Best Friends Forever

"This is a beautiful, slim volume, published by the Emma Press: they’re a wonderful, small press. It’s a selection of contemporary female poets writing about the complexities of female friendship, everything from enchantment to destruction. There’s a huge array of the different feelings, the different beginnings a friendship can have, the different things it can do to you and the different aftermaths it can have. It covers a great breadth. There’s a lot of comedy in it too. There’s a poem called Will You Be My Friend, Kate Moss? by Kathryn Maris about a woman whose daughter is in the same ballet class as Kate Moss’s daughter, and she dreams up this whole scenario where they could be best friends, if she just talked to her. I chose this because it’s a lovely thing, but also because poetry is so important for me, for inspiration while I’m writing. I don’t tend to read novels when I’m writing a novel. I read poetry, as I do that quicker, I can get more of a quick fix and get ploughing on with however many pages of the novel. Poetry then literally ends up playing a part in my work. Yeats is a huge factor in Animals . But others as well, Anne Sexton’s in there, John Cooper Clarke. Amy Key, in the introduction, says she put the anthology together because she felt female friendship wasn’t a subject that was well-represented in poetry. She did a survey on Twitter asking people what their favourite poem about friendship was. A lot of people chose poems by men, and the subjects of the poems were camaraderie, war, brotherhood, or intellectual rivalry. So she thought it was time to put together an anthology that looked at the nuances of female friendship. The breadth of intimacies and experiences they cover is vast and beautiful, and a testament to what female friendship can do in your life, and friendship of all kinds. There’s a section called We all have our choice of sisters and I thought, “Do we?” Because in the books I’ve chosen, there’s almost a compulsion and an irresistible attraction of the protagonist for these people who are in some way going to ruin their lives. So I thought, “Maybe we don’t get to choose quite so freely.”"