Novelist Francesca Segal: ‘Wuthering Heights did peculiar things to my romantic expectations’
My earliest reading memory
My father reading the poems of Ogden Nash. He delighted in silliness, and I delighted in anything he found funny, and so they have stayed vivid since earliest childhood, unlike anything I was later made to memorise at school. At six I learned that “Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker”. Sound advice, even if it came a little early.
My favourite book growing up
Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. I longed also to be left on my own island, alone with only my ingenuity and a feral wolf for company. It made childhood seem not a time of powerlessness but of such competence and courage.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë did peculiar things to my romantic expectations as a young teenager, from which – it took some time to recover.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I think I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I’ve been conscious of imagination, but I read AS Byatt’s Frederica quartet at 20 and felt electrified. She described a lemon in a bowl of plums, and that image hangs in my mind’s eye like a painting. I read Still Life and thought, I want to make beauty, just like this.
The book I came back to
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. I tried too young and failed. Then I moved to New York and listened to Lyndam Gregory’s incredible audio recording and walked and walked, spellbound. I crisscrossed Manhattan just to live inside that book, and I now have the most powerful .synaesthesia; I can tell you where I stood on the High Line when Rushdie first described the grasshopper-green chutney; I know in which bodega I was buying Swedish Fish when Saleem Senai found out the truth about his identity.
The book I reread
Middlemarch by George Eliot is bordering on an obsession of mine. I read it for the first time only three years ago, and I think I’ve reread it seven or eight times since. It would be my desert island book without hesitation – I would be taking a town with me, and a world.
The book I could never read again
The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn. Not because I didn’t enjoy them – quite the opposite. It was, because I read them with such a ferocious intensity that for those days I was Patrick Melrose, entirely consumed by the experience and by the novels themselves. It was almost Christmas, I was alone, and it felt as if all I did was swallow one and then the next; I remember calling my then local bookshop just as it was closing and pleading, urgently, that I absolutely must have the next one immediately. The bookseller took payment on the phone, then hid the volume for me beneath a bench on his way home. It felt like a drug deal, appropriately enough. Those books and that immersion are so deep in me now I need never go back.
The book I am currently reading
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. Its meditative loveliness is a tonic after the brilliant and painful bodyslam of Miranda July’s All Fours, which I’ve just finished. It’s slim and I am deliberately taking my time with it – bobbing around weightlessly, tending to my dwarf wheat experiments; watching the steady progress of a typhoon; looking back with love and longing at faraway Earth.
My comfort read
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. So many of my favourites are series, for I’m a homebody and when I find somewhere that brings me joy I want to move in. If ever I’m overtired or feeling low I pick up The Light Years or Marking Time, and imagine myself staking up the raspberries and holding the Duchy’s trug, or drinking a generous Gin and It and gossiping with Villy and Sybil. I’ve read those books so often, they are memories of mine; I’m convinced it all happened to me.
• Francesca Segal’s Welcome to Glorious Tuga is published by Chatto & Windus. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
