Hi I'm Sara Collins and I'm the author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
which is about Frannie Langton, who is a young Jamaican woman who is brought to
London in the early 19th century and she's given as a gift to a famous
natural philosopher, George Bentham. And she's then accused of murdering him and
his wife with whom she's been having a very twisted love affair. So I'm here in
Waterstones Piccadilly and I'm here to tell you about three books that inspired
me as a writer and you've got a start in the classics section. So I'm starting
with a classic which is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I absolutely love this book
and I discovered it during my teenage love affair with gothic novels. I think
it's one of the best of the gothics. It's like the original dark and stormy
tale both in its conception and its setting. But also I think in its effects
because it's been the originator of so many stories like this including the
novel that I wrote. And everyone knows the story and what I love about it is
that it's the most amazingly powerful tale of loneliness and longing. And I was
rereading this while writing my own novel, trying to imbue a sense of that
kind of emotion into my own language and what interested me when I did that was
the focus on the man being visited by the terrible consequences of his own
awful experiments. And that was really useful to me because I was writing about
the roots of scientific racism and kind of considering the limits of scientific
inquiry and that perpetual question where science and ethics meet. About not
how far can we go, but how how far should we go. And I don't think there's been a
better illumination of that question in fiction than this novel. It's absolutely
classic, one that I would press upon anyone who hasn't delved into this
classic to explore and definitely one that shaped my own novel. And so my
second choice and one of my favorite writers is James Baldwin.
This is his novel, Giovanni's Room. James Baldwin, in my
opinion, did more than almost any writer to throw the door open widely and
forcefully for black writers. And I've long been a fan of his essays. I think he
writes with an elegance and a clarity that any writer should try to emulate.
But I had avoided his novels for some reason until I stumbled across
Giovanni's Room. So this is the story of David who's an American in Paris who
falls in love with Giovanni who is a young Italian waiter. And it's a tragic
love story but the tragedy bookends this brief but perfect interlude that the
pair of them spend in Giovanni's Room. And it's a story about, not only about
love, but also about overcoming self-hatred and I absolutely loved the
quality of the prose and the intensity of the love story. And I also loved the
story behind the publication of this book because Baldwin's publisher warned
him against releasing it. He said it would ruin his career because the
homosexual aspects of the story would alienate his black readership and he
went ahead and did it anyway and I think it reminds us that writers should have
courage. And so last, but definitely not least for me, is the great Toni Morrison
and my favourite of hers which is Beloved. I think this is the most beautifully
written of ghost stories and it starts with one of the most beautiful opening
lines which is '124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom.' And like all of her
sentences it really pulls you right into its orbit which in this case is a story
of a mother who is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed rather than see
her taken back to slavery. I read this also when I was a teenager and it really
shook me up like nothing ever had before or ever had since. I think this book has
stayed in my DNA. And the first thing it did for me that
was so profound was it made me feel proud. Toni Morrison was the first author
about whom I could say in response: that could have been me or that could be
me. And although I don't think you need permission to
write or it's a shame if you do need permission to write, Toni Morrison really
did give me permission to think that I could do it too. But also because when I
was writing my own novel I was struggling with the idea of writing
about an enslaved person. I really didn't want to do it. And looking at this book
now from that perspective I think what she did was show us why it's important
to do that. Why we can't forget slavery but also why we shouldn't forget it and
why it's important to grapple with the after-effects of it. And she did that I
think better than anyone has ever done it or probably ever can do it. And what
she did was illuminate and reclaim and reveal the emotional lives of enslaved
people by really powerful acts of imagination which go to prove for me, I
think especially as someone who's engaged in writing historical fiction,
how much more important and true and meaningful imagination can be even than history itself.