Posed by the Mail & Guardian:
Which book, if any, changed your life?
I hate this question because the instant I’ve finished writing this, I’ll remember countless important books that escape me right now. I’ve always felt perhaps I ought to make up some obscure, deeply intellectual tome to make myself sound clever.
The first book that touched me deeply as a child was a collection of Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories. I wept inconsolably when The Nightingale and the Rose was read to me.
But I do remember being struck by the beauty of the words. I learnt the stories off by heart and pretended to read them to my classmates. I had to fake the reading thing because I was dyslexic. That book saved me an awful lot of teasing and torment.
When I did learn, books became a refuge. My parents had a wonderful store of books and I developed passions — reading my way through their Kiplings, Jane Austen, all my mother’s Georgette Heyers and even an old volume of Balzac. In adolescence it was DH Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald and JD Salinger.
Changed my life? Well, I spent years searching for Joshua Shapiro from Mordechai Richler’s Joshua Then and Now, whom I was convinced would be the great love of my life. Then I thought myself in love with Stingo from Sophie’s Choice.
It’s quite telling that all my literary loves were writers. I think I was somehow searching for the writer in me.
Of course the novel that literally changed my life was my own first novel, The Innocence of Roast Chicken. Everything changed from the moment it was accepted — if not externally, then certainly within me. I became a writer.
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