Though the Adrian Mole series was fiction, it felt so much like real, relatable life. Specifically, my life. Like me, Adrian was awkward, had big, naive ideas and a confused concept of the world and his place in it. The glued binding on my cheap original copy of ‘The Secret Diary…’ eventually gave way from overuse and the pages began falling out, necessitating a replacement. Over the years, I must have purchased a dozen copies of that book, giving them away or losing them during house moves, but it’s always been essential for me to have at least one in the house.
Once my brain was switched on by Adrian Mole, I started writing diaries and when I couldn’t keep up with the commitment they involved, began quietly working on my own short stories. During my twenties and thirties, these expanded to tortured attempts at novels. Reading being breathing in and writing being breathing out, the stories I came up with were informed by the books I read. I’m a big fan of James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard and Newton Thornburg, whose novels all involves a kind of taut, muscular crime writing that for a while I could not get enough of. But when I tried to emulate what I found in the pages of Ellroy’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, Leonard’s ‘LaBrava’ and Thornburg’s ‘Cutter & Bone’, it didn’t land authentically on the page. Sometimes when you breathe in a story then try to breathe it out, you will discover the kind of writer you’re not, and I am not, by natural inclination, tough and hardboiled. What was missing from my stories, I realised, was the lightness, relatability and humour that I’d loved in the Sue Townsend books that got me writing in the first place.
I would eventually find this missing element in writing from my life. A friend had encouraged me to start writing down some of the anecdotal stories I’d tell her at work, and I eventually began blogging them. Tales of my own experiences, family life, relationships and mishaps. Because my own life didn’t involve gunfights or serial killers, I naturally leaned into the humour and absurdity that can often be found in everyday life. A neighbour read these stories then texted to say she’d posted a couple of David Sedaris books through my letterbox, adding ‘I think you’ll find a friend in them’. What I found in these books, ‘Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim’ and ‘Me Talk Pretty One Day’ was validation for the kind of thing I was naturally writing. Sedaris’ stories encouraged me to be confident about the narratives from my own life that I increasingly wanted and needed to share, his writing underscoring the notion that the lives of ordinary people are not only valid they are also, frequently, extraordinary. An idea that would go on to be fortified when I read the likes of Patricia Lockwood’s ‘Priestdaddy’, Alan Bennett’s ‘Untold Stories’ and Jo Ann Beard’s essay collection ‘The Boys of my Youth’.
Books have made me and they’re still making me. While age and experience may change me in varying ways, I’ll always be that kid hiding in my nan’s bedroom, my nose in book and more lined up on the bedside table, ready to offer me an unmatched form of escape.
Adam Farrer, Author of Broken Biscuits And Other Male Failures
Non-Fiction Book of the Month for March