The Books That Made Me
I have always been drawn to stories of journeys – The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, Peter Pan. As an only child growing up on a remote Scottish island, reading was a companion, a doorway to adventure, to faraway places, to the unexpected and the unknown. Surrounded by the rugged Hebridean coastline, the vast Atlantic, the distant peaks of other islands, it wasn’t hard to imagine shipwrecks, hidden caves of treasure, gateways into other worlds.
But I wasn’t born on the island, my mother and I moved there when I was seven, and I wonder now if perhaps as much as the landscapes and adventures and magic of my early beloved novels, I recognised a similar feeling of unfamiliarity, a displacement, a quest for safety and belonging. When I think of those early favourites – The Secret Garden, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Wizard of Oz, even Little Women – I think of young protagonists thrown into new places and new situations, who must either eventually accept and adapt to their new lives, or find their way home again. These are all, ultimately, stories of belonging, of finding the people and the places you can call home.
Two wonderful but lesser-known novels that I re-read countless times as a child – The Root Cellar by Janet Lunn and Wise Child by Monica Furlong – both feature neglected and, initially at least, rather unlikable children who are sent to live with unconventional guardians in strange new places and then embark on emotional and magical journeys in order to finally accept their new homes. Looking back on both novels now, I recognise again the themes of belonging and found family, of ‘journey’ as a symbolic as well as physical concept.
In my teenage years the book that had the most profound effect on me was not a novel at all but a collection of poetry – T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. Around the age of sixteen my best friend introduced me to ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and it blew my mind in the way only a teenage mind can be blown. The marriage of the ordinary and the profound, the yearning to be understood coupled with the inability to express oneself, the sense of life as both delicate and violent, full of potential and devoid of meaning – that poem taught me so much about life and writing, about the beauty and heartache of the mundane, about the paradoxes and contradictions at the heart of every memorable story and character. And it is a poem which begins with an invitation to journey: ‘Let us go then, you and I…’
In adulthood many of the books that have had the greatest impact on me, both as Reader and Writer, have also featured journeys – inner and outer – and been set in foreign or far-flung places. In my twenties it was Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild; in my thirties Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. Recent favourites have included Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead and Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser.
And I continue to be drawn to novels where there is a sense of displacement, a search for belonging, which is perhaps also the search for meaning – of life, of one’s place in life – and connection. Having turned forty last year I have been devouring some incredible new novels – Rose Ruane’s Birding, Cathy Sweeney’s Breakdown, All Fours by Miranda July – all of which centre women in their forties or fifties and explore this search for meaning with unflinching honesty, humour and insight.
Reading exciting new fiction like this allows me to continue to be made – again, as Reader and Writer – to discover new ways to think and talk about things, to revel in the possibilities of fiction and artistic expression and to draw inspiration as I embark on the journey of writing my second novel.