Sophie Ratcliffe's Reading List

"I was aware of this book for years before I read it, because I knew that it was about two children who’ve lost their mother. As someone who had been bereaved as a child, I actually thought I’d find it too unbearably sad to read. I was also writing a book about grief myself, and didn’t want to read it in case I became entwined with it or accidentally ended up borrowing something from it. I didn’t think I could confront that subject in this form, but had a sense that the book was probably going to be brilliant. And it is. What struck me about Grief Is the Thing With Feathers is the way in which grief is embodied. In Max Porter’s novel or novel-poem, grief becomes ‘Crow’, who descends upon this family. He’s variously a babysitter, a friend, a ghost, a terrorizer. He impersonates a mother; he’s a joker; he’s twisted. He causes chaos. That’s what it captures: the absolute unpredictability, and nastiness, and then sudden benevolence of grief. The theatricality of what can happen to a person, to a household, after a bereavement. Like some of my other choices, this book captures how very different the experience of grief is for different people—in an environment, a family network, or a friendship group. By depicting the young boys’ perspective, switching to the father’s perspective and back again, he brilliantly captures moments when—while only one person has died—everyone has lost a different person. And it’s utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful in the place where it finishes. Because it’s a poem as well as a novel, it leaves spaces. Porter uses the spaces of the book so that you feel you can insert yourself in it. But I did, as I feared, find it extremely tough to read. I think it’s the primary narrative form of how a poem begins, if you can do very little else: an incantation, a collection, a gathering together and a form of composure. I was also just thinking about a devastating bit in this book from the boys, that evokes this powerful sense of a robbed future: We used to think she would turn up one day and say it had all been a test. […] We used to think she could see us through mirrors. We used to think she was an undercover agent, sending Dad money, asking for updates. We were careful to age her, never trap her. Careful to name her Granny, when Dad became Grandpa. We hope she likes us. My voice is catching just talking about it. When I was writing my own book, I thought about how grief just sort of turns up. It’s enormously difficult to talk about because it’s a strange temporal state—it’s past, present, future. The sense the person gone is somehow overseeing what’s happening is a very simple thought, but it matters a great deal. Porter completely captures that sentiment with the line “I hope she likes us.” I think grief does shift one’s sense of roles. Crow is shape-changing, but so is the dad, and so are the boys. The boys are looking after the dad, and the house in itself becomes a kind of masquerade. Metamorphosis is central; selfhood isn’t stable. These are interesting—and real—repercussions about what actually happens in a grieving family. Porter is very clear that although the experience of his novel is based on the death of his own father, who died when he was six, that this is not about him. One can’t help thinking, coming from a household which has lost a parent, that what happens is a sense that at the table, there’s always an empty space. But at the same time, grief requires people to change shape. To suddenly have to be other things. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I can’t speak for what it’s like to be a parent who’s lost a partner, but Porter plays it very beautifully. Bereaved children may feel at times that they have to be parents, and parents may feel that they need to be children. What one is also grieving for is the clarity afforded by the neatly-designated roles of a happy family. Hence Crow is kind of like an au pair , stepping in to play those roles. All the while, Crow’s doing impersonations in the background. It raises an interesting question: what do we do with desire in the realm of grief? Where and how does it play out? I said earlier that grief behaves badly and grief is risk-taking. Among the taboos we have when talking about grief—that it may drive people to drink or other forms of risk-taking—I’ve always been fascinated by the way it can drive people towards desire, or appetite. Yes. We don’t talk about it enough, though it’s tracked in medical journals. In this case, I don’t think the father in Max Porter’s book is particularly desirous. [ Laughs ]. He doesn’t do anything outrageous; he just gets a new girlfriend. But the question remains: where does sex lie in relation to grief?"

"Geoffrey Hill’s enormous oeuvre stands in for any poetry anthology anyone in the midst of grief might feel like turning to. The repetitive act of reading—curative reading—has a very long history, and still today many faced with the prospect of a funeral (or its aftermath) find themselves with a need to read poetry. In terms of what one can manage to process or cope with in times of grief, the shorter the better, sometimes. So, its rhythmic consolation and its brevity are why I’d say to any grieving person, ‘Maybe try some poetry?’. Personally, the trajectory of how I coped—or did not cope—with the loss of my father had a number of points. One of them was just pretending I was fine all the time. Another occurred when I left home and went to university. I became overwhelmingly sad all the time, as in crying every day, and clinically depressed. I stopped reading entirely, which is kind of tough when you’re studying English. [ Laughs .] So I left university for a time to try to recover. The doctor I saw used to check in with me and say, ‘Are you eating?’ And at the beginning I said, ‘No’. ‘Are you reading?’ ‘No’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But at one point I picked up a copy of Geoffrey Hill’s poems and flicked through it. (I’d looked at it before, and even when I was reading, I hadn’t understood a word.) I opened it up to his sequence of poems called ‘Funeral Music’ (1994). I remember exactly where I was sitting on my bed in Finchley. I remember thinking, ‘Funeral music—that seems possibly congruent with how I’m feeling.’ For reasons unknown, I turned to the eighth poem (it’s a series of eight sonnets) and read the poem. I didn’t quite understand it, so I read it again. And again. It’s a poem about some people who died during the Wars of the Roses. But I didn’t know that—didn’t read the footnote, didn’t care. To me, it seemed to be from the voices of ghosts: Not as we are but as we must appear, Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we Desire life but as they would have us live, Set apart in timeless colloquy: I looked at that and suddenly started to think about my father, about the way we project or reimagine those we’ve lost. In the poem, the ghosts are pissed off about being misremembered, over-remembered, or remembered in distortion—‘as they would have us live’. It finishes with a wail of anger where the one of the figures we’re imagining is being “Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place, / Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.” It’s utterly beautiful and it’s difficult : difficult enough to have kept me occupied trying to figure it out like a crossword puzzle. I probably started studying English because of a difficult but consoling poem by John Donne . I’d say this one by Geoffrey Hill is one of the two poems that has made a dramatic difference in my ability to align myself with, or relate to, terrible sorrow. “It’s utterly beautiful and it’s difficult : difficult enough to have kept me occupied trying to figure it out like a crossword puzzle” The late Geoffrey Hill is not the sort of person you’d expect to appreciate one saying ‘Your poem saved my life’, but he actually took it very well when I said it. Though any volume of poetry may be a balm for sadness, I would say that Geoffrey Hill is an extraordinary poet of broken love and grief. (He is a great lover of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry—which makes me think of that extraordinary poem ‘ Spring and Fall ’ . It begins with an address to Margaret, asking her what she is grieving for ‘O Margaret are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?’, and ends with the words ‘It is Margaret you mourn for.’ Full circle. Grief turns on itself.) He’s also written a beautiful poem called ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’. They are difficult, but I have the airy carelessness of a person who feels it’s okay to own and love a volume of poetry in which you might have only hooked into one poem and read it many times. I don’t understand half of ‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’, but what I do understand is precious, and I know that I’ll return to it. The patience that difficult poetry requires can keep us occupied through difficult periods. It’s the type of patience that grief requires, too: the conviction that I will keep going over it; I have to keep going over it. Some of it will become clearer, and sometimes it’ll just stay un-stuck. Hill is thinking about a different kind of love than the love Rose writes about in Love’s Work . He says, “In broken love you read the signs too late / although they are met with everywhere / like postcards of Manet and Monet, Van Gogh’s shoes.” The poem gives the faint idea they might have had a love affair, but you’re left without the truth. It makes you wonder: What’s the relationship between these two? There are also different textures of grief. There’s the grief of someone who’s encountered a long illness: you know that their death is coming, even if you don’t know what that death will be like. But there’s also the grief of losing someone who drops off the face of the world. All of a sudden. I experienced that while writing The Lost Properties of Love ; I lost a dear friend. They died at fifty of a massive heart attack. And I thought, I’ve missed it. I’ve missed the fucking chance to tell them this, or go there with that, or I didn’t make the most of our last meeting, or I hung up the phone too early. Hill beautifully captures that grief for a missed opportunity: “In broken love we read the signs too late.” That sense that it was all there; it just never came to fruition. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Having never encountered the grief of sudden loss before (and having now, well, not come through it, but experienced it), I have a renewed awe for anyone who has managed to get through that kind of shock. The shock of the person being there today, gone tomorrow. It’s the kind of shock you find Tennyson working through in In Memoriam . Unlike grief you anticipate, you’ve had no opportunity to work through it beforehand, no narrative to build around it. You’re just left on the floor, utterly removed. The poetics of that are very interesting: trying to build something in thin air, or going round and round in circles. It’s a way of replaying trauma."

"Kathryn Mannix is a palliative care doctor. In the introduction, she writes, “There are only two days with fewer than 24 hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives: one is celebrated every year yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.” With over 20 years of experience being a palliative care doctor, she set out to write a book (with the approval of the relevant ethics committee) which collects her experience of being a doctor in those final days of life. It’s possibly the most useful book that I’ve read, in terms of grief. It’s an accretive book; she goes through death story after death story, starting with an extraordinary, striking account of being the on-call palliative care doctor going to attend a woman with very late-stage liver cancer. She’s become very agitated due to the drugs she’s been given, and experiences an almost euphoric need to just get out . She’s carried out of the house by her friends and family on a little wheelchair with beer and cigarettes. Mannix is responsible for being there while it happens: being present, holding the family together, giving her more medicine. “There are only two days with fewer than 24 hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives” This woman has what might be seen as a ‘good death’. But then we have another story about a different death, and then another. We’re told a story about someone who’s receiving treatment and then dies very suddenly. We hear accounts of a young mother dying. We hear about a man who moves from Holland to England to die. In Holland, there’s the offer of euthanasia which, while not imposed, raises important questions about who makes decisions about what quality of life is. From the perspective of the bereaved party, I found the book intensely helpful. My father wasn’t someone who wanted to talk about dying at all. Admittedly, I was 13. Perhaps he felt I was too young. But I didn’t receive a book like Kate Gross’s. You hear of parents writing letters for their child’s every birthday, or talking to them through recording videos, but that wasn’t very big in 1988—the idea of memory boxes or any kind of legacy. Still now, I think, people have great difficulty talking about death, difficulty talking about what we know we’ll encounter. We will all lose each other at some point. It’s our bookend. This book usefully talks about the realities of death and what it feels like from a doctor’s perspective. There’s also a good section on how some people choose to deny talking about it, and how that’s okay, too. She made sense of the experience that I had. It’s extremely elegant and eloquent. What struck me was the humility of it—I finished the book having half-forgotten that it was written by a doctor. It’s not driven by the idea of ‘doctor-as-hero’; she says there are midwives and ‘death-wives’. In this book, death is a natural process, and grief is one of the many processes we all follow. Whether we feel that leaving this world is a long way off or we’re in the middle of being in a caring role, there’s courage to be gathered from reading this. It’s a manual of narratives, stories that we can hold so that we have something to hold onto, and an extremely brave book."

"I just envy you reading Dodie Smith for the first time. This is a book that is, as you say, special to so many people. It takes us right back to the initial dilemma of choosing five books on grief: you could pick any book for consolation. But I Capture the Castle was one of the books that was extremely important to me when I found it on a shelf by accident, aged 14 or 15. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It is a delicious, glorious, coming-of-age tale told with humor about two sisters who live in a derelict, tumble-down, ramshackle castle. They arrive there with their mother and father. Their mother has since died, the father has remarried, and, rather like Jane Austen, two brothers come and live nearby the family. The sisters—Cassandra and Rose—decide that perhaps they’ll set their sights on the men at the nearby manor, thinking maybe one of them can snag a rich husband. As the story unfolds, Rose and Simon get together, but Cassandra is really in love with Simon. A boy called Stephen who’s in love with Cassandra is lurking around in the house as well. So it’s chock full of unrequited love. If you’re a teenager desperately hoping that someone you’re desperately in love with will pay attention to you, you’ll relate to how this book asks, ‘Why does he not know that I exist?’ “We don’t just grieve the loss of a person—we can also grieve a lost love” But when choosing these books, I thought that we don’t just grieve the loss of a person—we can also grieve a lost love. The devastation precipitated by the end of a relationship can be a real bereavement. I chose this book for its brilliant rendering of longing for a love that probably won’t happen. Smith tells the story through Cassandra writing in her diary. At the end of the book, she’s thinking about whether Simon will come back. She wonders, “But why, oh why, must Simon still love Rose? When she has so little in common with him and I have so much?” It ends beautifully: There was mist on Midsummer Eve, mist when we drove into the dawn. He said he would come back. Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you. Exactly. There are two bereaved children at the heart of this novel. Cassandra has lost her mother; Stephen, who is the son of a former servant—and a kind of foster-brother by default—is an orphan. Cassandra is, in some ways, just a child. She talks about not even really remembering the face of her mother. I don’t know whether I’d call it a ‘children’s novel.’ I’d place it alongside Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) or Wodehouse—you could read it at any age. But it has true pain right at its core: risk, pain and suffering. Underneath the surface, it’s a novel of absolute desolation. Cassandra is in mourning without having fully realized it yet. Her desperation to be noticed is partly because she likes Simon, and partly, I think, because she’s desperate for someone to love her. Her father, too, seems to be torn up by grief. He’s trying to write this magnum opus, and has to be locked up until he comes out with his own Finnegans Wake . I didn’t pick up on this in my first reading, but actually, it’s a brilliant novel about a family in utter crisis. Not only financially, which often happens after a bereavement, but emotionally. “Writing in the margins is sometimes the only way we can say how we feel” You don’t quite know what role each individual is meant to be playing, no one is really talking about how they’re feeling, everyone wants to take risks they shouldn’t. This novel is often fondly remembered, but I want to highlight just how psychologically intriguing it is. At the end, it comes full circle: writing in the margins is sometimes the only way we can say how we feel."

"It’s about a young man called Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves. This is kind of a novel, but it was originally written as separate short stories which were published in magazines in the early 1920s. I chose it not only because it is the first Wodehouse book I read, but also because it is wonderful. I was particularly thinking of the hilarious first short story, about Bertie’s friend Bingo who falls desperately in love with a waitress called Mabel. The story centres on how Bingo is going to get his uncle’s permission to marry Mabel, and Jeeves devises a cunning scheme to make this possible. There’s a marvellous scene where Bertie and the lovesick Bingo end up in Mabel’s teashop. We get Bingo studying the menu “devoutly”, as if it’s a sacred text. That “devoutly” tells us a lot about Bingo’s feelings. Wodehouse has such a gift with language. The placement of the word “macaroon” in this story is magnificent. Jeeves always gets things absolutely right. He’s in charge of everything from Bertie’s choice of socks to his love-life. As Bertie puts it, he’s “so dashed competent in every respect”. And there’s a great deal of fondness between the pair, much of which goes completely unsaid. Yes – though Bertie would love to be thought of as intelligent. He often tries to capture things through quotations, which he gets wrong and is gently corrected by Jeeves. In fact Jeeves once refers to Bertie as “mentally negligible”, which causes a bit of friction. But Jeeves isn’t all brain. There is a moment at the end of the second story where we find out that Jeeves has a love life, that he’s courting someone. That is what made me smile the most. When a novel is so much about surface, and then you find this moment of inwardness, it’s extraordinary. Dickens does the same thing with Mr Pickwick. I’ve also always wondered – if Jeeves is so perfect, what would he be like on a date?"

"Summer Lightning is a detective story crossed with a romantic farce. It’s set in Blandings Castle, Wodehouse’s famous fictional country idyll. There’s lots going on. We have a pair of star-crossed lovers, a kidnapped pig, a scandalous memoir and slimy private investigator called Pilbeam. Our heroine is Sue Brown, a chorus girl. When people think of Wodehouse’s characters, most of us will think of Bertie, Jeeves or Psmith. But especially in his early writing, like Jill the Reckless or The Adventures of Sally , Wodehouse had a lot of brilliant female characters. He fell in love with someone called Alice Dovey, who wasn’t a chorus girl but a famous actress with a beautiful voice. After she died, he wrote in a letter to her family that all his heroines were more or less modelled on her. But he also drew on his wife Ethel, who was originally an actress, and his step-daughter Leonora whom he adored. So resilient, brave and funny women run through a lot of his fiction. There is also the theme, throughout his work, of needing to do what is called for because you haven’t got much money. That runs through Summer Lightning and is incredibly important to Wodehouse. I think one of the reasons Wodehouse was so driven is because he couldn’t go to Oxford, because his father didn’t have enough money. Many of his characters need money in order to be free to do what they want to do, or to marry the person they want to marry. Yes, he was interested in what he called the “knut” – an Edwardian slang term for a rather idiotic man about town who didn’t have much to do. But he also writes about what happens if the knut runs out of money – if the “family sock” runs a bit short. Also, a lot of his characters aren’t upper class at all but are struggling writers or secretaries or actresses."

"This is a short story collection, which includes the great story “Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend”. Kipling said that it was “the most perfect short story ever written”. But I really chose this book because it contains his stories about Hollywood. When the talkies began, Wodehouse went to LA and was paid a vast amount of money for what he thought of as doing very little. He wrote something, then someone else re-wrote it, then it was re-written again and then they decided not to do it after all. There is a wonderful story in this book called “Monkey Business”, where he captures Hollywood as a strange wonderland where no one is really what they seem. The story is all about a gorilla impersonator. There was a craze for gorilla movies in the 1930s. It’s wonderfully full of cultural details, in the same way you might find in Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One ."

"This is a collection of three of Wodehouse’s non-fiction books. One of them, Bring on the Girls , describes Wodehouse’s time as a lyricist, and in Hollywood when he worked with [musical producers] Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern. It also contains his own autobiography, Over Seventy , in which he describes his Victorian childhood. He used to visit grand houses but was incredibly shy. He would take refuge in the servants’ hall, full of “kindly footmen and vivacious parlour maids”. The third part, Performing Flea , is a series of letters from Wodehouse to his friend Bill Townend, mostly about the craft of being a writer. The title is a joke. A journalist during the war referred to Wodehouse as “English literature’s performing flea”. This is all quite complicated, and the best account of it is given in Robert McCrum’s brilliant biography Wodehouse: A Life . Wodehouse was living in occupied France during World War II and was interned by the Nazis. He was interned in three places over the course of 18 months – he spent the longest time in Upper Silesia, now Poland. He was released and had to stay under supervision in Berlin before moving to occupied Paris. Just after he was released, the Nazis suggested that he broadcast some comic talks that he had written, in order to keep in touch with his fans in America. Wodehouse didn’t realise that the medium was the message – that in broadcasting on German radio, he was being framed to look like a Nazi sympathiser. It was, he said, “a ghastly blunder”, and although he was cleared of any charges of collaboration it cast a shadow over his reputation. In the letters from this period it’s very interesting – and distressing – to see this through Wodehouse’s eyes, against the background of wartime Berlin and Paris."

"This is a collection of critical essays written in the fifties. Two of them discuss Wodehouse, quite briefly, but in beautiful ways. I’ll probably be accused of being like Wodehouse’s Florence Craye for including it – “steeped to the gills in serious purpose”. But it’s worth including because it’s one of the very few attempts to write about why humour like Wodehouse’s matters. A critic once said these are “serious essays against high seriousness”. One of those two stories, “Balaam and His Ass”, is about the comic master-servant relationship and why there is a beauty to it. The other, “Dingley Dell and the Fleet” talks about Wodehouse as an “expert on Eden”. Auden describes why characters can live on beyond and outside their novels, and why innocence matters – which strikes me as rather fascinating and important, if we are going to think about why Wodehouse has had such appeal to such a wide range of people, including Wittgenstein , Salman Rushdie and the late Queen Mother. As Auden says, characters like this just seem to endure. The red-faced Aunt Dahlia who is “built rather on the lines of Mae West” and sends Bertie epic telegrams. Aunt Agatha, the “nephew-crusher” who “chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth”. The “amiable and boneheaded” Lord Emsworth, “drooping like a wet sock”. The “immaculate” Psmith, lounging in the Drones club. The list goes on. It’s the quality of his style and his jokes. For instance, “She came leaping towards me like Lady Macbeth coming to get first hand news from the guest room.” Or, “[He] clasped her to his bosom, using the interlocking grip”. Or, “She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.” But even in quoting you miss something. You need them within the structure and rhythm of the stories themselves. He worked and worked at his plots. The details came easily to him, and that was the sort of writing that he enjoyed, but the plotting was more difficult. He was always asking his friends for ideas about how to plot. But the work paid off. He also writes very good love stories. So I think it’s his exceptional style, and the sheer joy of stories which offer a world where things come right. They give us a little glimpse of Eden."