Hi, I'm Jenny Zhang, and I'm here at Waterstones Gower Street and I
wanted to share with you some of my favorite books that were influential to
me as a writer and also in writing my book Sour Heart which is out from
Bloomsbury and it's a collection of short stories.
The first book I wanted to talk about was
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth which I know is very controversial
There's obviously like a dirtiness to this book it's
written from the perspective of Portnoy who's kind of ranting and raving
throughout the book and it's this kind of extended dialogue or extended
monologue rather where Portnoy is talking about everything; sex, family,
the overwhelming-ness of coming from a Jewish family and having a Jewish mom
but there's also a lot of tenderness, there's a lot of like scatological talk and
there's a lot of talk about masturbation and about like sort of filthy sexual
fantasies but I think at the end and the core of this book is sort of just this,
I don't know, very confused, genuine young man who's kind of like
desperately groping for his identity and his place in the world and a way to
feel calm and happy. It felt like all the provocations came
from a genuine place and I started to realize in reading this book that
profanity and depravity, it's a form it's a literary form just as
minimalism or poetry or beauty or lyricism is and that there is a lyricism
in profanity and so I took a lot of permission from this book because, well
my book has a lot of profanity so I guess I wanted to take this as my model
and my book also has a lot of tenderness and it's also a lot about family which
this is as well and I wanted to be just as funny and vulgar as Portnoy and Philip Roth.
So the next book is Pastoralia by George Saunders
and I'd love this cover, I've never seen it before. George Saunders is
an amazing American writer who has written primarily short stories and he
just came out with his first novel. Again this was like another revelation for me
and it was very influential for me because I was writing short stories and
I was having a really hard time writing a longer work of fiction like a novel
and I loved also that George Saunders will write these long short stories.
The title story, Pastoralia, it's almost novella length, it's a little
bit too short to be a novella, and a little bit you know too long to be a
short story so I took inspiration from that as well because I'm always writing
in these forms that are purely terrible for the market! And I love that there's
this almost like anti-capitalistic streak in George Saunders both in the
form that he writes in and the situation he writes about and I found him to also
be really exciting because he's somewhere between speculative fiction
and literary realism where it's not quite science fiction but it's not
really just straight realism either, it's kind of this new undefinable category.
My favorite story in here is the story called Sea Oak which is about this
family who lives and some pretty dire straits they're living in a pretty
terrible violent neighborhood and they're very poor and it's these
siblings who live with their aunt, aunt Bernie who is like the ultimate martyr.
I think the best present she ever got was when she got two pencils one time for
her birthday and she took a bus once to Atlantic City but while she was out
getting food two thieves broke into her hotel room and took a dump in her
luggage so, you know, she's had a very terrible life and in the story she dies
suddenly. Someone, I think these intruders, break into her home and she dies of
fright and it's this really funny story because
in the story she comes back to life she's kind of this living zombie and in
her afterlife she's crude she wants to have sex she
reveals that no one ever touched her that all she wants to do is get a nice
bra and go out and meet young hot guys and she's bitter in the way that she
wasn't when she was alive she's full of this rage of like why did I have to have
such a terrible life and in her living life she never complained and it causes
her nephew and her nieces to kind of take another look at their lives and
wonder like, why, like why do some people have everything and some people have
nothing and that's a question that is asked throughout the story and I think I
modeled a lot of my stories after George Saunders even though I don't, you know,
write speculative fiction and there are no zombies in my book.
Alright so my final book is by Roddy Doyle, I love this cover it's
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. I don't know why or how I picked up this book, I think I liked
that it said ha ha ha on the cover it was a funny title and I liked how
scrappy the kid on the cover was there was so much mischief and I was always
looking for books about children that were not for children I think partly
because my stories are all about children but they're there for adults.
And I found that hard to find for a while and also the the stories about
children that I read that were for adults and we're considered literary
fiction I think sometimes the children would seem a little precious or a little
idealized and I was looking for something a little rougher, a little more
subversive, something that, you know, believed in childhood as this capacious
time where children are neither Angels nor Devils. I think I read it like
in a day; it was just incredible.
Children don't even know sometimes that what they're doing is vulgar or that what they're
doing is precocious, or what they're doing is innocent, and he captured that
very coming-of-age really beautifully and I think early on in this book
Paddy Clark, he gets into all of these like scrapes with his brother and I
think at some point someone like lights someone's mouth on fire and I just
was like, those are the children I know, you know, the children I know
they're not really that sweet, they're actually, you know, I feel like I grew up
with almost like these homicidal maniacs sometimes, I mean they weren't really
homicidal maniacs but it's just more like when you're a child you're
constantly testing out the power you have and you're constantly testing out
the power you have over others and the power other people have over you I think
because being a child is essentially a power dynamic because it's the only time
in your life where you are completely reliant on adults and they have the
power to care for you, and they have the power to abandon you, and they have the
power to destroy you, and they have the power to shape you Roddy Doyle really
tests our patience for these kids because some of them do, you know,
pretty terrible things and they're pretty violent and they bully each other but he
also makes you just really love them and root for them and and he shows on the
other side of violence is helplessness and I loved that about this book.
It was a book that stayed with me and it was a book that I aspired to
write, one that treated children as completely worthy subjects of literary
and serious inquiry. So thank you for coming with me on this journey of my favourite books.