other. This was writing that seemed real and
alive. Park’s gritty realism and her gift for detail
seemed to me a literary feast. This was how I
hoped to write one day.
On the same drive I picked up another school
book. Jane Austen’s Emma, and again I was
gone. I was in London for the season, back in
the draughty country house, and expecting
guests for tea. I fell in love with the writing. I
couldn’t work out how Austen did it. I tried to pay
attention to her writing; see the mechanism
behind it, but I was too transfixed by Austen’s
language, her deftness at summing up – and
scoffing at – social mores.
They were such different books, yet they
combine in my memory as a turning point for me
as a reader and hopeful writer. If I could write
like either of these women, I thought; if I could
create such complete and engrossing characters
and worlds, then I could become the author I
hoped to be. I became compulsive about reading
everything both authors had written, and
continued this pattern with other favourite writers
for several years.
Now in my 40s I have a growing list of literary
favourites. Most recently it’s been Ernest
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Until last year I’d never read Hemingway, had no
idea of the mesmerising beauty of his prose. The
way in which he writes so simply, and yet swings
such a mighty literary punch. The book is short,
yet it contains a lifetime of hopes and hardship,
failures and dreams. It holds an entire ocean, yet
pauses to capture the glistening of a tear in an
old man’s eye. I read it aloud to my class of
primary-age writing students last year, and they
were transfixed. They begged me to keep going
when it was time to leave.
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