Shelley Davidow: Author and Academic

I’m an author and an academic. I write because it’s as necessary as breathing, and I teach to support my writing habit, but also because I love it.

I read multiple books simultaneously. I just finished Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad about My Neck. I have a two-person book club with my 13-year-old niece, and we’re reading Meg Rosoff’s Friends Like These. And I also just finished Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston; the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis; The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Before I was ten, I wanted to be an astronaut. After I realised what it would entail, I completely lost interest. From the age of 12, I wanted to be a writer! I read voraciously and wrote my first novel at 13. I won a literary award at 22, and I haven’t stopped writing ever since!

I think she’d be relieved that I’ve been so persistent and now make a decent living in the First World and am still able to write. Once when I was 17, I dreamt I found a stack of books in a cave. They had my name on them, but I didn’t recognise them. I realised then that these were books that I’d written, somewhere in the future. When I woke up, I felt this sadness and exhaustion, like this may never happen and I wish it would. The distance between where I was and where I wanted to go seemed so impossible. So, my teen self would be kind of amazed and happy looking at all the books on my shelf that I’ve written and had published.

Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, because it is the most brutally honest, beautiful and succinct book I’ve ever read (even though apparently she hated it!). I read it at 24, but it would have helped me personally as a writer to have read it earlier.

While living in America, I was a poor wife-of-a-student with no right to study or work, so I audited a class with a South African writer called Sheila Roberts at the university where my husband Paul was studying. She kindly let me in. We read The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, which I loved because of her prose and incredible understatement. You only figure out after the last page what actually happened at the beginning of the story. I always think of Sheila when I look at that book on my shelf.

I have such eclectic taste, no one would read what I read. But I’ve most often recommended Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky, which is brilliant and funny and helpful — about stress and why we could take a few lessons from zebras.

I love fiction and non-fiction equally. Physical books only, written by real humans only, with pages I can engage with, dog-ear, make notes on and treasure.

Wifedom by Anna Funder.

Apeirogon by Colum McCann.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

Healing the Mind through the Power of Story by Lewis Mehl-Madrona. Literally mind-blowing how this narrative psychiatrist gets psychotic patients off meds via helping them change their stories.

The Return by Hisham Matar. Enviable, beautiful writing.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. The first of the three women: that story is worth the whole book — stunning writing and a heartbreaking account.

I am writing a novel which is a dual narrative historical fiction, set in 1730 and the present day. I can’t say too much because I don’t like sharing before the book is accepted. It’s challenging me a lot because I have little time and a thousand and one ideas that are all jostling to get written.

It would be a mid-life crisis autobiography and it would have to be called: Rage Against the Dying of the Fucking Light! (I might actually write this, so no one steal my title!)