TILAR MAZZEO ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER

● Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage! was first published as Indignez-Vous! in France in 2010, where it sold millions of copies. It was then published in the US and Europe as Time for Outrage!

Hessel was a French diplomat and concentration camp survivor who fought in the French resistance and he writes the book as a letter to the younger generation. He says this is what the rise of fascism looks like and lays out what he thinks the conditions are: an economic crisis; a rise in nationalism; a rise in anti-immigration rhetoric; fears of the internal enemy. “These are all the things that I saw happening in the 1930s, and that I see now, and I’m telling you that now is the moment you must be outraged.”

I would list this as my number one most influential book — this very small book with its incredible political resonance that a decade ago tried to warn of what we are now seeing. It enhances the sense that we are living at the crossroads of history.

The Sovereign Individual, co-authored by James Dale Davison and William Rees-Mogg.

The significant author here is Rees-Mogg, father of British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg. I encourage everybody to only buy it secondhand so no royalties are produced.

It is not a book that says things I like. It was written in the 1990s and imagined what was going to happen with the rise of the internet and the ways in which that was going to reconfigure the nation state.

It is an incredibly prescient and terrifying book, because it has largely come to pass in certain ways, and not by accident or because he was a tarot card reader. But because it’s a book that’s been adopted by a number of very powerful people in the intellectual cultural sector, primarily out of Silicon Valley. I think it is an accurate account of what has happened over the past 20 years.

● The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey was published in 1951 and is about a Scotland Yard detective and how he unravels the story of a woman’s life. I’d say my writing style has been influenced by Tey’s early detective novels and others in the golden age of British fiction. Whenever I think about how to write stories — and when I came to write Sisters in Resistance — I think about what it means to write about history as a kind of detective story. For me that’s a powerful idea; that what we are doing is uncovering not just facts, but also motivations and the parts of the story that haven’t been told and how you piece together a narrative.

● Where The Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls is a kids’ book that made me cry as a child. It’s the story about a boy and his grandfather and his friendship with his dogs.

When I was reading this story recently with my kids, I asked myself why did it have me weeping as a 12-year-old? Why did I find this story so upsetting and deeply moving? And it’s because Rawls is also talking about the ways in which history is generational, and about intergenerational trauma and how it can be healed.

It’s also a book which allows kids to process things they cannot talk about. And I think it’s part of why I write the books I do. Writers write the stories we were drawn to as children. Not only am I a child of the Cold War, I’m also a child of the post-Vietnam War era. I fundamentally grew up in a context of intergenerational war trauma that we were never allowed to speak about. So I write the stories of war and trauma that were never told.

● Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale is a biography based on the diaries of Martha Ballard, who was a midwife working in the American state of Maine in the late 18th-early 19th century. It was published in 2015 and won the Pulitzer Prize — and it’s the kind of history I aspire to write.

It’s about what it was to simply be a midwife who went from town to town through snowstorms helping women deliver their babies and bury their children. It’ sa great example of how we can take what appears to be mundane and average and, if we are sensitive enough to the fabric of human history, we’ll find amazing stories.

These are diaries that had sat for 100 years in a local archive and all it took was a good storyteller to realise that behind them was a story of a whole community, a whole nation.

I learnt a lot about how to write narrative non-fiction from that book, which speaks to the essence of cultural history; the idea that the stories of individual lives can tell the larger stories of culture in important and critical ways.