Lisa Taddeo |
Books
that
made me
Lisa Taddeo: ‘I suppose it comes as no surprise that I like dark writing’
The novelist on the influence of Joy Williams, giving up on Norman Mailer and finding comfort in William Trevor’s short stories
Lisa Taddeo
Friday 16 July 2021
The book that changed my life
The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg is a better book to read for expectant mothers than What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff. It flays open the notion of motherhood, personhood. Ginzburg’s husband was arrested for editing an anti-fascist magazine in Rome, and died after intense torture in jail. There’s a moment where she describes the way a child will eat fruit after grief that I think of weekly.
The book I wish I’d written
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin accurately captures that great gnawing fear that comes with motherhood. I read this book the morning after my birthday. My child was two and I had my first proper hangover since having a child. I read it and felt as if my heart was being cleaved from my body. I felt the truest fear of motherhood – that we are only one terrifying moment away from losing our children.
The book that had the greatest influence on my writing
Joy Williams’s The Visiting Privilege. Williams has looked over the edge and seen what wild darkness there is to see, and she has come back to write it down for us. I suppose it comes as no surprise that I like dark writing, like Williams’, which seems to start in the grave and tunnel
The book I think is most underrated
Anything by Grace Paley. She is a gift of a voice and and someone I wish children would read in school.
My comfort read
William Trevor’s stories, like Alice Munro’s, are real: they are about life and violins and they have beginnings and middles and ends and make you cry and smile and suffer. I bring Trevor with me everywhere.
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