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The books that shaped me: Jessie Burton
Welcome to 'The books that shaped me' - a Good Housekeeping series in which authors talk us through the reads that stand out for them.
This week, we're hearing from Jessie Burton, whose debut novel The Miniaturist was an international bestseller and adapted for the BBC as a TV series. She's since published The Muse and her latest novel, The Confession, which is out now in paperback.
How have books impacted your life?
It’s difficult to explain exactly the impact books have had on me. More than music or movies, reading has shaped the person I am continuing to become. A book can transport you from where you’re sitting, to a forest in Narnia with a talking faun, or to Central Park in New York with a disaffected teen who’s run away from school, and yet you feel at home in both instances. A book can put your feelings into sentences you couldn’t ever have thought of but which feel so true to yourself. A book can comfort you or scare you, or show you the world from a completely different angle. All these things that a book can do are still astounding to me, after all these years. It is a simple contract. Someone writes something, you read it, and a new world is born. Reading is a lifelong process of osmosis and transformation, escape from yourself and engagement with yourself. Books are invaluable, and the impact they have had on me is unquantifiable.
The childhood book that’s stayed with you...
Even if I just hear someone mention the title of Matilda by Roald Dahl, I am transported back to childhood. I was six when it first came out, and the experience of reading it was acute. Matilda’s resilience and braininess was so appealing, and I remember wanting to eat cornflakes, because she did. I would stare at pencils, trying to levitate them just by force of my will, as she did. I believed in her power. She was a character I assimilated into my reality, and the wickedness and humour and ultimate triumph of the book was something that has stayed with me. The role of orphan is a prevalent one in children’s literature, but the difference that Dahl made is that Matilda actually has parents, and they’re terrible. It’s a pretty funny book as a result. I have very lovely parents, so I suppose it was a thrilling, transgressive experience to read the story of a little girl who has to do so much for herself. My six-year-old goddaughter has been reading it, and we have many enjoyable conversations about it. When writing my own children’s books I often think about Dahl, what it was about his style that not only appealed so deeply to young readers, but which has also endured through the many decades. He takes children’s emotional and psychological sophistication seriously. He has a wild, dangerous imagination, and there’s something anarchic about his worlds that nevertheless feel safe to visit. I think that’s what children love to read. At least, the ones I know!
Your favourite book of all time...
I cannot honestly say I have a favourite book. The conditions for what is a favourite book change constantly for me. I think, if I had to mention one of them, I would call upon Jane Austen, and say that Pride and Prejudice is one of my all-time hits. It’s funny, sharp, meticulously constructed, varied in its character personalities, it has a simple premise – five young women in Georgian England trying to find a man to marry so as to avoid impending penury – that nevertheless tells us so much about human nature. It’s escapist too – a rarified world we cannot visit except through its pages. It’s a comfort, like a familiar blanket that doesn’t smother. It also gave us Colin Firth as Darcy in the BBC adaptation, for which I am very grateful. Two lines I love: "Everything nourishes what is strong already." and "It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable." I think you’ll agree that two such contrasting quotes demonstrate Austen’s undeniable range.
The book you wish you’d written...
Where do I start?! Quite frankly, I stopped thinking like this quite a while ago. There is no point wishing I could write like someone else, because I never will. So I decided to simply enjoy their talents as a greedy reader, and hope (against unlikely hope) that their skills would somehow rub off on me. Nevertheless, I will mention two writers who have regularly given me pangs of longing that I have had to process. Elizabeth Strout’s writing (particularly in My Name Is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge) is so envy-inducing. She is utterly confident in her economic style, which conveys so much. She writes what feel like ‘real’ women, women displaying pettiness, snark, rage, all who have a righteous clarity of vision, but who also do things wrong. The other writer is Penelope Mortimer, whose novel The Pumpkin Eater and short story collection, Saturday Lunch at the Brownings, are devastatingly good. Mortimer, too, understands how less can so often be more. She has a deceptively simple style, like Strout, which is extremely difficult to pull off. I admire them both for the abundance beneath the restriction, for making the dreariness of life seem so important and meaningful.
The book you wish everyone would read...
I’m always wary of ever telling someone to read a book or else. But if we’re talking a gentle recommendation for a book that is so majestic, so deeply moving and unforgettable, I always say people could try What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt. It’s a novel about love – aren’t they all! – but written so delicately and with such insight. It’s about grief and marriage and relationships and children and making art. No one I’ve ever recommended it to has said they regretted reading it, so that’s a start.
The book that got you through a hard time...
Jane Eyre is probably my major comfort read, which might seem odd, given that it’s a story of a young woman who basically has a hard time through four-hundred-odd pages. Maybe that’s why, though! I have been reading and re-reading Jane Eyre since I was eleven. I used to have extremely bad anxiety and intrusive thoughts when I was younger, which I had not yet learned how to identify and manage. I would sit up late, reading this novel, trying to avoid my racing mind, plunging my imagination into its magnetic voice, its imagery and propulsive plot. Obviously, it’s a classic and a masterpiece, but the personhood inside it, the intimacy of it, of Jane’s unfolding story as she tells it to us, is tremendously comforting. She survives, despite great adversity. She is a person who knows herself, when the rest of the world keeps seeking to diminish and even destroy her. She is not perfect and she knows that.
A novel has the power to comfort because as human beings we need stories to make sense of the chaos in which we live. Books offer us an order to that chaos, sometimes a mirror to it, and sometimes even a sense of solution to it – and we can digest all that at our own pace. We can find our own stories in other stories, and that fact makes us feel less alone. Novels provide escape, but also the flexing of the imaginative muscle, which is important for empathy, for lower blood pressure, and for seeing the world anew.
The book that uplifts you...
Recently during this pandemic, my friend recommended to me the adult novels of Eva Ibbotson as a solace and a joy, and I’m so glad she did. They are so full of goodness, generosity and romance! I loved The Secret Countess – a refugee from the Russian Revolution comes to England and finds work as a housemaid in a big country pile, and you’ve guessed it, the heir to the house – a survivor from World War One – falls in love with her, not without several obstacles, including his eugenics-loving fiancée, getting in the way. It’s very Cinderella and fairy-tale, full of millionaires and housemaids, but there are some beautiful observations and there is a strong message underneath it, as in all of Ibbotson’s books – of welcoming people in, of caring for each other, of staying positive, of enjoying food and glamorous things, as well as nurturing the more abstract qualities that make humankind not irredeemable. Ibbotson herself was a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna, so she knew what she was talking about.
The Confession by Jessie Burton is out now, published by Picador
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