Catherine Taylor’s Shelf Life
Catherine Taylor is a freelance writer, editor, and critic. She is former publisher at The Folio Society and was deputy director of English PEN. A co-founder of the literary quarterly Brixton Review of Books, she edited The Book of Sheffield: A City in Short Fiction (Comma Press, 2019) which was chosen as the Big City Read by Sheffield Libraries in 2020. Her memoir The Stirrings: Coming of Age in Northern Time, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2023 (paperback 2024).
How and where are you?
I’m preoccupiedly at home in north London, wondering if this “wet, uncongenial summer” as Mary Shelley recalled the summer of 1816, in which “an incessant rain often confined us for days to the house", will ever grow warmer… still, she wrote Frankenstein during that particular summer, so we shouldn’t complain too much.
What are you reading at the moment?
Elizabeth Bowen’s collected essays The Mulberry Tree, Cristina Rivera Garza’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer, about the 1990 murder of her sister and femicide in Mexico, which just won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir, and a deep-dive into the work of New Zealand writer Janet Frame – I’m writing a long piece for her centenary this August (I was born in Aotearoa NZ, and much of this is a re-read). Oh, and I usually have an Agatha Christie on the go, for winding down before sleep. I can’t read too many of those at one time though as I start to feel my brain is drying up.
And, of course, watching or listening to, or otherwise consuming?
The last film I watched was a brilliant short on Mubi, Faris Arljoob’s The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry, about a young German woman trying to put together the pieces of her lover’s sudden death in Jordan. Beautifully shot, and starring Clara Schwinning (an uncanny resemblance to a young Tilda Swinton) it’s about isolation, mystery, unknowingness, grief ... I wish it had been a full-length feature film. I’ve just finished watching Eric, on Netflix. I was rather baffled by the point of the puppet monster thing. It’s quite an 80s concept, though, like ET or Gremlins. Sesame Street meets Mean Streets, not entirely successfully. So I’m incidentally listening to a lot of The Cure, as ‘A Forest’ is part of the soundtrack. Eric is set in 1985 in a New York City I longed to visit at that time. Everything dark and off-beat seems more glamorous when you’re a teenager.
I’m also imbibing Beth Gibbons’ new album (DO WE STILL SAY ALBUM??) and a bit of Bob Dylan (anything from 1975’s Desire, usually).
What did you read as a child?
Everything I could. Aside from my beloved time-slip and frankly bizarre children’s books – Marianne Dreams (Catherine Storr), When Marnie Was There (Joan G. Robinson), The Owl Service, Red Shift (Alan Garner) and so on I had two particular favourites: US writer Rosa Guy’s The Friends, about two Black girls living in 1960s’ Harlem and Summer of my German Soldier (Bette Greene), about a young American Jewish girl in World War II who befriends a German POW. They’re both rather tragic coming-of-age books (they’d be classed as YA now) about outsiders and being an outsider and since I always felt like one, I guess they resonated with me. Also I think it’s important to read about scenarios and lives and situations beyond one’s own experience, if that doesn’t sound too worthy. It does, I know! And Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah, in which a sixteen-year-old girl is the sole survivor of a nuclear catastrophe – or so she thinks. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man. O’Brien died before it was completed – it was finished by his wife and daughters, which I feel gives the book more of a feminist angle.
Which books and/or writers have inspired and influenced you, and what have you learnt from them?
This is a nice question if difficult to answer… even writers I don’t read any more have left a huge impression and influence – Dickens, who really knew how to set a scene, and for drama and characterisation; the Southern Gothic writers I was obsessed with as a teenager – the morbid, dark, oddities of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and the redemptive work of William Faulkner all set in the lush, humid, racist segregated South of the USA; the short stories of Maupassant who conjured a world in a sentence especially his narratives of ordinary citizens caught up in the Franco-Prussian war; Christa Wolf for blending mythology and contemporary politics in her essays, and of her brilliant novels, The Quest for Christa T is my book of a lifetime, it’s a bit like reading Virginia Woolf set in East Germany. (I also think Jenny Erpenbeck, who won this year’s International Booker Prize, is an heir to Wolf.)
The early novels of the other Woolf, Virginia Woolf, remain the most important of her work for me, in particular The Voyage Out. I am not a fan of her ‘so-called stream-of-consciousness’ writing, though it’s probably libellous to admit it. James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room – incendiary righteous anger and sorrow by turns. The poetry and prose of Marina Tsvetaeva burned into my soul at 18 and never left. Angela Carter’s baroque (The Magic Toyshop and The Bloody Chamber are her best; I feel the later novels are parodically over-the top). Elizabeth Bowen’s icy precision and unusual sentence structure, formal and off-kilter, her short story ‘The Demon Lover’ was the model for the final chapter of my memoir.
Nabokov’s The Gift, the last book he wrote in Russian – it’s about writing and being written and artifice and this play we call life. Philip Roth’s The Human Stain is possibly one of the greatest 20th-century novels ever produced about the human condition – debased, broken. It’s quite Brechtian in its concept – this is humanity, see how ugly it is. Talking of Brecht, his poetry and plays – apart from The Caucasian Chalk Circle which I have walked out of more than once.
What’s the worst review you’ve ever received?
I haven’t received any bad reviews as such, apart from one earlier this year, in a northern magazine – it was way after my book originally came out and it was clear the reviewer had actually bought my book just to write negatively about it about it. The premise of the review seemed to be that my memoir and experience of my own life didn’t match up to the reviewer’s own memory and experience of their life – which was a very peculiar take. Also the piece was really badly written, which I truly find more offensive than any kind of dig.
Tell us a little about your creative process.
Procrastination and more procrastination. I am not someone who writes every day of every week. Like the majority of writers I have to do other work in order to support myself, so the ‘creative process’ has to fit around that. But when I do write I become very immersed, it can be an extraordinarily intense experience, like nothing else. I can write for hours at a stretch. Writing my memoir was akin to opening a time capsule, all the work that went into it. It was simultaneously exciting and exhausting. I need to rev myself up again for the next book…
How has your experience of the publishing industry been?
I’ve worked in the book industry for over 30 years, every aspect of it really, so I thought there would be few surprises in being published myself. But there have been, of course. It’s a little bit like being on a conveyer belt. There’s a lot of cloak and dagger stuff and it’s hard to get info. The process would be much easier if it were more transparent. And it is nerve racking, if like me you’ve commissioned authors and edited books and written about other people’s books because that’s your job…that said, I think I’ve had a pretty positive experience overall, though, I’ve been lucky.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
“Don’t be shit.”
What are you working on right now?
I’m writing some short stories as a kind of exercise, and I’m enjoying doing that. And planning my next book, which goes further back into my family’s history, the story of my maternal grandmother who was committed to an asylum for 20 years. I’m trying to give a voice to someone who had no voice. I’ve never even seen a photograph of her.