Our host is joined by author and journalist India Knight.
India is the author of five novels: Darling, Mutton, Comfort and Joy, Don’t You Want Me? and My Life on a Plate. She is a columnist for the Sunday Times, and author of the Substack newsletter Home, which inspired her most recent book of the same name – a love letter to the places we live which explores with wit, wisdom and reassurance just why the state of our abodes is so vitally important to our wellbeing. India has also written the foreword to Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor for the Mermaid Collection edition – classic books by popular pioneering female authors republished to delight new generations of readers.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover India’s five most influential books by women.
‘This book completely blew my mind because up until then I’d only read nice books about people like us who did nice things and went on picnics, and went on nice holidays and if there were crises, they were really small crises, interesting crises, but teeny. Getting up the duff, and doing something so transgressive to like 12 or 13 year old me was like, oh my goodness, I didn’t even know these things happened. She goes from her nice, comfortable, middle class life to a room in the boarding house, to the L-shaped room, and the other people in the boarding house are amazing, inevitably. She doesn’t know any people of colour. One of the lodgers is Black and becomes her great, great friend. She doesn’t know any people of other faiths. One of the people in the house is Jewish. The land lady is kind of rackety. […] It’s really an early version of an actual versus a chosen family. You know, all of these people open her eyes to the way the world is and what kindness there is in the world.’
‘I made my daughter, who’s now about to be 23, read it when she was about 16, thinking, Gen Z, this is not for her. She’s going to think that I’ve dug this up from antiquity and she loved it, and it did resonate for her. I think it’s one of those books that really, really, really stands the test of time and it annoys me because sometimes people think it’s a book for teenagers and it kind of is – there isn’t a teenager who you couldn’t give it to – but it’s not so kind of cute and winsome that as an adult you think what’s wrong with me – why am I reading about a teenage girl. It treats its reader like an adult, and so you can read it at any age. I think I’ll be reading it when I’m 85.’
‘I love how clever she is and how lightly she wears it, which is something I can’t bear – a kind of here comes my magnificent sentence kind of sentence. How everything she writes appears brittle and airy and everything is throwaway, and everything is a joke, and everything is a tease and nothing matters, and nothing is serious, except it does matter and she knows it matters and, you, as the reader, know that it matters.’
‘I really enjoy the puzzle aspect. It’s sort of a whodunit or why done it, but what I really love, and what I’m really interested in is the idea, of course, of the good immigrant – you’re allowed in, provided you end up sending your kids to expensive schools and live in a big mansion, and follow the rules, and basically behave like a decent white American person, and you are banished and damned to all hell if you deviate from that, and you must, of course, abandon all your traditions, good and bad. You must assimilate. I mean, it’s an endlessly fascinating topic. I’m fascinated by it for obvious reasons of my own inheritance.’
‘It’s just beautiful, hilarious, because Lissa Evans is a genius, genius writer of comedy, but what she does so beautifully is flip between very, very funny set pieces material that would in anybody else’s hands, well, almost anybody else’s hands, feel kind of saccharine and sentimental. She’s the complete opposite of saccharine. Her eye is very lucid, but the stories she tells are so profound and resonant. Nobody doesn’t like this book and yet criminally underrated again.’
