Yahoo News The books that shaped me: Laura Jane Williams
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 Laura Jane Williams, whose debut novel Our Stop was an international hit. Her work has been translated into 11 languages in 17 countries.
How have books impacted your life?
Books were the way I got my father to demonstrate his affection for me when I was a kid – but I promise that isn’t as sad as it sounds! We were always allowed as many books as we wanted, and whilst my brother was largely disinterested in reading, I knew that the weekly trip to Waterstones Durham was an opportunity to get dad to ask me what I’d chosen, tell me how clever I was, and talk to me about the story once I’d read it. He showed me love many other ways, but somehow, with books, I always knew he was just that tiny bit more impressed with me.
The childhood book that’s stayed with you...
I don’t remember being read to as a kid as much as I remember dad making up stories after Sunday lunch for us. He’d just riff and invent stuff on the spot, or retell Aesop’s Fables. I studied creative writing at university, and it wasn’t until the oral storytelling modules that I realised how rare that was – not a single other person in my class had experienced that growing up! I will make a point of doing that with my own family. You have to be quite confident to tell a story without a book in your hand, though. Kudos to dad for that!
Your favourite book of all time...
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is my favourite book of all time. I read it when I was twenty years old and trying to find my place in the world, just like the characters are – even the middle-aged ones. It felt like a guide, somehow. There’s a scene where three siblings on the verge of adulthood bump into each other in the street and go for coffee together for the first time, and how she writes about them realising they exist as family outside of their parents’ watchful eye is just… perfection. I re-read it every few years. It’s a signed copy, actually – I saw her speak at Swiss Cottage library and afterwards she told me she liked my shirt. If you’ve seen how well she dresses, you’ll understand my glee at that anecdote.
The book you wish you’d written...
My own books focus on contemporary romance, so I am always fascinated by writers whose stories span different points of view across generations – big novels rooted in history with huge themes, like Jessie Burton’s stuff, or Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. Homegoing is about two half-sisters in eighteenth century Ghana who are separated, and how their descendants take two diverging paths up to the present day. That book floored me, and that it was a debut? What! How can somebody be so talented right out the gate! I just saw her that her next one is out in September, so I’ll be sure to get it as soon as it’s out.
The book you wish everyone would read...
I was ready to burn the world to the ground start all over again, but this time playing by my own rules and not society’s, when I finished Untamed by Glennon Doyle. It’s such a call to arms to question everything women have often been told to be: quiet, grateful, “nice”. I don’t know a single woman who has read it and not come out the other side as more prepared to be themselves more authentically. It covers the breakdown of her marriage to a man, and her subsequent love affair with a woman for the first time, but covers children, race, religion, community… and all in these devastating short chapters that take your breath away.
The book that got you through a hard time...
When life gets hard, I turn to true escapism. A gripping thriller that has me racing through the pages, like Imperfect Women by Araminta Hall or The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley, lets me forget my own world and sometimes that is a gift. Or, a gorgeous rom-com like anything Jasmine Guillory writes, lets me live in a gentler, sexier place for as long as I’m curled up with it. I love that reading is such an active activity – you don’t passively consume it like you do TV, but instead use what’s on the page to have these vivid imaginings. Isn’t that wonderful? And slightly mad?
The book that uplifts you...
Beth O’Leary’s The Flatshare was such a game-changer for contemporary women’s fiction. It’s heart-warming but realistic, a well-plotted romp that you want to savour. The idea of two people sharing a flat without ever meeting is brilliant, and the way she writes about them getting to know each other through “post-its” in the kitchen is gorgeous. I love that “up-lit” – uplifting literature – is getting its own genre now. It’s amazing to have room for joy in storytelling, especially when the real world can sometimes be so bleak.
The Love Square by Laura Jane Williams is out now, published by by Avon.
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