Our host Vick Hope is joined by actor and comedian Rachel Parris.
Rachel is a musical comedian, actor and improviser, who’s appeared on Live At The Apollo, Have I Got News For You, and Mock the Week. She was BAFTA-nominated for her satirical sketches on BBC’s The Mash Report, which have garnered over 100 million views online. She’s a regular on BBC Radio 4 where she can be heard on Just A Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and, formerly, The Now Show. Rachel hosts the comedy podcast How Was It For You?, with her husband, Marcus Brigstocke; and another series for the Children’s Book Project called, The Power of a Book, where guests share the children’s stories that mean the most to them. On the stage, she is a co-founder of Austentatious – a Jane Austen themed improv comedy show in the West End. Rachel has written two books and her latest, Introducing Mrs Collins, is a tale of love, loss, and second chances, for anyone who’s wondered if there’s more to the sensible character we met in Pride and Prejudice.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Rachel’s five most influential books by women.
It felt like such a journey. It’s a big book, which I like –you feel like you’re giving part of your life to the book and I definitely felt that with Demon Copperhead.[…] I’d never read any Barbara Kingsolver before so the author was new to me and straight away I was like, ‘what is this wonderful writing’! I didn’t know anything about the David Copperfield connection, I found out after finishing it that it was loosely based on an idea of that, but I don’t feel like it has very much bearing on it. The idea of a young boy going through various trials and foster homes certainly, but for me the place where it was set and the class and circumstances in which it was set were so unique and I didn’t know anything about that part of America, and it’s such a big part of the novel that no one really knows about it. I feel like the Appalachians become a character in themselves. […] My whole heart was with [Demon] all the way through and I didn’t want it to end.
We started Austentatious before we had all totally fallen in love with Jane Austen, because we liked the novels and thought it would be a good fit –but that was 15 years ago, and in those first few years we really took it upon ourselves to read the novels more and learn more about the period, and it was the re-reading of Pride and Prejudice in my twenties that I really started to fall in love with it. I’ve now had so many years to sit with those characters that it was a few years ago I got really interested in Charlotte Lucas and her having a romance of her own.
I’d heard people talking about it but didn’t know anything about it, I’d deliberately avoided people giving me spoilers because I’d heard it was good! And I read it in a day. It was such an experience, and it’s funny how we say we give a part of our life to a book; this was only a day but man I went through it on that day. I think it’s such a beautiful book. None of the things it talks about are new ideas, even the high concept thing it’s doing with three alternative what-if stories – she’s not the first person to do that – but in lots of other ways it’s so original and so moving. The way [Knapp] writes the characters, and she’s got a lot of characters to write because [they] each have three versions of themselves, so she’s had to imagine all these different paths, so you can tell how well she knows these characters. I think she paints them beautifully.
I think why I recommend this to friends is because I’ve never read a portrayal of female friendship and childhood friendship that is so fantastically done. It’s so unique and recognisable and makes you think of the complicated knotty friendships you might have had in the past. Of course this is unusually knotty, but there were moments of such recognition. I think in a way it’s such a simple story really, it’s about their lives and their friendship and the things that happen to them. It’s not hugely complicated, but I just think the writing is amazing. […] I loved this book because it’s a totally different world, it’s the world of 50s Naples which I loved learning about, totally different traditions, new schools, new history, but the knottiness of childhood friendship was so recognisable.
I just love crime fiction, and a series of crime fiction! […] What I love about this series is it’s not just about the case, but about The Troubles in Ireland, which was something I knew very little about even though it was when I was growing up. This book was really informative about that but through such a brilliant story. I love fiction that informs me about things like this. I was like, ‘I need to know more about what this is alluding to’. […] The cases are great and it’s got all the mystery of a crime thriller and there’s things happening in the present that are informed by these old cases, so there’s often two timelines.
