My life in books

The journalist and founder of the Women In The World summit reveals the books that have defined her life

MY FAVOURITE BOOK AS A CHILD

WAS… The Borrowers. I loved the sense of this secret, tiny world that had its own rules, regulations, structure and hierarchy. It transformed the way I looked at the ants in my back garden!

MY FAVOURITE LITERARY CHARACTER

IS… Emma, from the eponymous Jane Austen novel. I love her brilliance and her blind spot. She’s got these wonderfully sharp powers of observation but cannot see the truth of love staring in her face. One of my favourite literary lines is, “It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that Mr Knightley must marry no one but herself!” THE BOOK I MOST RELATE TO IS… Middlemarch by George Eliot. At Park Avenue dinner parties, I meet so many Rosamond Vincys. She has a long, snake-like neck and wields the charming but lethal extravagance that ultimately brings down and corrupts the honourable but weak Dr Lydgate.

The book is extraordinary in every way.

THE BOOK THAT GOT ME THROUGH A

DIFFICULT TIME WAS… Allison Pearson’s

I Don’t Know How She Does It, which I read when Talk magazine closed [Brown edited Talk from 1999-2002]. Allison had just sent me an early proof of the book and it was a big salve to me when I was extremely miserable. For the last 10 years there, I’d been juggling young children and my career, all the time feeling like I couldn’t get it right. When Allison’s book came out, it reminded me that there’s no such thing as getting it right. It was funny, fresh and real.

MY FAVOURITE EVER BOOK IS… Vanity Fair by William Thackeray. It’s about the absolutely penetrating sense of social climbing and what it means in all of its colour and power. Becky Sharp is with us every day; she’s in the pages of every gossip column. I admire her. Her desire to extricate herself is what gives the book its forward motion.

THE LAST BOOK THAT MADE ME CRY WAS… First

They Killed My Father by Loung Ung. It has just been made into a film by Angelina Jolie. I met the author at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s the memoir of a woman who was five when the Khmer Rouge destroyed her happy family life in Cambodia. It’s about the ordeal she went through – the death of her beloved father, mother and sister, who were all murdered. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and inconceivable that human beings can do this to one another. THE BOOK EVERYONE SHOULD READ IS… Virginia Woolf’s diaries. They’re a portrait of a lucid mind at play, and give a gorgeous sense of a witty woman in her prime, using her powers of judgement to defenestrate all fools. They’re hugely regenerative books. I kept them by my bedside for years.