Hi I'm Sophie Mackintosh and I'm the author of The Water Cure. The Water Cure
is a book about three sisters who live on an isolated island community. They've
been raised apart from the rest of the world because they've been told that the
rest of world is toxic to them, specifically toxic to women, and so they
live with their family in a massive kind of isolated hotel and this is what
happens when three men come to find them, the first man they've ever seen in their life.
I'm here at Waterstones Piccadilly and I'm gonna talk about three books
that inspired The Water Cure, three of my favourite books that are really
important to me and my writing. And number one is The Magic Toyshop by Angela
Carter. So this is a book about Melanie who's 15 and what happens the summer
that her parents die. And she is sent off to live with her eccentric uncle who's
obsessed with life-size puppets and her siblings. And I read it at university it
just blew my mind, I'd never really read anything like it before. I think I'd kind
of grown up reading things that were kind of gritty,
young adult and that was my interest and then to read something that was so
lavish, it was so weird and gothic and grotesque. But still in our world it just had
all this kind of this magic in it, so it really changed my idea of
what I thought great writing was and just yeah kind of sparked I guess an
interest for me in the macabre and the the Gothic and the spooky and how that
kind of relates to our world. And there's an isolated world in this novel as well
like the world of the house they live in, the world of the siblings. There's so
much about siblings and kind of coming of age and sexuality, it's just a really
rich, beautiful book that I think about all the time. For my second book I'm gonna
pick The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.
And I think if you've read The Water Cure you wouldn't be surprised I've
picked this one because there's a lot of similarities between them. They're both books
about sisters and they both have kind of multi-person narration. Like The Magic
Toyshop I read this when I was quite young, I think I was younger when I read
this, I was in my teens. And I remember reading it in a really, really hot summer
and just reading it about 500 times. Probably not 500, probably 10...
but you know I read it over and over again. It was the first book I think I
just reread and I just became obsessed with it. I think
there's something really aesthetic and unusual about it. There's something
really dreamy about the way it's told and that kind of chorus narration is
something that always stuck with me because I think it's really easy to get
bogged down in just like the first person or something and it showed me the
ways you could tell a story. In The Water Cure there is a multi-person narration
but in the in the Virgin Suicides it's kind of like the male gaze is the
narration but in The Water Cure the girls themselves speak in that
chorus. And that was something I did like very deliberately and it's kind of my
little love letter to this book I guess. But it's just really beautiful and I
mean again it's very dark as well but I think at the same time there is this
like beautiful core at its heart that I always think about. For my last
book I'm gonna pick Bluets by Maggie Nelson which I think is the most
beautiful book I've ever read in the world. I don't think I'm ever going to
read a book more beautiful to be honest. I've been rereading it recently and I
always kind of pick it up and just go to one little part because there are
hundreds of very small fragments in the no- in this book. I almost called
it a novel but it's not a novel. Completely unclassifiable
really. And each time I try to read just one little section I end up just reading
the whole thing and like weeping because it's just beautiful and amazing. It's
kind of, I don't know, I think of it as poetry or lyric essay and it's about the
colour blue but it's also about heartbreak. It's just a really
interesting, formally kind of innovative book. I generally just haven't
read anything like it before or since and I think even though I don't write
like Maggie Nelson myself, like, I wish! She taught me a lot about how to kind of,
she taught me a lot about the possibilities of economy and you know
how to say things really clearly. She's kind of what I strive to you when I'm
thinking about making a sentence that is as good as it can be.