Hi, I'm Jess Kidd, and I'm here in Waterstones Piccadilly to talk about
some books that have influenced my book which is The Hoarder. And it follows a
care worker called Maud Drennan who has been allocated a curmudgeonly old holder
and she arrives at his Gothic mansion and starts excavating the decades of
rubbish to find a forgotten mystery that comes to light and this directly
influences her to revisit her own traumatic past. And one of the books I'd
like to talk to you about which really influenced this is Great Expectations by
Charles Dickens. But what I was really interested to do with this book is
to look at how secrets work and this very much links into my book The Hoarder
in the way that it looks at the secrets we tell, the secrets we keep and lifelong
secrets really and how they influence the people around us. The other influence
really from this book is the idea of setting. I mean setting is so vivid and
strong in Dickens's work but particularly with Miss Havisham's Satis House
and I really wanted to take the idea of a gothic House tradition and
work with that, but the other thing that really appealed to me about that
environment was the idea that loss and grief kind of stops the clock in that
house and Miss Havisham, the jilted bride, is literally kind of stuck in this
moment and from then on afterwards kind of decays. And really this has parallels
with Mr Flood's life in the way that Maud excavates down and finds out that
a lot of Mr Flood's problems happen from the point when he loses his wife and so
really this gave me a way in to explore this kind of outward expression of kind
of loss and grief so that's this marvelous book and how it influenced me.
We're now in the fiction section and I want to talk about the second book that
really influenced The Hoarder, which is this: The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
With this book we get the idea of a kind of a terrible
tyrant at the center of the story in this case it's Melanie's uncle Phillip.
Melanie is an orphan, a bit like Pip, and she's been sent with her younger
siblings to live with her uncle Phillip in South London and this is really a
change from a kind of quite cosseted, supported childhood to a terrifying
adolescence. And so at the centre of this is uncle Phillip who's the kind of
puppeteer he controls the whole of the house and so much so that his wife
Margaret, Aunt Margaret, is is rendered silent.
So we meet this kind of new set of characters as as Melanie has his huge
upheaval to go and live in a different environment and what I found interesting
particularly about this uncle Phillip character was how I could write this
kind of idea of latent threat, of violence, but also this is a
very creative man who is building these remarkable mechanical toys and so this
really influenced my writing of Mr Flood, the old hoarder of my book, who
also is a creative kind of genius but he also has this kind of latent threat of
of violence and this idea that potentially there are no boundaries with him.
We're now on the second floor in the children's section and this is a third
book that really influenced the writing of The Hoarder and it's Skellig by David Almond,
his 1998 children's book. I absolutely adore this book not least
because of the way it came to the writer: he was strolling along, I might have
got this wrong, he was strolling along the road and the first line came to him
and it was: 'I found him in the garage on a Sunday afternoon.' And that was all he
knew; he didn't know what he was going to find, his character was going to find, in
the garage. This story follows ten-year-old Michael who
moves into a new area with his parents. They start to renovate a rundown,
tumbledown house and in the meantime his sister is unwell and in hospital, his
baby sister. So Michael is very much left to his own devices, with his parents
absorbed with everything that's going on, and he starts to explore this new
environment. And he finds he explores into this kind of garage and finds a being
there who at first he thinks is a rough sleeper, is a homeless person, but as he
gets to know him he's not entirely sure who this creature is and this is the
Skellig of the title. And what I really loved about this was the fact that we
have this ambiguity about this character; is he potentially an angel, is he some
kind of owl-like creature, is he human?And we don't really need to resolve this too
much because the main focus of the book is the way that Michael saves himself by
saving somebody else, and comes to terms with all other things going on in his
life. So for that, for this kind of ambiguity of character I was really
interested in the book, because Mr. Flood has this kind of conflict between a
potentially aggressive or a threatening character but also someone who's
immensely frail which is quite similar to Skellig in the book. The other
thing this book does is it crosses this line between life and death so we have
the idea of Michael finding this quite vulnerable frail creature and kind of
helping him back to some kind of health we also have this idea of Michael's baby
sister being very seriously unwell and again I was very fascinated by this
because my own book explores a lot of those themes of loss and grief and I
suppose the dangers of caring too much and also self-discovery
through looking after and caring for somebody else.