Our host Vick Hope is joined by Lily King.
Lily is the award-winning author of six novels which have been published in 28 languages. Her 2020 novel, Writers & Lovers, won the New England Society Book Awards, was a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen as a top-ten best book of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, People Magazine, and The LA Times. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, the New England Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, as well as being named one of the 10 Best Books of the year by The New York Times Book Review. Her latest novel, Heart the Lover, was released in October and was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Lily’s five most influential books by women.
I remember reading this so so vividly when I was about 9 or 10 years old. I’d read Judy Blume’s first book, Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and loved it, but this book really awakened me to the possibilities of literature and of realistic fiction. I feel like so much of what I’d read before I was that age was talking animals and people going to space, so there wasn’t a lot of realism for children in the early 70s. The humour, right from the first page, and the voice – I felt like I could know these people and it was speaking so directly to me. I remember reading it and thinking, ‘I want to do this; not only do I love this book but I want to do this for kids, I want to write for children’.
I was so in awe of this book, I just couldn’t believe what I was reading, and I also couldn’t believe I’d never read anything by her before. […] I keep this book on my desk when I write. What she’s doing with language is just like no-one else, it’s like nothing else. It’s a miracle because there’s nothing like it; the way she’s revealing information in this poetic piece is extraordinary to me.
[Virginia Woolf] is my very favourite, she is my lodestar. She definitely guides me; when I am lost, all I have to do is open any page of either of these two books and I remember what I love about reading and writing and why I do it. […] It’s the honesty and transparency of this character and what is going on in her mind and how it’s working – I think that doesn’t get old and it feels so relevant because she’s truly capturing humanity, and I’m not sure we change that much.
I love this book so much and I really feel like it’s underrated. It’s hard to know how much she was thinking about Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, but this is definitely like Sense and Sensibility for the 1930s. It also feels very, very fresh, it doesn’t feel all that long ago. The language feels very modern and nearly contemporary. […] she only writes in her journal for the entire book, and you actually feel like it is a journal. She’s becoming a thinker, becoming an observer, and she’s truly coming of age on the page.
I loved [Hazzard’s] first book, and then she writes this true saga. She seeds it with things that will happen later and she’s really in control of it all; it’s not like it’s so sprawling that she’s winging it in any way, it’s still very tight even though it’s a big story. […] I think her descriptions are very spare but so beautiful.
