My Life In Books: Olivia Petter

All Fours, the latest book by Miranda July. It’s very funny and clever.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I blame a lot of my poor romantic choices on this book.

The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby and The Handmaid’s Tale. And in terms of more recent fiction, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. I think about that book, and specifically its spikey, idiosyncratic protagonist, often. It’s a masterpiece.

Usually in my bedroom on a pink velvet chair at the end of my bed. I love reading in the mornings on weekends. I try to read on the tube but find it too distracting and just end up listening to music instead.

Anywhere and everywhere, but my favourite bookshops in London are BookBar in Finsbury Park, Libreria off Brick Lane, and Pages of Hackney.

I’m actually in two, which means my reading list is often pretty long. One is with some friends from school and the other is with friends I’ve made through work. They’re a lot of fun. Being in a book club is a great excuse to chat and drink wine with lovely, clever, funny women.

I take recommendations pretty seriously and get a lot from Instagram, usually from authors whose work I’m already familiar with. I’ll basically read anything Pandora Sykes recommends – I really enjoyed Green Dot by Madeleine Gray on her recommendation – and likewise for Coco Mellors. Over lunch, she told me to read Franzen, who has since become one of my favourite writers. She also pointed me towards Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, which I devoured on holiday in Mexico last year.

I think Jonathan Franzen is one of the best writers around; anyone who wants to learn how to write fiction should read his work. But I also love Dolly Alderton, Raven Leilani, Sally Rooney and Coco Mellors – Cleopatra & Frankenstein had a lasting impact on me.

I enjoyed Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. I don’t think I’ve ever read a depiction of trauma and coercion quite like it before. Russell perfectly captures the nuances around victimhood and trying to reclaim your autonomy within a structure that has already robbed you of it. On a lighter note, there’s Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which I love for so many reasons, mostly because it’s a perfect example of fictionalising your own life with integrity, humour and artfulness. It’s something that’s often used to denigrate female novelists as if to suggest we have no imagination beyond our own experiences. Ephron shows us how valuable this kind of writing can be as an art form – and that it should be taken seriously.

I really rate All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks. Reading that was hugely helpful research for my first book, Millennial Love, and for my own life too. I remind myself that love is a verb very often. A more recent non-fiction book I adored was The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice by Elizabeth Flock. She examines three real-life stories of women across the world fighting back in the face of violence. The first focuses on a woman in Alabama called Brittany Smith, who was jailed after killing the man who raped her. Flock’s reporting is exceptional and highlights just how much misogyny fuels miscarriages of justice when it comes to violence against women.

Probably Ariel by Sylvia Plath. People don’t read enough poetry these days and I think that’s a real loss.

Cleopatra & Frankenstein by Coco Mellors.

Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey. It had me laughing out loud on holiday.

Probably Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. What a book. What a film. I have a framed poster of it on my wall at home.

Grief Is A Thing With Feathers by Max Porter.

Regrettably it’s probably Heathcliff… I’m sure my therapist would have a lot to say about that.

1984 by George Orwell. I don’t think any novel is quite as timeless. Even today, more than seven decades since it was published, it serves as a poignant social and cultural commentary on power, capitalism, and relationships. I think that’s pretty spectacular.

The Bell Jar. Hands down.

Gold Rush is a book that been brewing for years; the entire premise was born out of a phrase in The Bell Jar: “Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.” It made me think about the entertainment industry and specifically the glossy veneer that so much of it exists behind. I wanted to explore how celebrities have exploited that in the age of #MeToo.

So much fun. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do and I’m still pinching myself that I’ve been given the opportunity to do it. But it’s an entirely different muscle to non-fiction. I’m much more high maintenance with my writing process; I need to be able to switch off from the noise of the real world and that’s easier said than done with my job. That usually requires taking myself to the British Library, putting my phone away in a locker, and hoping the wi-fi is broken (it often is). I am working on another novel at the moment. It’s very early days but it’s going to be about a relationship and there will be multiple points of view… That’s all I can really say at this stage. But it feels amazing to be writing fiction again.

Gold Rush by Olivia Petter is available to buy here.

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