The Books that Moved Me

On Monday evening I watched Gay Byrne’s Late Late Memories on RTÉ and was lucky enough that this particular episode featured a wonderful and poignant interview with the late journalist and author Nuala O’Faolain, dating from 1996 on the publication of her memoir, Are You Somebody? I vaguely remember watching this interview the first time around, but it didn’t resonate with me in the same way at the age of 22 as it did on Monday evening. Listening to O’Faolain talk about the emotions of being single at Christmas – “the one time of year when everyone wants to have somebody” – struck a strong emotional chord with me. I read Are You Somebody? when it was first published and it completely absorbed me, but I immediately felt on seeing this interview that I should reread it now, as a woman in midlife, who in some ways turned out to be more than she hoped, and in other ways nothing at all like she expected. There’s a thread of this running through O’Faolain’s memoir too.

Often the books that resonate most with us are those in which we see a reflection of some part of ourselves. Mary Costello’s Academy Street is one such novel. I read this beautiful book in a single sitting on a wonderfully cold and cosy Saturday when I was living alone and could be left undisturbed if I wanted to. Costello’s protagonist is a girl called Trish Lohan who emigrates to America, works as a nurse, has a child, but never marries. The plot is unremarkable, but this is the point. The novel is built around the shy, introspective personality of Trish and her constant self-examination. I loved the fact that a character like Trish, who reminded me of myself in many ways (homely, quiet, an observer), was a worthy focus of Costello’s 160 pages. As one of the reviews on Amazon said, “With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion amid the legions of the meek and the unobtrusive.” Costello is such a skilful writer that she was able to take the banal and elevate it into something thought-provoking and beautiful.

In recalling the books here that I’ve loved most through my life I’m hesitant to include Bridget Jones’s Diary simply because the book has become synonymous with the Reneé Zellweger movie and for me, the two are very different entities.

I know many of you will disagree with me, but I hated the movie and thought it was an utterly superficial, and rather stupid, interpretation of a novel that had far more poignancy and depth than it was given credit for by its mostly male creators.

I remember reading the book when it first came out. My sister had been living in the UK when Helen Fielding had first written the diary in the form of a newspaper column for The Independent so when the book was published she bought it for me immediately. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on Nassau Street on weekday mornings before heading into my first job after college on Fenian Street and laughing out loud at Fielding’s portrait of a professional woman, who unlike Zellweger in the movie, wasn’t a twit or incapable, she was just – like most of us – insecure and a bit all over the place sometimes. I identified hugely with the character in the book (not at all with the character in the movie) because if you’d read my diary at that time, you’d have thought I was struggling with my weight, that I wasn’t quite up to my job, that I couldn’t bag the man I wanted, because we show the most vulnerable side of ourselves in our diaries.

Our diaries – certainly when we’re young – reflect the voice of that devil on our shoulder (you’re not good enough, you’re not thin enough, smart enough, attractive enough), but that’s not what the real world sees. And the guffaws we agonise over are often not half as monumental as we think. The movie version of Bridget Jones lacked any understanding or appreciation of how women see themselves in comparison with how they really are. Okay, rant over. I really did love the book though.

I always feel like I’ll elicit a yawn if I say Pride & Prejudice is one of my favourite books. It feels so hackneyed now after the BBC adaptation and the Keira Knightly movie made the story as populist and overworked as Pirates of the Caribbean. But I read it first at the age of 13, the summer before I started 2nd year because it was on my reading list (nerdy, I know), and I’m not exaggerating when I say I think I read it 20 times that summer alone, and many many times after. By the time I reached Inter Cert exam time, I could quote paragraphs let alone reference relevant parts of the text. On a superficial level, I fell hopelessly in love with Mr Darcy, as my teenage hormones began their merry dance, but beyond this, the novel demonstrated in every word, character and event Austen’s intuitive understanding of human nature, her whip-smart prose, her acerbic wit and her ability to craft the most memorable characters – it was was like nothing I’d read before. With her six major novels constantly reinvented and adapted for small and cinema screens, it feels as if the books themselves have been abandoned in favour of a quick visual fix. Hopefully not, because every word of Pride & Prejudice is as much a joy to read today as it was when I was a young teen.

If I was ahead of the curve in my appreciation of Pride & Prejudice, then I was extremely late to the table with Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, which I’ve only just read, 20 years after it was first published. What a phenomenal work it is. It’s the kind of book that you can’t wait to pick up each evening, but you know you’ll be glad to finish because it’s so darkly suspenseful you can barely breathe in anticipation of what may happen when you turn the page. I’m not a mother or wife so my reading of We Need To Talk About Kevin will undoubtedly differ from many others. My sympathy was wholeheartedly with the narrator, Eva, whose son Kevin is involved in a school massacre. But what intrigued me just as much as the central question of whether or not a child can be born evil, was Shriver’s subtext that the American Dream is a crock. I’ve been intrigued by the notion of the American Dream and how it shapes the lives of American citizens and policy ever since I studied Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in school. While in Trump’s America, the concept has all but become a cruel joke, in 1999, when the novel was set, it was still a shiny trophy to be held up by those who worked hard and believed. Shriver efficiently and unapologetically dismantles the myth as the protagonist and her husband’s seemingly perfect suburban life falls apart around them.

Another book that cruelly demolishes the idea of suburban bliss, among other social constructs, is The Women’s Room by Marilyn French, published in 1977 and discovered by me in the late nineties. Nuala O’Faolain in a review for The Guardian back in 2003 described it as, “the first and last international bestseller of the women’s movement.” It follows the life of middle-class Mira Ward from 1940s adolescent to bored, disillusioned 1950s housewife to empowered Harvard student in the 1960s. The Chicago Tribune described The Women’s Room on Amazon as, “A book you’d like to give to twenty women (and perhaps anonymously, twenty men).” I passed it on to all three of my sisters many years ago and hopefully, I’m passing it onto more than 20 women here now. It’s a seminal work about womanhood and the relationship between men and women and one I refer back to often.

If We Need To Talk About Kevin is dark, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is nothing short of brutal. A harrowing depiction of the life of a former slave, Sethe, in late 19th-century America and the post-traumatic effects of slavery on her and her relationship with her children, it’s a novel whose truth is so chilling and so inhumane that it would be unbearable to read, but for Morrison’s tender, honest and mesmerising telling. It hooks you and horrifies you with equal strength. From an emotional and a practical perspective, it’s not an easy book to read – the structure is not linear and the narrative switches back and forth from one character to another – but it’s a monumental work-filled, surprisingly, with as much hope as violence and despair.

To think that I could capture even a flavour of the books by women writers that have mesmerised and entertained me over the years in 1,500 words was probably silly. There’s so many more to mention: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Tully by Paullina Simons, Help Me! by Marianne Power, Promiscuities by Naomi Wolf, Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent, Sisterland by Martina Devlin...and on it goes... And next on my reading list? Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham, which poses the intriguing question of what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had turned down Bill’s proposal. I’ll be sure and let you know.

The Books that Moved Me

join the conversation

home · About · membership · store · Contact · terms · PRIVACY