‘I didn’t read any DH Lawrence until I was in my 40s’ … Lucy Caldwell. Photograph: Neil Hainsworth
The author on the power of folktales, being inspired by Ulysses – and the book that every woman should read
My earliest reading memory
The summer my middle sister was born, my mum and I would walk to the shops at Cherryvalley, in east Belfast, to do her messages, and she’d buy me the latest issue of Storyteller, illustrated tales from around the world. It came with a cassette tape of actors reading the stories, a ding to tell you when to turn the page. My favourite was a Japanese folktale called The Goblin Rat. I was only just two, but I listened to it, entranced and terrified, until I could recite it by heart.
My favourite book growing up
Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series. I first read them aged 10 – I’ve read the title book every midwinter since, and read them last year with my own then-10-year-old son. They tell a haunting story of the age-old battle between the forces of dark and light, weaving in Arthurian legend, shot through with an adult melancholy that makes them as compelling now as then.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? We read it in English when I was 13 and our homework was to write an extra chapter. I spent every spare minute that week writing mine – the intoxicating feeling of tuning in to another world, until that world becomes more real than your own.
The book I came back to
I’ve always loved Dubliners by James Joyce, but first read Ulysses in paroxysms of undergraduate anxiety about not “getting” the references. Years later, I bought an edition with no footnotes, no endnotes, just the novel itself – it was, and continues to be, one of the most glorious reading experiences of my life. Even your text messages fizz after you’ve been reading Joyce.
The book I reread
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves. She’s a Jungian psychoanalyst and a cantadora, a keeper of the old tales, and this book is about the secret gifts and power of mythology, the paths to your inner psyche, reclaiming your wildness. I’ve read it in my 20s, 30s and 40s, and different stories have sung out to me each time. Every woman should read this book.
The book I could never read again
I love Rosamond Lehmann but I’ve never been able to get past the part in The Echoing Grove where two sisters try, ineptly and at agonising length, to bludgeon a rat to death.
The book I discovered later in life
As teenagers, we’d dare each other to leave the school library copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover open on the “dirty bits” – where the spine was broken. But I didn’t actually read any DH Lawrence until I was in my 40s, and I’m so glad I came to that book later in life, as a wife, as a mother. It’s not the explicitness of the sex that’s shocking – it’s the ardency of the longing, the abandon of his rhythms. That would have been wasted on me before.
The book I am currently reading
I’ve just finished Helen Bain’s debut, The Daffodil Days, which I loved – an account of Sylvia Plath’s last year, told backwards, in an intricate series of stories by people momentarily close to her. It’s hard to know what to follow it up with, but I have high hopes for Courttia Newland’s The Art of Opposition, a book of essays “on hope, resilience and creative expression beyond the mainstream”, by a writer I know to be a formidably sharp and compassionate thinker.
My comfort read
It’s not that the stories themselves are comforting – far from it – but I reread Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. There’s such pleasure in knowing that each story, like Philip Larkin’s definition of poetry, is a perfect verbal device to take you through its experience.
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