![]() ![]() I read Wuthering Heights twice and on both occasions found it demented. I adored Jane Eyre up to the line “Reader, I married him” she lost me after that. In my early 20s, I did, however, close Toni Morrison’s Beloved thinking I would give anything to be able to make something that beautiful. I came to writing by accident, when a friend cajoled me into joining a writing group, so there was no moment when I decided I wanted to do this. The book that made me want to be a writer Much later, I reread it and understood that O’Brien had done something much more subversive she had dared to show that women – Irish Catholic women, if you don’t mind – had inner lives. Like many Irish girls, I first encountered Edna O’Brien through The Country Girls, flicking through the pages to find the dirty bits I presumed had led to its banning by the Irish censor. From my small bedroom in the midlands of Ireland, it seemed that the world was opening itself out for me. ![]() I read her account of being sent to buy a suitable dress for Linda Kasabian, Manson Family member turned state witness, to wear in court. I was saved from a lifetime of such carry-on when a neighbour gave me a copy of The White Album by Joan Didion. ![]() My teenage reading began with Howard Spring and Agatha Christie, but was thrown into peril by the purchase – on a school trip to the Isle of Man – of Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews, a lurid tale of a brother and sister who are locked away by their mother and fall in love. ![]()
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