Our host Vick Hope is joined by Debbie Wosskow.
Debbie is a multi-exit entrepreneur, investor and one of the UK’s most influential business figures. Best known for founding the home-swapping platform Love Home Swap and co-founding the women’s network AllBright, she has built and scaled multiple successful businesses, advised the UK government on the sharing economy and now co-chairs the Invest in Women Taskforce, driving hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into female-led companies. A former board member at the Women’s Prize Trust, Debbie is Executive Chair of The Better Menopause, a company that produces science-backed nutritional supplements for women navigating perimenopause and menopause, a Board Member of The Mayor of London’s Business Advisory Board and a Non-Executive Director at Channel 4. She is also the co-author of the business bestseller, Believe, Build, Become – How to Supercharge Your Career. She was awarded an OBE in June 2016 for services to business & received Freedom of the City of London 2019.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Kemi’s five most influential books by women.
What is at the heart of this is sisters, and I have a lot of sisters! I’ve talked about this in my book; as I reflect on my work around economic empowerment for women, I am the latest in a long line of proudly difficult women, and my sisters stand alongside me in this regard. The novel is about [one sister] wanting to kill herself, which sounds like a horrible read or a devastating break in a relationship between sisters, but I actually found it unbelievably uplifting and beautiful. There’s a quote: “she wanted to die, and I wanted her to live, so we were enemies who loved each other”, which is just a shard to the heart.
It’s a quiet masterpiece about women’s lives. […] It’s happy, sad, funny, tragic, and the thing that I loved about it, is it’s about the excesses and the limits and disappointments of love. […] It’s about the heartbreak of addiction, and loving someone who can’t love you in return, but much like the first book [I chose], I didn’t find it a sad book. There’s so much it spoke so beautifully about, to the tiny, lovely, quiet moments of childrearing.
It’s so other, and so high impact, and so magic and mysterious – and it’s not my normal book. I think as I read it and reread it, it’s a metaphor for the internal world that we all have in our heads. The reason I picked it, as a [Women’s Prize for Fiction] winner, is because I think it shows the breadth of what women can write, read and appreciate […] and I think this is a book for anyone, which happens to be written by a woman.
I felt like there had to be a Chimamanda in one of my picks. How well this book has stood up, and the power of a female story, and a female protagonist who was forthright, that was not easy, that was dealing with challenges of race and ethnicity, and what that means in different places of the world. A lot of the backdrop [to reading this] was Obama, so the story of that time and actually how different it is to deal with race, ethnicity and your life as a woman of colour, with the transference of Nigeria to the US, and what that meant around huge topics that are still huge recurring themes, like immigration, and how othering that can be. To me, of all of her books, this is the one I come back to still now, for being so relevant and powerful and broad in its themes.
The book is unashamedly about friendship, this huge life-defining friendship between Edi and Ashe as Ashe cares for Edi while she’s dying of ovarian cancer in a hospice. It’s another book that should be really dark but it’s so moving and so humorous, it’s poignant and so real and that’s what I love about it because it doesn’t canonize the characters. […] It made me absolutely sob my eyes out, I sent it to all my girlfriends and we just all saw so much in it about how beautiful female friendship is and how it’s for life, it trumps everything.
