My Life IN BOOKS
WITH HER NEW MEMOIR OUT LATER THIS AUGUST, Kit de Waal SHARES THE BOOKS THAT HAVE HAD THE MOST IMPACT ON HER
My favourite book as a child was…
I’m afraid I didn’t really read as a child, at least not voluntarily. I do remember loving Great Expectations, which we read in school when I was 15. The absolute horror of Miss Havisham has always stayed with me and kept me awake at night.
My favourite line from a book is…
My current favourite is in Donal Ryan’s The Queen Of Dirt Island: ‘Let the books remember the local battles. Re-write the plot. Let the harvest wither. This is your life. She is your great event. Keep her in the sun.’
The book character I love the most is…
Cheryl Glickman, the narrator of The First Bad Man by Miranda July. She’s extremely strange, lives in her head and is very lonely. She is such a well-drawn woman, so believable and sympathetic, and you root for her throughout the twists and turns.
The book that got me through a difficult time is…
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. It’s very long, very involved and so completely of a different time and place it’s like reading science fiction. And yet it shows how completely we are all the same, want the same things, yearn for love and a reason to get up in the morning and that we are all deserving of human dignity. I read it when I really need a distraction and it does that in bucket loads.
Without Warning & Only Sometimes (Tinder Press, £16.99) by Kit de Waal is out 18th August
The character I relate to most is…
Angela Jacob in Andrea Levy’s Every Light In The House Burnin’. This is a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl’s relationship with her father who came to England on Empire Windrush. It’s very moving and I can see a lot of myself in her and her identity – different from her father’s yet anchored in his journey.
The one book I think everyone should read is…
This changes with the seasons, but for anyone studying creative writing, Notes On A Scandal by Zoë Heller is a masterclass in the unreliable narrator, and though it’s quite old now, the issues are fresh and relevant. Short book, big impact.
My all-time favourite book is…
It’s a very long list. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys always makes an appearance in my top 10, as does The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett and The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan. I’m reading Ginger And Me by Elissa Soave and it may well have to be included.