Matilda

"Matilda was my first book-hugger book. It was a book I would clutch to me and reread because I wanted it to become physically part of myself. I so recognized this feeling of being isolated. You can find your best friends in books. I was bullied at school because I was quite overweight and I had a mole on my face. These things marked me out as “different”. Also, I loved to read so I’d take myself off to the library, like Matilda did, and get the books off the adult shelves. Then I discovered Matilda who was also doing these things and had the most marvellous revenge on an awful woman. Reading this book, there was an enactment of what I hoped would eventually happen to me. And, being an author is rather like having magical powers. I can use those bullies and put them into books – and have my revenge on them that way! It is a book I find I can reread. It’s not just a book about Matilda, this wonderful heroine, it is also what Roald Dahl says about reading and imagination and books being like ships, books being like lights. In another writer’s hands these ideas could seem sentimental but with Roald Dahl, who is never sentimental and who is always on that edge of danger and always has his characters on those edges of danger, there is never any sense of sentiment."