To mark the release of her second novel Lack, Cecilia Knapp shares with us her five recommended books for navigating the crossroads of your thirties – from heartbreak and healing to the question of motherhood, identity and starting again. Spanning memoir, poetry and fiction, these books offer clarity and comfort at a time of transition and uncertainty.
Before I was a novelist, I was a poet. And poetry has always informed my prose: its focus on the image, its ability to distil and make felt complex ideas and feelings. So it’s no surprise that my first recommendation is a poetry collection, the much-anticipated second from Rachel Long following her acclaimed debut My Darling From the Lions. Sparrow on the Rooftop is stunning. It is a narrative collection that much like my novel Lack charts the heady, intoxicating beginnings of a relationship that ultimately breaks down. It manages to be at once beautiful, intense, vivid, achingly honest, but also wry, witty and full of personality. Undercutting everything is the speaker’s relationship with her body, with eating, and, ultimately, the path towards healing.
So much of Lack is about fighting out of the prison of a devastating relationship. It asks what we are willing to sacrifice of ourselves to feel loved, and what women are taught to tolerate in their intimate relationships with men. I was also interested in the catastrophes that can result from a power imbalance in those relationships (in Lack, the speaker finds herself embroiled in an affair with a wealthy, married, older actor of waning fame who exploits her naivety). This gripping novel by Megan Nolan explores the subject of a toxic relationship with precision and brutal insight. At times an uncomfortable read, Nolan reminds us that the journey out of these entanglements is not always easy but it is possible.
An inventive and compelling novel in verse narrated by a speaker who is so fatigued by years as a tenant within the exploitative, precarious world of private landlords that she writes an “unhinged” email to her letting agent. The whole book takes the form of this email, detailing a life of damp house shares, overpriced flats lacking windows and extortionate rents. Weaved in amongst this are anecdotes about the jobs she’s taken to make ends meet, romantic entanglements, rites of passage and the moments of peril that so many young women are forced to navigate. If you, like so many of us, find yourself in similar positions as someone in their thirties, here is a place for your rage, your exasperation. Poetic, hilarious, relatable, exposing, maddening. I raced through this book.
Grieving a mother as a daughter is a very particular type of grief and one that too many of us must contend with earlier than we would have liked. In Lack, I try to find the language for this specific loss. In Soft Tissue Damage, Anna Whitwham’s memoir, she explores the loss of her mother to cancer. Simultaneously, she documents her relationship with boxing and her journey to her first fight in the ring. Emotional and physical pain intertwine and run parallel as Anna spars in the gym, preparing to fight, all the while contending with her enormous loss. An inspiring read about the courage of beginning something new, about growth in the midst of great suffering.
A truly expansive piece of work that flits between so many categories: memoir, poetry, philosophy, creative non-fiction, told in vignettes and textured with quotes from many other writers who have inspired Nelson’s thinking. The book charts Nelson’s relationship with her partner Harry Dodge and their journey to having a child together. Nelson writes of her experience becoming pregnant via IVF, whilst Dodge experiences physical changes too, undergoing top surgery and beginning to take testosterone. It is a book about love, about building your own family on your own terms and about profound transformations. I particularly enjoyed Nelson’s reflections on motherhood and her reference to DW Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough” mother, a refusal to strive towards the unachievable construct of perfection which is so often used to shame women if they do not meet this impossible standard. As a new mother, I found her writing to be a balm and I think anyone in the early stages of parenthood, or considering it, would get a lot from this book.
