Lucy Caldwell, the author, reflects on the books that have shaped her reading life, from early childhood folktales to James Joyce and Lorrie Moore. She speaks about the power of mythology, the inspiration she took from Ulysses, and the book she believes every woman should read.
What was your 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 you had 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.
Which book did you love growing up?
Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series was her favourite book set while growing up. She first read them aged 10, and has read the title book every midwinter since. She also read them last year with her own then-10-year-old son. The books tell a haunting story of the age-old battle between the forces of dark and light, weaving in Arthurian legend and shot through with an adult melancholy that makes them as compelling now as they were then.
Which book made you want to write?
Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? was the book that made her want to be a writer. They read it in English when she was 13, and their homework was to write an extra chapter. She spent every spare minute that week writing hers, caught by the intoxicating feeling of tuning in to another world until that world became more real than her own.
Which book did you come back to later?
She has always loved Dubliners by James Joyce, but first read Ulysses in paroxysms of undergraduate anxiety about not “getting” the references. Years later, she bought an edition with no footnotes, no endnotes, just the novel itself, and says it was, and continues to be, one of the most glorious reading experiences of her life.
Even your text messages fizz after you’ve been reading Joyce.
Which book do you reread?
Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves is the book she rereads. Estés is a Jungian psychoanalyst and a cantadora, a keeper of the old tales, and the book is about the secret gifts and power of mythology, the paths to your inner psyche, and reclaiming your wildness. Caldwell says she has read it in her 20s, 30s and 40s, and that different stories have sung out to her each time.
Every woman should read this book.
Which book could you never read again?
She loves Rosamond Lehmann, but has 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.
Which book did you discover later in life?
As teenagers, they would 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 she did not actually read any D H Lawrence until she was in her 40s, and she is glad she came to that book later in life, as a wife and as a mother. She says it is not the explicitness of the sex that is shocking, but the ardency of the longing and the abandon of his rhythms, which would have been wasted on her before.
Which book are you reading now?
She has just finished Helen Bain’s debut, The Daffodil Days, which she loved. The book is an account of Sylvia Plath’s last year, told backwards, in an intricate series of stories by people momentarily close to her. It is hard to know what to follow it up with, but she has 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 she knows to be a formidably sharp and compassionate thinker.
What is your comfort read?
She says it is not that the stories themselves are comforting — far from it — but she rereads Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help. There is 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.
