Reading Aloud And Allowed
TPQ: What are you currently reading?
CBF: I’ve just finished Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. 10/10 recommend. “Our favourite stories can be like lovers. Make sense to me, we ask them. Make sense of me. Here, fix these hurting parts. And stories do, sometimes better than our lovers.”
TPQ: Best and worst books you have ever read?
CBF: I once tried to read The DaVinci Code. Unbearable, although quite a good laugh for that very reason. Best? Unable to say!
TPQ: Book most cherished as a child?
CBF: My daddy read to me every night when I was a child. My most tender memory of this time is him reading the Winnie the Pooh books to me and I remember him crying at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, the one called In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There. It begins with these lines: “Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going…But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last” and towards the end there’s a truly bittersweet exchange between Pooh and Christopher Robin about his going away and growing up, not being able to play anymore. Or as AA Milne puts it not being able to “do Nothing anymore”. I didn’t really understand why my father was so upset at the time. But now I have my own daughter, I realise how powerful an evocation it is of the end of childhood and how fleeting the years are where we get to play and live in imaginary worlds with our imaginary pals, without any desire to become “grown up”. Thanks to Bella, I get to live again in a world of imagination and play even when the pressures of reality and daily grind threaten to get in the way.
Around 7, I was totally in thrall to a book called The Suitcase Kid by Jaqueline Wilson. It’s about a lonely girl who lives between houses when her parents split up. I was hooked on it, although my family unit was completely intact, because Andy, the wee girl, finds that she does not fit into these new, strange adult worlds and instead finds most connection and comfort in her cuddly toy rabbit called Radish.
I read Tender Is The Night when I was about 15 and it had a huge impact on my aesthetic and cultural tastes; the quiet ruin and fragile glamour, decaying beauty and nervous breakdown. I have a lifetime obsession with trying to give form to people (mostly women) who are simultaneously there and not there, poking at the thin veil between presence and absence, sanity and madness, the real and the imagined.
CBF: My daddy read to me every night when I was a child. My most tender memory of this time is him reading the Winnie the Pooh books to me and I remember him crying at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, the one called In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There. It begins with these lines: “Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going…But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last” and towards the end there’s a truly bittersweet exchange between Pooh and Christopher Robin about his going away and growing up, not being able to play anymore. Or as AA Milne puts it not being able to “do Nothing anymore”. I didn’t really understand why my father was so upset at the time. But now I have my own daughter, I realise how powerful an evocation it is of the end of childhood and how fleeting the years are where we get to play and live in imaginary worlds with our imaginary pals, without any desire to become “grown up”. Thanks to Bella, I get to live again in a world of imagination and play even when the pressures of reality and daily grind threaten to get in the way.
Around 7, I was totally in thrall to a book called The Suitcase Kid by Jaqueline Wilson. It’s about a lonely girl who lives between houses when her parents split up. I was hooked on it, although my family unit was completely intact, because Andy, the wee girl, finds that she does not fit into these new, strange adult worlds and instead finds most connection and comfort in her cuddly toy rabbit called Radish.
I read Tender Is The Night when I was about 15 and it had a huge impact on my aesthetic and cultural tastes; the quiet ruin and fragile glamour, decaying beauty and nervous breakdown. I have a lifetime obsession with trying to give form to people (mostly women) who are simultaneously there and not there, poking at the thin veil between presence and absence, sanity and madness, the real and the imagined.
TPQ: Favourite Childhood author?
CBF: I read a lot of fairytales, myths and fables as a kid and still do. I think they are very revealing and I always want to know which one you remember most vividly so I can do some armchair psychoanalysis.
But as to favourite author, I have to admit, it was Enid Blyton. Specifically, her Amelia Jane stories. They’re about a naughty doll who comes to life in the nursery and wreaks havoc on the other toys. She always ends up getting punished and having to say sorry. I can’t imagine what this says about my own psyche . . .
TPQ: First book to really own you?
CBF: I read a lot of fairytales, myths and fables as a kid and still do. I think they are very revealing and I always want to know which one you remember most vividly so I can do some armchair psychoanalysis.
But as to favourite author, I have to admit, it was Enid Blyton. Specifically, her Amelia Jane stories. They’re about a naughty doll who comes to life in the nursery and wreaks havoc on the other toys. She always ends up getting punished and having to say sorry. I can’t imagine what this says about my own psyche . . .
TPQ: First book to really own you?
CBF: Ariel by Sylvia Plath. It was the first collection of poetry I read and remains the most influential. I can recite Daddy by rote, although it doesn’t make for a very good party piece at Christmas.
TPQ: Favourite male and female author?
CBF: Very hard to pick one favourite! Women are a very long list; Sylvia Plath (particularly her diaries, or what remains of them), Elizabeth Wurtzel, Anais Nin, Mary Gaitskill, Lisa Taddeo, Joan Didion. There are lines from Play It As It Lays that loop through my brain on repeat: “I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird” and "Maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?” Although I like both male and female authors, when I rack it up in my mind, I generally read a lot more women than men. I made a list in my head and my favourite writers are those who create worlds at the extremes of both feminine and masculine archetypes. For example, I love Ernest Hemingway - I especially adore The Old Man and the Sea. But even Death in the Afternoon undoes me. I moved to the Basque Country when I was 20 and always had a preoccupation with the Spanish Civil War, which gave me my introduction to Hemingway and other writers like Orwell. I’m not a fan of bullfighting at all. In Bilbao, I lived close to a bullring for a long time, but I never once went there. How Hemingway could take something I found morally and politically objectionable and make it seem so beautiful, heroic, almost romantic continues to fascinate me.
TPQ: A preference for fact or fiction?
CBF: I’ve read a lot of political non-fiction, but it’s probably not my preference. I do enjoy political history, like The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, Fanon and so on. I also like reading depth psychology, these days I’m drawn towards Jung, Erich Fromm etc. There were a few years when I was very involved in socialist politics that I barely read any fiction. It’s a huge shortcoming in left-wing politics. Someone once told me that a particular French anti-capitalist group had abandoned the practice of educating new recruits using texts like Capital or Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and instead pushed non-Marxist classic fiction like A Tale of Two Cities instead. I don’t know if this is actually true but I always loved the idea that fiction can speak louder truths about the world and force us to see the aspects of grey in between more black-and-white narratives about justice and how society functions.
CBF: I’ve read a lot of political non-fiction, but it’s probably not my preference. I do enjoy political history, like The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, Fanon and so on. I also like reading depth psychology, these days I’m drawn towards Jung, Erich Fromm etc. There were a few years when I was very involved in socialist politics that I barely read any fiction. It’s a huge shortcoming in left-wing politics. Someone once told me that a particular French anti-capitalist group had abandoned the practice of educating new recruits using texts like Capital or Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and instead pushed non-Marxist classic fiction like A Tale of Two Cities instead. I don’t know if this is actually true but I always loved the idea that fiction can speak louder truths about the world and force us to see the aspects of grey in between more black-and-white narratives about justice and how society functions.
TPQ: Biography, autobiography or memoir that most impressed you?
CBF: A very recent read, but This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright probably knocks previous favourites off the top spot. Until I read this, I’d have said Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement, maybe Prozac Nation (I love Elizabeth Wurtzel and will defend her and all her complexities forever!) or Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three/Bad Seeds fame) But this memoir felt really special. I’ve read a lot of ‘addiction fiction’ type stuff, but this was different. It’s about Octavia Bright’s recovery from alcoholism intertwined with her father’s spiralling illness after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It quotes Simone Weil, Louise Bourgeois, Jose Luis Borges and other very cool people from art and writing that I love. The threads running through touch on memory and forgetting and hunger and loss - it's the first book I've read in a while where I went mental with a biro, underlining bits and folding down corners of pages to come back to. This bit is underlined and highlighted in my copy:
I could build a whole castle out of my desire to be loved and I also wanted to be left alone. Sometimes it felt like there were no limits to my wanting, as if it were a devouring and insatiable force.
TPQ: Any author or book you point blank refuse to read?
CBF: I am nervous to admit this! But I have a general (but not absolute!) rule of refusing to read fiction over 600 pages! I think that’s partly just preference - I really love novellas, short stories, flash fiction. Having said that, I do like long-form poetry. I read The Long Take by Robin Robertson recently and it really got under my skin, it's in my top ten favourites now. But in terms of those giant tomes, embarrassingly, I just don’t have the stamina. I don’t know whether my attention span just gives out or I just really want to get to the end. Even objectively “good” books like A Little Life or The Goldfinch made me really sluggish by the end. I just want to know what happens! I also will not read Harry Potter. I hate its contribution to the Disneyfication of Edinburgh!
TPQ: A book to share with somebody so that they would more fully understand you?
CBF: Rumplestiltskin.
TPQ: Last book you gave as a present?
CBF: I gave some books to my brother-and-sister-in-law for Christmas. Dan has been writing a lot of his own stories and getting published too - he's got a real gift for dark and unsettling tales so we got him The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers and my sister-in-law got a book about Irish history and language. Someone is about to get a copy of Abandon Me by Melissa Febos for their birthday too!
CBF: I gave some books to my brother-and-sister-in-law for Christmas. Dan has been writing a lot of his own stories and getting published too - he's got a real gift for dark and unsettling tales so we got him The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers and my sister-in-law got a book about Irish history and language. Someone is about to get a copy of Abandon Me by Melissa Febos for their birthday too!
CBF: Laidlaw by William McIlvaney. I am completely intoxicated by all of McIlvaney’s work and wish I could've met him. I love that he went from writing this critically acclaimed literary fiction masterpiece in Docherty and then followed it up with a novel in the so-called ‘pulp’ genre of crime fiction. Laidlaw is a magnificent book and contains the best line about Glasgow and all its contradictions:
Glasgow was home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park. It was the sententious niceness of the Commander and the threatened abrasiveness of Laidlaw. It was Milligan, insensitive as a mobile slab of cement, and Mrs Lawson, witless with hurt. It was the right hand knocking you down and the left hand picking you up, while the mouth alternated apology and threat.
TPQ: The just must - select one book you simply have to read before you close the final page on life.
CBF: Getting over my fear of long texts and reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of things Past) by Proust.
🕮 Cat Boyd-Foley is a writer, poet and artist working in the trade union movement in Scotland. She is interested in suburban foxes, domestic banalities, childhood fantasies, feral women and coal mining
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