Hilma Wolitzer’s first short story appeared when she was 36, and her debut novel arrived eight years later.
The books on your bedside?
The latest issue (and a few previous ones) of Granta; Matrix by Lauren Groff, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? by Jenny Diski, and War and Peace, accompanied and gently informed by Tolstoy Together by Yiyun Li. Other books have probably slid off my night stand, to be discovered one day among the dust mites under the bed.
The first book you remember?
Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi. As a child, I experienced a total suspension of disbelief when I read. Puppets could certainly become real, and my own dolls had secret, animated lives. I was thrilled by the scary parts of Pinocchio and by the possibility of transformation.
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Your book of the year?
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. I think this actually came out last year – time seems so fluid lately – but it still strongly resonates and bears rereading. O’Farrell’s feat is daring: imagining Shakespeare’s marriage and parenthood in such persuasive emotional detail. Her rendering of the plague that took his son’s life is wrenching and uncannily relevant.
Your favourite literary character?
Jane Eyre is an early and lasting heroine because of her resilience and her capacity for love. I was also pleased to see Mr Rochester’s first wife, the vaguely drawn madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s novel, come to palpable life in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.
A book that changed your life?
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Austen gave me two vital gifts: a historical perspective on woman’s place in society, and evidence of the literary value of domestic life.
The book you couldn’t finish?
At 14, in our high school English class we were made to read [George Eliot’s] Silas Marner, which I skimmed and found insufferably boring. I should probably try it again at 91, but there are so many other books and so little time. In retrospect, I wish we’d been assigned Eliot’s Middlemarch instead.
Your Covid comfort read?
Poetry mostly, by Rita Dove, WH Auden, WB Yeats, Philip Larkin, Lucille Clifton, Hilda Raz, Robert Hayden and Billy Collins, among others. Sometimes I open books of poetry at random for a quick fix of courage and consolation, the way others do with the Bible. Auden said that “poetry makes nothing happen”, but he was referring to the large political world, not the individual heart.
The book you give as a present?
Mrs Bridge, by Evan S Connell. This is a brilliant portrait of an upper-middle class, mid-western American family during the 1930s, told in brief, darkly hilarious and moving passages. The eponymous, often exasperatingly passive Mrs Bridge is a product of her times, yet the novel feels timeless. I hope it never goes out of print.
The writer who shaped you?
I’ve been influenced and inspired by a number of writers, including Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Alice Munro, Ralph Ellison, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bishop, Nathanael West, EB White and Grace Paley. This list could go on much longer, and I’m sure I’ll immediately regret leaving some names out.
The book you would most like to be remembered for?
My most recent one, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket, because it reflects the arc of my entire writing life.