Vanessa Austin Locke: The books of life

I had a significant birthday last week and like we all do when faced with the indomitable passing of the years I opened a bottle of red and got a bit existential. In my living room is an empty fireplace and, uninspired by the idea of filling it with fairy lights, pine cones or fake flowers, I pulled a Changing Rooms and filled it with books. I’m sure there are some deep and meaningful musings to be had regarding the burning of books implied here, but I was less concerned with this and more with the pinot noir-induced haze through which I peered and saw my life, held poignantly in the microcosm of this revealing collection of volumes.

“Every epoch of my life was crammed into a metre-by-metre wall space”

After my parents, books have had the biggest influence on me and I’m the first to judge a person on their bookshelf. Stacked up there before me were the very items that had melded with my (I’m gonna say it) soul, and made me the person I am today. Every epoch in my life was crammed into a metre-by-metre wall space. My childhood; defined by beautifully bound, hardback copies of Alice In Wonderland, Gulliver’s Travels and Peter Pan with their gold and silver lettering. The characters, that grow deeper as I grow older, still utterly relevant. The Velveteen Rabbit laced me with a tinge of penetrating sadness that I have been strangely grateful for over years. Then came I Capture The Castle and The Little White Horse, both bildungsroman novels that grew me up along with their heroines. It was here too that horses became a permanent signpost in my psyche.

My late teens were coloured by obsession and the evidence in my bookstack points to the heroin chic movement of the ‘90s; biographies of Jim Morrison and Gia, the obligatory journals of Kurt Cobain for any grunge/rock chic worth her salt. But this was also where creativity formally entered my consciousness; a copy of White Man Sleeps: Creative Insights, several collections of Neruda’s poetry, Leonard Cohen’s, Silvia Plath’s and oh… Vladimir Nabokov, whose child-bride Lolita, and obscenely beautiful language became my constant companions for a year or more along with Pale Fire and The Enchanter. And there’s The Iliad, where I fell in love with Hector, tamer of horses.

My early 20s were dominated by academia and religious texts, in particular Hélène Cixous, whose seminal works The Laugh Of The Medusa and Newly Born Woman helped me become just that… a woman. There’s also a copy of Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad And Sad: A History Of Women And The Mind Doctors From 1800 To The Present, and that’s the book that launched my fascination with the linguistics of women’s mental health. But the overarching book of these years, and indeed my life, was Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which I’ve probably read 20 times.

My late 20s were troubled, and the literature reflects that. A Grief Observed by C.S Lewis eased me through profound bereavement, Atomised, The Revenge Of The Lawn, The End Of The Affair, Beloved, The Driver’s Seat, A Defence Of Masochism and Everything Is Illuminated all mark a battle with bitterness that I won with their help and sometimes hindrance.

And what’s on my bedside table now, to take me into this new era and fuse with my future self? Mr Rosenblum’s List, Hangover Square, and a book that I remember from my mother’s bookshelf, that she gifted me on this recent birthday… Women Who Run With The Wolves.

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