We sat down with former politician and social justice advocate Katherine Zappone for a look through her bookshelf.
Katherine, what’s it like writing a memoir?
It was hard! And emotional! I started it just a year after my beloved Ann Louise passed. Deep grief is an emotional state like no other. But the writing – over and over again – helped me enormously to find her presence in my life in a new way.
What was the most challenging part?
Every day it was a challenge to ‘put your bottom on the chair’ and look at the empty screen. It never gets easier, though what a thrill to do a word check and see 1,000 words at the end of a day.
What was your writing process like?
I am used to doing academic writing, which is little use for a memoir. It took me four years to learn how to write in ‘personal narrative’ and I really loved the challenge of doing it each day after. I wrote at my desk, a dining table, a Tyrone Guthrie Centre desk, in Dublin, in Seattle, in New York, in my bedroom and in the National Library of Ireland. I love writing in libraries and common spaces. It helps to maintain motivation.
What are you reading at the moment? And where do you like to read?
I usually read in my bed before sleeping. On holiday I love to curl up in front of a wood burning fire. I have just finished Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know. Author of Hot Milk, and many other books, this is the first in a three-part autobiography on writing, gender politics and philosophy. Searingly honest, short and of extraordinary literary character.
Can you remember the first book that made you cry?
Not sure if it was the first one, but To Kill a Mockingbird still brings a shiver to my bones. It’s the first time I tried to feel what it must be like to be black in America. I felt so sad by the narrative of unjustified suffering.
What about your favourite childhood book?
No question about it – my sister and I used to fight over who would get to read the next Nancy Drew mystery. Nancy was the female counterpart sleuth to the famous Hardy Boys. Thus began my love of mystery books, still with me today, and my early choosing of books that featured girls and women.
Can you recall a book that had a profound impact?
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker was the first book to teach me that God is not a white man in the sky. Walker’s use of language, and simple and elegant creativity clearly comes from a brave and spiritual way of being in the world. I used to teach this book in Trinity College Dublin. Together my students and I learned how to think about the divine in a new way.
What book should be on everybody’s shelf?
Anam Cara by John O’Donohue.
Which authors do you admire?
Emilie Pine, Eavan Boland, Diarmaid Ferriter and Colum McCann, for a start!
What was the last book that made you laugh?
I loved Graham Norton’s Frankie. I laughed, and cried, throughout.
What books are on your bedside table?
This is Happiness by Niall Williams (a slow start for me, but I’m getting through it). The Cure at Troy, Sophocles’ Philoctetes by Seamus Heaney (I’m taking this one page at a time – but just a verse of Heaney’s stays with you forever). And All Passion Spent by the amazing Vitae Sackville-West, great author, ecologist and lover of Virginia Woolf.
Love in a Time of Politics: A Memoir of Facing Loss and Finding Hope by Katherine Zappone, is out now