Sophie Ratcliffe: The Nearest Thing To Time Travel

I’ve always thought reading is, in some ways, a bit of a strange thing to do. When I was about four or five myself, I accused my parents of ‘cheating’, because they were holding a book in front of them, but they weren’t saying anything – and when I read a book at that age I had to say the words out loud. Reading will always be a bit of a mystery. It’s a really private thing, as – I suppose – we never know what anyone is really thinking or doing when they are reading something. And because reading is so static, there is often a sense that perhaps we might be doing something that seems more definitely useful to the world – like cooking or driving an ambulance.

So I write books which explore why and how reading might, or might not be useful, now and in the past. I do this for quite selfish reasons. I really love reading, so I’m always hoping to figure out why it matters. I’m a reading detective.

I’m a really a fast reader. If required, I can read three novels in a day. I once read both versions of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (a new variant manuscript was discovered about 15 years ago) in a period of four days. It can be useful but it leaves you feeling a bit sick, like eating too much cake.

I’m reading a book called Self-Portrait by Celia Paul. It’s an incredible memoir about coming of age as an artist, and about what it means to be a female creator. The book contains beautiful reproductions of Celia Paul’s paintings – and when I came across it in a bookshop that’s what made me first want to read it.

Paul writes of the difficulties of carving out a space in which one can create, amidst the ties of love and parenthood. She writes that she ‘would like this book to speak to young women artists – and perhaps to all women – who will no doubt face this challenge in their lives at some time and will have to resolve this conflict in their own ways’. That call to action really spoke to me and made me want to read the book. It’s absolutely marvellous.

Oh crikey. I’m torn here. The Painted Garden by Noel Streatfeild, Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt, or I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. On different days I would choose a different favourite. But today I’ll choose Cynthia Voigt’s magnificent Homecoming. It’s the story of four children who, for complex reasons, have to make their own way through Connecticut, by foot, with very little money, and no adult support. Due to my father’s early death, I had to grow up pretty fast – and I found Voigt’s story compelling and resonant.

It’s the nearest we get to time travel. It can make it feel like someone who is gone is alive again. And if it doesn’t do that, it can divert you from the sadness.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m trying to write something about the idea of ‘first love’ – and I’d heard this was a great story about a first love that lasts a lifetime. It is.

I need no perfect conditions to be honest. If the book is good enough, I’d be reading it while cooking, walking, hanging out the laundry, hang-gliding. But I do love reading on trains. (Also snacks). So, a cup of tea, an egg sandwich, a packet of crisps, and a long train journey.

Ah – what a segue! Well, the book was partly inspired by the idea of reading on trains. More precisely, by one famous train-reader – Anna Karenina, in Tolstoy’s novel of the same name, who sits on a train, turning the pages of a novel, trying to hold back her racing thoughts of illicit love. And the book iscentrally about love, death, trains and, myself. It’s a memoir, but a memoir with a difference.

I try to write honestly about the things we hide from other people, including those closest to us. The centre of that honesty is talking really truthfully about loss. (The book will be coming out in the States next year, with the title Loss, a love story). As I mentioned, my father died when I was thirteen – and the real effects of that kind of bereavement often don’t often get told. I was also inspired to write the book because I wanted to explore, in written form, a way of showing how much imagination is part of our truth. So in telling my story, I repeatedly return to fictions that are entwined in my life. My own story about love, motherhood, death and affairs is intertwined with those of others, embedded like Russian dolls.

A poetry collection called O Positive by Joe Dunthorne, and another called Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe. I know they are both good because I keep going back to them. But I’d also say that Self-Portrait by Celia Paul is up there with them.

I give up on books all the time. Often with the intention of returning to them. But I firmly believe that you need to be in the right place and at the right time to meet a book. Which is why I hate packing for holidays – how can I know what I will need to read (and I don’t like ebooks!)

This question is giving me flashbacks and palpitations. It’s dangerously near to the question that I was asked in my Cambridge Admissions interview, aged 17. It was a cold December afternoon, and I think the Professor asked me a variation actually – ‘If an alien landed in your garden, what books would yougift him to explain what literature is’. I think I scrambled through saying something about Shakespeare and his historical sources while trying not to hyperventilate.

Still, to return to your sci-fi philosophy prompt, if we’re presuming my alien is fluent in all human languages, and kind enough to be interested in humanity, then I’d have to presume that this will be a best guess. I think I’d give her Collected Nonsense by Edward Lear, for its joyous sound patterns. There’s a trampoline in my garden, and perhaps we could bounce together to some of the rhythms.

I’d then give my alien the Collected Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, and I would talk through Bishop’s poem ‘Questions of Travel’ – a brilliant poem which asks why we go places. I hope this might strike a chord with her, given she’s presumably travelled far. I’d finish by giving her The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams – a work of comic genius. Humanity and humour are so intertwined.

When asked this question, I think many people who have gone on to have a life of reading answer the same thing – a poetry anthology that they read at school. That’s my answer too. My anthology was Touched with Fire edited by Jack Hydes. We were studying it a little time after my father died – and we started to look at a poem called ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ by John Donne. It managed to capture the feeling of how one might be separate from someone in time and space, but still together – in a way that I found deeply consoling.

Up until that point, I had always thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. I was utterly determined that would be my path. After reading that anthology, and that poem in particular, I changed my mind, and decided that I wanted to study literature. So I guess that’s a fairly big impact.

It’s right in the middle of my teaching term right now so there’s not a load of research underway – and there won’t be till March. Along with, and related to, my research on reading histories, I’ve become really fascinated by the idea of collections and archives. Why do we collect things, and how do we collect things – and what we might be warding off when we do. I’m also really excited to go and visit something called the Minervian Library on the Isle of Orkney, which is a collection of books which were written andbound and collated by a group of Victorian siblings. I’m fascinated by recovering these smaller histories, and accounts of writing and reading that are often lost in time.

It’s a reread – it’s called Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration and Get to Work by Mason Currey. It’s a wonderful collation of the different ways creative people have handled the business of, well, achieving anything. Some, like the composer Richard Strauss, are straightforward and fearsomely active. Up at 8’o clock, three eggs and a stroll, then work till ten. Others, like Truman Capote were almost ‘horizontal’, stretched out on a couch with coffee and cigarettes – his only movement being the shift from caffeine to martinis in the middle of the afternoon.

Jane Austen squeezed in her writing between visitors, her pages hidden on the table. And the novelist Ann Beattie writes only at night. As someone who is always wondering how I might get more done, I find this book immensely reassuring. There is, one learns, no ‘right way’ to write. And we will get things done, as and when we can.