So in my attempt to not read celebrity gossip, I decided to use the internet for good and thought I’d check out The New Yorker‘s web site when I needed a mental break from work. Am I ever glad I did. Here’s Jhumpa Lahiri reading and discussing William Trevor’s story “A Day.”
Lahiri says she would be “lost” without having discovered William Trevor. Is there an author out there that you’d be lost without discovering? For me in my formative years it was always Kerouac and Henry Miller — not that I would ever write like either, but I obsessed over their absolute abandon of a ‘normal’ life for their art. And they wrote about places and people I was dying to see and meet. And now Paris and Big Sur, California are two of my favourite places that I’ve visited. Funny how those things work out, isn’t it?
In terms of writers, Roddy Doyle is on my life list of writers to look up to, also the Margaret Atwood that wrote Surfacing, which is my favourite of her novels, and these days I’m kind of obsessed with Tim Winton after reading Breath, which I think will be one of the best books I’ll have read this year…
When I was in university I read The Bell Jar, and it changed the way I thought about life, and myself.
Oh Sylvia Plath, that book has one of the greatest first lines I’ve ever read in a novel. And there were moments after undergrad when I worked at an awful mutual fund company as a receptionist that I would make my screen saver lines from “Daddy.”
Yes, Plath definitely influenced my life as well.