My bookshelf
Iown so many books it’s a struggle to keep the shelves in order. There’s a big collection of my old children’s books, as well as hundreds we’ve bought for our kids over the years. I have the adult fiction and non-fiction arranged in alphabetical order.
Many of the books I’ve collected lately are related to my new novel, Mazarine, which is set just before the election of Donald Trump, and follows a woman’s travels from Auckland to London to Paris to Buenos Aires as she searches for her missing daughter. As well as travelling to those places, I read non-fiction relevant to the preoccupations in the novel.
I started the book in 2016, before Russian meddling in the US election was being widely discussed. Strange things were going on though, and there was a sense of it. One day, acting on some kind of odd instinct, I went to a train station in London, where a man had fallen on to the tracks in a supposed suicide. I knew then that I had the subject for my novel.
I decided I would write about false narrative or fake news. Since writing Mazarine, I’ve collected books that reflect this interest: I followed every twist and turn of the US election and the investigation into Trump’s possible collusion with the Russians. I read the Steele dossier on Buzzfeed while in Buenos Aires. Later I read Collusion, by Luke Harding, also Harding’s book A Very Expensive Poison, about the murder in the UK of the Russian agent Litvinenko. I found Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, about the chaotic Trump White House highly alarming. I read What Happened, Hillary Clinton’s book on the election, and books about terrorism, counterterrorism, Putin and Russia.
Some of the books on my shelves, and the ideas in Mazarine, reflect recent reading on psychology. For the first time in my life, I’d consulted a psychotherapist and was fascinated to discover a body of knowledge combining science and human interest that I’d known nothing about, and that I’d been brought up to regard as corny and bogus. (I remember my mother warning me off the school counsellor, who she felt sure would be sinister and a drip.)
I read widely and randomly, with a layperson’s free-wheeling lack of discipline, about dissociation, personality disorders (of which narcissism was particularly relevant, given that the US President is acknowledged as a textbook case), complex trauma, attachment. As one does with Dr Google, I diagnosed myself and people I knew with all sorts of exotic disorders, gave myself the horrors and experienced many alarming psychological symptoms but it was all so interesting I even considered studying the subject properly.
I kept reviewing, which is a good way to discover new authors. After writing about Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante, I bought all their books. I reviewed The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1, which was a giant 1400 pages long. I waded through it and became fascinated with Plath. I went on to buy her novel The Bell Jar, based on her suicide attempt and admission to a psychiatric hospital, and her biography by Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman.
I also admired Helen Garner’s collected nonfiction, True Stories, which led me back to two of her brilliant works covering criminal trials. For me, one book usually leads to another.