Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S2 Ep19: Bookshelfie: Grace Dent

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

In this episode Zing Tsjeng is joined by Grace Dent - the broadcaster, columnist and one of the most recognisable and unique voices on the British food scene. She's also an author and her latest book, Hungry - a nostalgic food memoir - is out on Oct 29th. Grace's book choices are: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton Restoration by Rose Tremain Kinflicks By Lisa Alther Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser Akner Every fortnight, join Zing Tsjeng, editor at VICE, and inspirational guests, including Dolly Alderton, Stanley Tucci, Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis as they celebrate the best fiction written by women. They'll discuss the diverse back-catalogue of Women’s Prize-winning books spanning a generation, explore the life-changing books that sit on other women’s bookshelves and talk about what the future holds for women writing today. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and this series will also take you behind the scenes throughout 2020 as we explore the history of the Prize in its 25th year and gain unique access to the shortlisted authors and the 2020 Prize winner. Sit back and enjoy. This podcast is produced by Bird Lime Media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Now streaming exclusively on Disney Plus. Wish upon a star. Disney's Pinocchio. Star light, star bright. First star I see tonight. From the studio that brought your beauty and the beast. I wish I may. I wish I might.

And starring Tom Hanks. Have the wish I wish tonight. Disney Spinochia only on Disney Plus. Now streaming. 18 plus subscription required. Teas and C's apply. With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices, and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Zing Singh, your host for Season 2 of the Women's Prize podcast, coming to you every fortnight throughout 2020.

You've joined me for a bookshelfy episode in which we ask an inspiring woman to share the story of her life through five brilliant books by women. Hello and welcome to today's episode of Bookshelfy. We are still practicing safe social distancing, so this podcast is being recorded remotely. And today's guest is Grace Dent, the broadcaster, writer and one of the most recognizable and unique voices on the British food scene. When she's not putting together her must-read restaurant reviews, she's writing books and her latest one, Hungary, a nostalgic food memoir is out October 29th. She was also one of the Women's Prize judges in 2015, the year Ali Smith took home the prize for how to be both. Welcome to the podcast, Grace. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's fun. It's fun to be doing something to do with the Bailey's Book Prize. I haven't, the Women's Prize, I haven't thought about it for a while. So doing this podcast, bringing back all the memories of sitting at that, sitting at that table with Shabee. Mary Chakrabati and who else was that? Laura, Laura from everyday sexism. It was a good time. It was a good time. I always find judging book prizes. I always think that the most exciting part and the most joyous part is when you say yes. And then the books begin arriving in boxes and boxes and boxes and you wouldn't, you suddenly realize the gravity of the task. Right. So how intensive was it? Because this is.

what I can never wrap my head around, that the judges have to read so many books. Well, yeah, and at first, it feels like an amazing, exciting challenge, and you're going to be incredibly organized and do 10 a week and whatever. And then life gets in the way, and it does become very stressful. So you're reading continuously, you know, you're reading the moment you open your eyes and when you're going to bed and everywhere. you feel a massive weight on your shoulders because the moment, you know, we're only human

and you often get 15, 20, 30 pages into a book and think I really don't like this, but you also know that you have to, you kind of have to carry on, you know. So, yes. And yeah, I mean, I was very proud to do it. And but it was, it was, it was exhausting. But it was a massive, it was a massive,

treat as well so I don't know it sounds like a huge challenge it's I'm trying I think as as I speak about it it was painful pleasure which is kind of sometimes the experience of reading a good book can be very painful pleasure well I mean I think some of the books I've chosen to speak about today I I definitely I recommend them but they are painful and you know really painful topics and and ones that really stuck with me afterwards about, you know, about divorce and sexual appetite and parents. So, yeah, I think the best books probably do leave a scar. So the first book you picked was a book that I hope you won't hurt and wounded by as a child. It's the magic faraway tree by Enid Blyton.

Yes, yes. Like, I just haven't a real, kind of a joy in my heart when I think about being a little girl and living in Curric and Carlisle and sitting in the bedroom that I was sharing with my little brother at the time. So I was very young and getting hold of that book. It's the second in the series. It's the Enchanted Forest series. And the second book is the Magic Farrowing.

tree. It's the story of, as all good children's stories, it's always about bored children who find something to, something fantastic to, you know, to make their summer holidays wonderful. They go into a forest and they find a strange tree and they climb the tree and they, not only is it strange and filled with strange fruits and strange people, they then realize that the final rung of the ladder is an ever-moving land that the land changes all the time. And they crawl up the ladder and the challenge is to go in and enjoy the land and then get out before the land moves on because you'll be trapped. Now, there's something about that, even that idea, that notion that still now in my mid-40s

makes me giddy. You have to get down. this ladder before everything changes again. I don't know where there's, I think there's a almost like a parable of life in there, you know, about partying, about getting to, you know, anything that's too good and too giddy and too wonderful, whether it's getting in with a crowd of people or, you know, starting to really enjoy a nightclub or whatever. You have to leave, you have to leave before it takes you over. And that's, and that's the, that's the whole, that's the whole point of the book. I'm, Have you read it?

Did you read any Enid Blighton at all? So I did read Enid Blighton, but now, you know, looking back on it, I just remember there was a lot of stuff in there that maybe it wasn't the best to teach children, you know, like the mums are always relentlessly cooking and baking for the dad. He's just absent. Which, you know, in 2020,

feels a little bit like, oh, this is off its time. But I did not read the magic faraway tree. I think that, you know, but, yeah, Enid Blighton is very much of, of its time portraying a certain type of, you know, 30s, 40s, 50s childhood that was in, yet, you know, fathers, especially at the, you know, the class of people that Enid Blighton wrote about, I think that fathers were quite absent. They were, they, they set off every morning and, you know, with a bowler hat and a, you know, umbrella and they set off to the city and women were quite bored and, you know, cooked and waited for them to come home. I mean, I don't think that, you know, Enid Blighton didn't ever really, really, you know, she wasn't, she wasn't a greatly, a great modern person. I think she was

quite stuck in, in her ways. I didn't really enjoy the famous five and the secret seven. This is it with, I'm not a, uh, I was thinking before. I started speaking to you. You know, am I a massive Enid Blighting fan? No, I don't think I am. I was left very cold by Mallory Towers as a child because I went to a, you know, a state school. And nobody I knew ever went to boarding school.

And it was just to completely, so to me, the idea of, you know, first time at Mallory Towers that didn't excite me. Right. They didn't have, you know, amazing adventures in the summer holidays where we, you know, sailed down rivers and solved crimes. It was that didn't really excite me. I, but the magic faraway tree for me, I think that it opened my eyes to fiction like nothing had done before.

I definitely read this book before I got my hands on Roll Dahl. Now, I will argue that I think that anything that she achieves in the magic faraway tree Roaldahl in his books in James and the Giant Peach and Danny, champion of the universe, champion of the world, I always get that wrong. And you know, Charlie the Chocolate Factory, I think

that he, I think he nails that emotion far far better. But I do love this idea in the magic fireway tree where you know, they go up, they go up into the land

where you can grab anything, you can have anything, want and oh that there's a woman uh that like mistress slap who's like always hitting children there's like a there's a definite macabre aspect to this book that i really really love but i mean i argue continually that children's books should be a bit spooky and they should be a bit frightening and the idea that you know i know that in the in the latest editions of the magic faraway tree they've changed mistress slap to mistress snap so she's only a laugh She's only allowed to shout. And I think although I can see why we've done that,

I think that the point was she was meant to be terrifying and actually slightly unhinged. So what was your childhood like, you know, growing up in Carlisle? Well, I, you know, I think that, you know, for my background, I think that I possibly had the happiest version of it that I could. You know, I was, I had a mum and I had a dad and they were, you know, they argued a lot, but they loved each other. And we were never hungry.

I'm not saying that we ate the greatest foods in the world. You know, I kind of grew up on the contents of the freezer and wimpy. But I was, I was very, very happy. you know, I like my, my father was, again, you know, he wasn't a perfect man. He was a very, very symbolic of the 70s, very 70s dad. I don't think that, you know, he didn't, he didn't really say very much. He was quite a quiet person and just wanted to sit in his chair and read his newspaper. But, you know, I do kind of, I think that I did have quite a good time.

You know, I lived on a, I lived on a terrorist road, a terrorist street with, with tons of different children, loads of different children. We played out continuously. We played out on the fields and, you know, played out on the cold of old abandoned allotments. And, you know, I went to quite a religious school. So it was quite tub-thumping. I went to brownies. A very, very typical 70s and 80s, northern working-class childhood.

I, you know, I didn't, I didn't know that anything else existed. It was only when I got to London years later that I realized that there was any, really any kind of, there was anything else available. There was any other marked class difference. So, so I can't say that, you know, I didn't spend my childhood thinking, wouldn't it be wonderful if we were incredibly rich and I was at boarding school? because I don't, you know, these things didn't. It was only one, it was only in later years that I thought maybe we were slightly hard done to.

But then you went to university and you studied your second book that you've picked, which is Restoration by Rose Tremaine, who also won the Women's Prize, actually, for the road home. Yes, she, she did. She did. That was absolutely, and I loved that book as well. So Rose Tremaine, Restoration was one of the first books on one of my first reading lists. the University of Stirling when I got there in 96 and, sorry, 92. God, that was so long ago.

I got there and I didn't much like the look of this book by its cover. I think it had, I think one of the first editions had Charles II, a picture of Charles II on the front or somebody, someone in a Charles II curly head style. And I just thought, oh, God, she does. A really historical fiction was not my bag. And then I began. And I've always loved this book.

It's so vividly brings to life the idea of the restoration period in London, which I've gone on since then to, I love the Tudor period. I love the restoration periods. I love the Stuart dynasty. I've got really, really into history the older I got. It really brings it vividly to life.

It's a book about a man who has been very in at court, very part of the in crowd, and is then cast out and for some faux par, and about his time kind of fighting his way to get back into the love and the affection of the king. And it's a book which I've always said, as I've lived in London for the last 20, 25 years, you see this pattern being repeated again and again anyway. You know, there's like the idea of people who want to be close to the royal family or want to be close to celebrities and, you know, being in the in crowd and being in the

out crowd and being cast out and no longer in favour. This is something that's just going on in Soho now, you know. This is something that's just going on in Prumrose Hill right this moment. You know, this is, you know, people that, you know, want to be close to in the Kate Moss's crowd or want to be close to, you know, Harry and Megan. It's a parable about what is actually important in life and about personal discovery. And, you know, there's themes about mental illness and bedlam. The bedlam is in that the actual old original bedlam of people being treated for mental illness is in there.

So there's a lot of, you know, it looks at that and the idea, the fragility of your mental health. And I just love this book. What I find funny about this, though, is I really think that I've given this book to so many people. And I've never, ever heard anybody come back and say, God, grace, I love that book. Really? Not once. And it makes me laugh because it makes me, it's so underlines. how books just present themselves so differently to different people.

You know, you can love a book. I love it with all of your heart, but it'll leave other people cold. And I think this book does, I think Rose Tremaine's work, some people absolutely adore it. You know, I love music and science. I've read, you know, I read everything in the end by Rose Tremaine and ended up writing a dissertation about her in,

1996 and I think I was pretty much one of the first people to ever write a dissertation. I can't remember, I think at the time nobody else had, I don't know if anyone else does now. And I remember then just feeling very much on my own and my love of Rose Tremaine and what she achieves. She's, she is one of our greatest British authors and I don't know why she's overlooked. You know, she was writing, you know, with an issue like, you know, like trans issues. She was writing, you know, writing about that in 1995. She was, you know, churning out fantastic novels about that whole idea. She's just very, very ahead of her time and can suddenly, you know,

pull out like an incredible book about the state of London in modern day and then suddenly go back and write something about, you know, the 15th century in China. I don't know how she does it, but she is, she's the real deal for me. She is the real deal of, um, of how to be an author.

I know. I looked up, um, the plot of restoration because I actually read the road home, um, which is a 2008 women's prize winner. And I was like, is this the same author?

This sounds so different. Because the road home is about a Polish migrant who moves to London and gets on a down and outs and ends up working in a restaurant, actually. And it could, not be further from, you know, a courtier who gets kicked out of the royal court. You never know what she's going to do. She's got a new one out right at the moment.

I noticed this. She's prolific. She just never seems to stop having a book out, which is, to me, again, a massive, you know, a massive feat. Because, you know, I write one book and I need to go and line a darkened room for a year at least. So she's got one out of the moment and I could not tell you. I couldn't even guess what it's about. So you studied this book at university and I know that was also when you started writing for Cosmo Magazine. Was that your first kind of taste of journalism?

The first time I felt as if I was properly writing, I think was at university. I wrote for a fanzine for a while. called Mental Block and had just had a load of fun in that and got into all kinds of trouble and then started to I wrote for the student newspaper for a while I've never really felt like a journalist

to be quite honest I never wanted to be a journalist I haven't I haven't I haven't I haven't got a passion for facts and recording and bearing witness in a way that my friends who call themselves journalists have, you know. The investigative reporting is, I think, an incredible skill. Me, I don't

think that's me. I think that I'm more, I'm very good at absorbing what's going on around me and being able to spue it back out in an informative and funny and moving way, I think I'm a good writer and I'm definitely a good creative writer. I'm very descriptive and I can make people feel things. But if you sent me to report on a cat that stuck up a tree, you probably wouldn't get the facts about even where the tree properly is and what kind of cat it is. I drive my small team who look after me for the Guardian. I drive them slightly mad because they, you know, they have to sub my copy. And whenever I describe where a restaurant even is,

they literally have to get my map coordinates and double check it because I'm awful for just putting it in the wrong county or whatever. So I like to say that I'm an artist and I'm allowed to be artist. And it's, I've got away with it so far. That's, that's all my, that's all my career plan has often been to just get away with it for as long as I can. It serves, it serves you very well so far. Just keep getting away with it and making sideways steps into, uh, into where you kind of want to be. You know, I'm always, I'm always very conscious.

I always have been that media and all the different facets of it, whether it's, you know, appearing on TV or presenting or writing or reviewing or whatever. It's so, things move so fast. They're so fleeting. You can have the thing that you do snatched away from you very quickly because it suddenly goes out of fashion. So I like to always have different irons in the fire. and also do things that excite me.

If it stops, you know, I wrote about television for a long time. And then I just wasn't, I wasn't feeling it anymore. I really wasn't, I wasn't feeling the love for it. So I got out before it started to make me sad. So I do, you know, I'm a big believer that we, we only have one life. And you can't, don't let, don't go up a cul-de-sac. You climbed down the ladder of the magic fireaway tree before it was too late. Yes, I definitely, I think I've got, you know, being, yeah, absolutely bang on.

I've got out of a lot of different magic faraway tree lands before it moved on. And sat and got back down the ladder and sat and waited for a new land to come. That's perfect. That's exactly why I love the book. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish Cream. Bayleys is proudly supporting the women's prize for fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people. Bailey's is the perfect adultery, whether in coffee, over ice cream or paired with your favorite book.

So the third book you picked was Kinflicks by Lisa Author. Okay. Kinflicks by Lisa Arthur, I always, in my heart, think is the book that I shouldn't have been reading. It's, it's, I'm not going to put a fine point on it. It's filthy.

It's, it's a filthy, mucky, grubby, it's also an incredibly clever erudite book written by a woman in the, I think it was out in about 1977. And it's, it's an American book,

a female writer, Lisa. author. It's a book, a kind of a first-person book about a woman going back to her hometown to look after her mother who is elderly and sick and going around various places from her old life and thinking about her right of passage, about the sexual things that happened, about the sex she had. And then when she went away to uni, thinking about the sex she had there and, you know, it's about 60s, 70s, American female feminist sexual enlightenment. It's about, it kind of came out at the same time as like Erica Young

and this whole idea of women actually being able for the first time to kind of be filthy, to talk about, you know, masturbation and, you know, I'm wondering how blue I can be on this podcast. Oh, you can be as blue as you want. It was, well, I just remember that obviously, you know, I think I read it when I was, say, 11. I got hold of it at a car boot. I got hold of it at a carboot sale. I always say that I went very quickly from reading the magic faraway tree to reading kinflicks with no in the middle. You know, I didn't come from a house where there was tons and tons of books or a reading plan.

or teachers that really thought about young adult books that this was, you know, the 70s of the 80s. Really kids read children's books and then they were just set free at a car boot sale or a jumble sale to pick up what they wanted with any supervision. And I got hold of, I would read Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper, which were raunchy enough. And then I got hold of Kinflicks. And it's not like I didn't probably know about sex and the facts of life by 11 because, like, now, I went to a school where the kids did. But I never heard of sex like this because, you know, suddenly she is talking about masturbation and vibrators. And she goes, you know, she loses a virginity in a car or definitely does something in a car.

She goes up to university and discovers radical feminism and gets into a same, you know, gets into a lesbian relationship. And my, I think my head nearly fell off at this point. I think I remember, you know, reading this book. By the time I'd got to this part in the book, I was so terrified that somebody might find out and take this book off me. Because obviously we're talking about a time before the internet where, you know, you know, anything that was fantastic and exciting was so precious because you couldn't see it or hear it anywhere else.

So I do remember this book, being underneath my mattress. and being terrified that my mother would take it off me and she never knew that she never knew about this book. The funny thing is with my mother now she's now 84 years old and sometimes when I remember something like this now I ring her up and I taunt her. I say, I'm going to tell you something and she just roars with laughter.

Getting back to Kinflicts, yes, I've tried to read it since and I've kind of went, okay, so the, there's a bit of talk of you know if you don't give someone a hand job they get blue balls and there's a bit of talk you know she goes to it's really interesting you know

she goes to this kind of not a kibbutz but kind of radical feminist outpost and I think she gets oral sex off another woman and to me in my mind I was like this was the like the raunchiest but now I look back and I go okay the point of that

was that she was very confused and she didn't even really know whether that was, she was a lesbian and the point was that she then goes on to get married to a man and it's a, it's, it's, I think that all books that move you, when you're young, you should go back and look at because you'll often find that the story wasn't the story that you thought. But when you're 11, you get so transfixed with, you know, that you're actually reading it, something about it in print that it just blanks out every single literary intention ever. completely completely i um i think that you know it kind of makes me sad sometimes when i think that

that uh that younger kids now because they live in you know such a kind of an easy porn saturated landscape you know you do you kind of think do they have these kind of formative moments do they have that anymore where you know they get hold of just this one thing and they're like Oh my God. I don't know whether that happens. And I don't also, when I have this debate in my own head, I don't even know what side I'm on. Is it better to be the way it is now or should we go back?

I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I feel like before the advent of the internet, if you ever came across a remotely extirated thing, it would be like that scene from Indiana Jones when they open the treasure chest of your face just blasts off. Exactly that. You know, I lived in a house with, you know, my mother was incredible, my mother used to fill it my bedroom.

You know, she used to literally go through my, when my dad in the end said to me when I was about 13, he said, you just stop keeping a diary. Just stop writing it all down. Like, just stop it. It's like, I come, I get him from work. I do not want to have your diary. read to me. And I was like, what? So I always remember that conversation.

Because he was basically saying, look, you know, you're entitled. You're entitled to a private life. And it's, you know, it's really tempting of parents to kind of want to step in and know everything. But, you know, I think that at a certain point, you are kind of, you're entitled to be embarrassing and to do embarrassing things. and to, you know, to be in love and to be infatuated and to think about sex. And so sometimes parents don't need to know everything about their children's sexual urges. I honestly look back when I think of myself as a teenager and I was so self-important and obviously obsessed with the fact that I was experiencing everything for the absolute first time.

I just thought I knew it all. And I think my mother must have been like, oh, babe, you don't know anything. Yes. I think that it's one of the. greatest, you know, greatest, most painful things that you cannot talk to teenagers about anything. You really can't, you know, you can try, you can hint. But when I talk to the teenagers in my family, I can, even with the best one in the world, you can feel them really doubting that you can possibly know what they're going through.

you know and I you know I've spoken to them you know being dumped and being kind of you know being ghosted isn't a new thing you know or somebody saying that they're madly in love with you at Friday night and then by Monday ignoring you in the corridor

these things are not a new invention it's not so it's I do find it interesting when I try to trying to get through to teenagers is just impossible The brains are absolutely a completely mad jelly frequency. I'm really, I don't regret not having children. I just don't regret it. I see all my friends right now.

And I'm thinking of Ashen faced. And I think, no, no, I'm okay. Not for me, thanks. Not for me, no. So the fourth book you picked was Station 11 by Emily St. John Mendo. Yes. Yes. I absolutely.

bloody love this book and I wanted this book to win the women's prize, the year that I was judging. I, it was a book that I think I got about 45 pages in and I was like, I don't, you know, I don't, this is it. I have found the book. I have found it. And I think I was incredibly outraged that I did it get in the long list? I think it maybe got the long list. If it did get into the long list, it was because I really fought for it. This is a book about, it's a dystopian book, which is not my bag.

It's not, is it sci-fi, kind of sci-fi. Is it sci-fi? It's definitely not the type of book that I would ever have picked up. it's uh i mean god this it's a book about the can i what can i give away yes i can kind of give away that it's it's about the earth being taken over by an incredible flu you know so it's it's very prescient yeah it's and i mean that's all very quick it's about the world kind of healing and rebuilding again. And I, it's very surprising. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, if, if you had to begin again, if the, if the earth did actually have to begin again, you know, you know, what we know

now with COVID, if the absolute worst had happened and thousands and thousands, millions and millions and millions of people had gone and there was only a very small amount of us left. And we didn't ever get internet again. We didn't get electricity again. And, you know, all the things. things that we feared happened, what actually would be important. And what would end up being, you know, what, you know, there's strange things like, you know, everybody that was left in the airport, in the airports, if they just, if they just ended up setting up home there, in 50 years time, what would airport world be like? And if we could never have credit cards again, how would you explain credit cards to children? There's thousands and thousands of tiny ideas.

like this. It's an incredibly difficult book, I think, to communicate to people that it's actually fun and joyous and it's very, very cerebral. It's not a sci-fi book. This is a, not that they aren't not cerebral, but it's a very, it's a book about Shakespeare. It's a book about art. Like, what art would survive after this? What would we still, would theatre groups, if does theatre really heal? Does art heal? You know, one of the characters, spend a lot of the book going around looting houses in a lovely way, a lovely, gentle looting because no one's left, there's no one there anymore. You know, what would you spend the rest of your life getting into houses hoping to find,

you know, would it be certain types of medication? Would it be, would you always look for, what, whose books, if books were never printed again, whose books would you go and always try to find? And if society broke down, what would be the new religious? that would come out. And I just think that this book, and it's not a very long book. It's not, I just think it's,

it achieves so much in such a short amount of space. It's incredibly moving. I didn't want it to end. I just think this is one of the greatest books I've ever read. I mean, it sounds especially relevant right now. I know. It's, it's one of those that, I think it might be hard. to get people to read it harder now than it's ever been, you know.

She's, she's, people are not in the mood. Do you think people have corona fatigue? They are, they are not, I mean, the, the, the illness that she creates and without trying to give to him which away, because it isn't really a book about this, but the illness is, um, the, the book begins with, uh, at one of the characters, what, watching, uh, you know, abroad. watching a play and one of the main characters on stage just dying on stage and it all kind of of this illness and then the kind of panic as you begin to realize that this kind of almost

you know this life ending thing is just wiping everybody out who you know and it goes from there it's just wonderful I was going to ask you know do you think readers have COVID fatigue I mean you're a writer I'm presuming you have to mention you know the big Cs word in reviews nowadays. Yes, absolutely. I don't think it's, it's something that people necessarily are running into, going to be running into the bookshops thinking, I need to read people's, people's views on COVID. I think that we're so bombarded by it. I'm not saying that there will be some fantastic fiction and some fantastic art that comes out of it, they will. But As I say, I think that people are very saturated by it.

I felt when I was, you know, I was still putting the finishing touches to Hungary at the right in the middle of what was going into lockdown. And I really sought long and hard about reroute in the book and making it all about, you know, having to gather food in the end chapters, having to gather food for my mum, who I was, she was in isolation and and then I stopped and I just thought you know that there will have been a thousand think pieces about this

like a thousand think pieces and if this book comes out by, you know we didn't know if it was going to come out I mean I was I was very much one of the authors that first of all all of our books fell off the schedule and then suddenly one of the publishers, like a game of poker, a game of risk, I don't know whether it's whichever. One of the publishers then suddenly released a list of what they were putting out, and then everybody put their books out.

And then there was 700 books coming out. I, in my heart, I thought that if my book is coming out at Christmas, in October, you know, in the run up to Christmas, what would I want to read? And I want to laugh. This is what I want to do right now. I want to laugh. So, and I want to think about very, I want to think about a world before COVID, which is.

Happy times, basically. Exactly. I want to, I don't, I almost don't think that I'm ready right now to think about everything we've lost as well. Because it only hits me. It hits me every day what we've lost. hits me, you know, our personal freedoms and our trust in each other and the people that we may never see again because they're too scared to leave the house. And, you know, we're coming, you know, as I, as we talk now, we are in the run up to Christmas 2020, which I think the pennies beginning

to drop for people that Christmas dinner may not be happening as you think, uh, you're New Year's Eve parties may not be happening at that, that great homecoming that you're having, it may not happen this year or next year. So I do, you know, I was very, very determined to write something funny. And give us a brief idea of what your book is about. Well, it's, uh, it's a memoir, but it's, you know, it's a, it's a kind of a memoir. It's a, it's a kind of a memoir. It's a, it's a, it's a memoir. It's definitely about memories. I say at the beginning that it's about my memories of how I see growing up and how I became a little working class girl in Couric eating Finder's Krispy pancakes and the contents of my mum's freezer and Butterscotch Angel Delight and only really knowing

cheddar cheese and, you know, quite limited, quite a limited diet to being the restaurant critic for The Guardian and spending my life in Michelin Star Restaurants, how did I go from one place to the other? So Hungary is about my appetite and it's about my hunger and it's also about my hunger for success and to leave and to, you know, to move to London and to enter the world of media and do all the things I did. It's really also a book about my father and the journey I've been on with him over the last 10 to 12, maybe even 15 years with his decline. I've lost him completely really now with dementia. And it's so it's about that stage in my life.

So it's as he loses his memories, me thinking about my childhood and my teen years. I'm absolutely determined, you know, it's kind of a funny book. But yes, there is, you know, I do talk about dementia in it. So yeah, dementia and pot noodles. That's the book. Put that on the front cover. Dementia, you know, I think that the publisher has a tagline, hungry from frazzles to foie gras, which is, you know, I have very strong thoughts on foie gras,

so this isn't me saying that I love foie gras. It certainly is not. But that's the book. It's about the journey. It's, yeah, it's, it's. It's, it's, it's, I wanted to talk about class. And this is also a veiled way of me talking pretty much in, in a funny manner for, you know, 80,000 words about the working classes and the nuances in the, in the different, the many, many different forms of working class. You know, we are not, we're not just one kind of big lump as sometimes, because.

portrayed. We're not, you know, it's very difficult to talk about the working classes because there's about 20 different types. It's about whether I am middle, you know, I think most people go, well, you're not even working class. You're middle class. Well, am I? Am I? Am I allowed to be middle class now? Are you ever really middle class when you don't have a maths GCSE and you've got like rows of silver fillings? And are you, you know, you can run for a, a long time but I still had to go back I still you know I can be as fancy as I want and you know start to know all of the ins and outs of the London restaurant scene but I still had to go back and look after my dad and eating Weatherspoons and that is that's a very common thing for

thousands and thousands of people you know when you you go into Weatherspoons or you you go into the Toby Carvery you see lots of people who got a little bit above the station like me who's now in there, you know, eating or eating a scone in a garden centre at 3 o'clock in the afternoon because they've had to go back and look after, you know. So, yeah, it's about class. I'm very, when I was a little girl, I used to love, Julie Cooper wrote a book on class. And it was just, yeah, called Class. And it was about the, you know, it's just kind of a lighthearted romp through all these different,

imaginary characters and I always thought I would like to write something like that. And I think I did with added, with added junk food. I write a lot about in the book about ASDA. I seem to have become completely fixated in later life with ASDA, which I think that, you know, completely revolutionized the way that my family ate from about 1987 onwards. I mean, the thing is like that it, clearly. ties into a much bigger discussion in food criticism and the restaurant industry about, you know, could diversity be better? Could the representation be better? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know,

I think that, I think that although it's probably no comfort to anybody, I think that the, the representation is probably getting better. It's definitely getting better if you looked at how it, how it looked to me the landscape even 15 years ago you know i 10 years ago 8 years ago i couldn't have well 10 years ago i it was a massive coup that i felt personally that like i was allowed to be a restaurant critic you know i i i you know i'm a i'm a i'm a white working class woman it's like but i i i thought it you know it was there was no diversity it was it was was a very certain set type of person was allowed to say, I understand food. And the type of food they understood was French gastronomy.

And the reason they understood French gastronomy is because they had childhoods where people understood French gastronomy. Yeah. So, you know, I hope, you know, that things have been really, really shaken up now. I really do. I think that, you know, I'm very proud to work for The Guardian. They have a really, really good go every week of letting people from all backgrounds right. And all, you know, about all different types of, you know, all different types of cuisine.

They are, I think that the Guardian are more switched on than possibly anyone in trying to get things right now, you know, trying to say, you know, it's not good enough to get the names of these things wrong or, you know, the genesis of these dishes wrong. So, you know, I think that I think that things are positive. Sometimes they may not feel like that way, but they are more positive than they were. Grace, your fifth and final book choice was Fleishman is in trouble by Taffy Brodasser Ackner. Fleishman is in trouble. I think is one of the great. American novels over the last 20 years. It's up there with Jonathan Franzen.

I think it's up there with Philip Roth. It's just, it's quite a long book. It's through the eyes of a man who is almost about to file for divorce. and it's just a book about relationships and marriage. It's a book about marriage. I'm fully aware that if you're maybe of an age and you've never been married or you've never even been in a very long cohabiting relationship, this book may well leave you cold.

However, I read this book, say five or six years after getting divorced, And I thought, God, this book is just absolutely bang on about being in your 20s and being in a relationship and being in your 30s in your relationship and then ending up getting married and your dreams and what it's like and then what it's actually like and the process of learning about each other and learning each other's faults and then eventually, you know, getting divorced. which millions of people all over Britain, all over America, they were all going through this. And I think that this is just so acutely observed about putting your feet back in the dating game and how things have changed and what it's like to be, you know, in your late 30s or your early 40s to be suddenly back out on the market with all the different apps. And God, it's just a great book.

It's just, and for about the first three quarters of it, it's through the eyes of the wronged man. And he does a really bloody good job of convincing you that, that this awful woman's done all these awful things. And then it obviously goes over to her side. Right. And then you go, oh, God, okay. Yeah, I totally, I absolutely get this.

I just think that, you know, the author, just pulls it off. Just pulls it. I just wanted, when I finished this book, I just, I think I contacted her on Twitter, like a mad fan.

Just said, this is just, I just, you know, her kind of, like, you're amazing. She was very gracious.

She was just, you know, she was just like, oh, thank you. It's just crazy. I am just a huge fan of her. So, yes,

I was talking to a friend yesterday about this, though, and I recommend this to them and they recommended a little life to me and and we both hated each other's books. I mean, I guess that just speaks to how subjective literature is, isn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And again, this is why literature never gets boring, really. It's, you can be madly in love with something and it's just leaves someone cold, which is the most

brutal thing. When you give someone a book and you love it, it's like you've given them a little bit of your heart. Right. Yeah. And then they just say, this is crap, I didn't finish it. And you kind of feel almost wounded thinking about this poor book that's like sitting discarded under their bed. So what does a really great book mean to you? Well, I think that a really great book becomes kind of part of you. It's part of your artillery. It's part of, it's, you know, you've given it your time and it's, and it's embedded in your head forever, a really great book. You know, people go, oh, it's about escapism. Kind of. Sometimes it's not. It's not escapism. It's almost, you know, you're, you're letting the characters and the plots into your head and they're never going to leave. They're there.

it's uh it's almost it's more like a transplant sort of like possession really yeah yes absolutely it's so out um broadening your broadening your brain like waking up parts of your brain waking waking up bits that you didn't you didn't even know were asleep so if you had to pick one book from your list as the one that you would press into the hands of your friends as your favorite which one would it be?

Station 11. I'd give people station 11. Because for me, it had a, and this sounds like I'm going off on a tangent, but the same kind of feeling that I had with Game of Thrones that, again, a genre that I would never have watched, you know, just like, what?

Dragons, dragons, and, you know, I wouldn't know. And I felt like that. I was like, oh my God, oh my God, it's making me feel a thing. thing that I didn't know that I felt. So, yes, Station 11. I think she's got a new book coming out as well. Fantastic.

Even if we're all locked down again, I'm okay. There's a new Rose Tremaine and there's a new Emily St. John Maiden. Well, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It has been a joy. It's been an absolute joy. I am going to, I think, I think I'm going to eat some food. Yes.

And land the sofa. Yeah, it's like I've heard my stomach's been rumbling all the way through this. Well, we couldn't hear it so that it was fine. Thank you very much. I'm Zing Singh and you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. You definitely want to click subscribe. Please rate and review this podcast.

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