Sarah Moss: ‘I never liked Wuthering Heights as much as Jane Eyre’ | books

My first memory is reading
“Swallowdale” by Arthur Ransom, seven years old. I did not learn to read in the early years of school, and was deeply illiterate until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, especially Swallowdale in which a shipwreck is salvaged and the adults provide just the right support when the kids mess up.

My favorite book growing up
The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, the politics of which I now find distinctly objectionable. I often tell students that what you don’t get is what you get, and I’m sure the obsession with ruthless independence and suppression of foundational violence did me no good, but I loved the landscape and the combination of domesticity and adventure.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Teenagers are easily led. I saw myself in some of the simple, intelligent girls in Victorian fiction, which reinforced the 1990s message that intelligence was unattractive and attractiveness was stupid. Young women should not be allowed to read mid-century books until they have learned to think critically; The poets Pitt, Updike, Amis and others, taught me to see women and the world through the eyes of white men, and to also admire an excellent sentence. I suppose they were both helpful in their way.

The writer who changed my mind
All books change my mind, that’s their goal. Recently, Christina Sharp’s Regular Notes has changed the way I understand much of the world around me.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t think it was a book. Before I could write, my party trick was telling stories. Sometimes other parents would call home late at night to ask my parents to bring me to the phone and confess to my sleepless little friends that the ghost stories I told earlier weren’t real.

the Author I have returned to
I’ve just rediscovered Barbara Pym. When I first read them, I was so determined not to become a frisky, shabby middle-aged Englishwoman of limited means that I didn’t want to know whether they had an inner life. I can’t say I’m particularly thrilled now, bravely or otherwise, but apart from that – well, let’s just say she’s a great novelist and I was wrong.

The book I re-read
Most books worth reading are worth re-reading. I revisit Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, and notice how different their teenage heroines and wise or bitter older women seem as I grow older. Other highlights include Janet Frame’s autobiography, everything written by Miriam Toews, and Bill Reed’s essays on art. And we shouldn’t forget survival books, either: cookbooks by Meera Sodha and Anna Jones open to the right pages, and knitting books by Felix Ford and Kate Davies bring happy hours and favorite sweaters.

The book that I could never read again
I never liked Wuthering Heights as much as Jane Eyre, and these days I can’t see the sensationalized abuse, not that there isn’t some of that in Jane Eyre as well. Perfect narrative structure all the same.

The book I discovered later in life
Discovering books is like discovering landscapes; They were already there. I love when writers come to me with translation decades after they have been published: Magda Szabo, Alba de Céspedes, Azar Nafisi.

The book I’m currently reading
I Am a Polyamorous Reader: Helen Garner’s How to End a Story; Engagement of Gun Brett Sundstrom; Kathleen Jimmy’s Selected Poems.