‘A Lovely Morning’ by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Walter Kaiser

Though it’s a sequel to a longer story (‘An Obscure Man’), ‘A Lovely Morning’ stands on its own as a beautiful piece of work. A young boy named Lazarus, the son of a Dutch adventurer, is raised by an Amsterdam brothel-keeper but escapes to join a group of touring actors and dreams of his unfolding future life. The late-Renaissance setting is brought so compellingly and believably to life that it makes the real world around you pale in comparison. Both ‘An Obscure Man’ and ‘A Lovely Morning’ attempt to render the universe of Rembrandt’s paintings in prose, something you’d have to be incredibly ambitious to attempt and incredibly talented to achieve, but Yourcenar is more than up to the challenge.

First English publication in Two Lives and a Dream, Aiden Ellis, 1987

‘Calling Cards’ by Ivan Bunin

Born in Russia in 1870, Bunin’s life was one that took him from being a student of Tolstoy and friend of Chekhov to winning the Nobel, being repudiated by the new Soviet state, and dying in penury of pneumonia in Paris in 1953. He specialised in short stories, bringing the style of the great Nineteenth-Century Russians to the concerns of the Twentieth Century, including the series of dense, dark and sex-charged fictions he wrote while living in Nazi-occupied France, collected as Dark Avenues. ‘Calling Cards’ is one of the shortest and best from this book, a brief story about a brief liaison on a pre-revolution Volga steamboat. The description of a woman undressing, told with both admiration and pity, has stayed with me for more than 20 years while the rest of my memory has fallen away like wet cake:

“Thin collarbones and ribs stood out in conformity with the thin face and slender shins. But the hips were even large. The belly, with a small, deep navel, was sunken, the prominent triangle of dark, beautiful hair beneath it corresponded with the abundance of dark hair on her head. She took the pins out, and the hair fell down thickly onto her thin back with its protruding vertebrae. She bent to pull up the slipping stockings – the small breasts with frozen, wrinkled brown nipples hung down like skinny little pears, delightful in their meagreness.”

I’m not sure exactly what this says about me, so let’s just move along, shall we?

First English publication, translated by Sophie Lund, in The Gentleman from San Francisco and Other Stories, Angel Books, 1984. First full English publication of Dark Avenues, translated by Hugh Aplin, by Oneworld, 2008

‘The Day of the Funeral’ by Edith Wharton

“His wife had said: ‘If you don’t give her up I’ll throw myself from the roof.’ He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof.”

If these opening lines don’t make you want to read on, I can’t help you.

First published in Human Nature, D. Appleton and Company, 1933 and variously collected including in The Collected Stories 1911–1937, Library of America, 2001

‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann

A transcendental story of a hopeless alcoholic drinking himself to death, written by a genius who was in the final stages of drinking himself to death. Joseph Roth, clear-eyed chronicler of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of Nazism, is one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest writers, and his work has almost all been translated by the brilliant poet Michael Hofmann. I don’t think that there’s a writer/translator pairing I love more.

First published in English, in a different translation, by Chatto & Windus, 1989. Hofmann’s translation published by Granta, 2000

‘Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving’ by Allie Brosh

The autofictional memoirs of Allie Brosh take the form of half-comics/half-prose, told with a deliberate artlessness that extends to the artwork itself being a sort of Microsoft Paint scribble and the prose being conversational. But from this she creates stories that are often either hilarious (like this one about attempting to move house with two psychologically unsound dogs) or heartbreaking. Her second collection, Solutions and Other Problems, is a book almost broken by grief.

First self-published online, 2010 and available to read here. Collected in Hyperbole and a Half, Touchstone, 2013

‘His Face All Red’ by Emily Carroll

This final selection is also a comics short story, and in many ways the opposite of the last. It’s beautifully painted and brilliantly paced in a way that makes use of the shape of the page—indeed, in some ways the online version is preferable, as it forces you to move deliberately on into the story in a way that feels more ominous than simply turning a page in a book would. It also feels ancient, and rich with guilt and paranoia and a creeping sense of wrongness. That Carroll started her career with such accomplished art is very impressive indeed, and she has gone from strength to strength since.

First self-published online, 2011 and available to read here. Collected in Through the Woods, Faber & Faber, 2014

‘Why Don’t You Dance’ by Raymond Carver

I was a writer from as early as I can remember (at around 8 I started writing novel-length stories!), but past the self-consciousness of adolescence I didn’t come back to it in any serious way until I did an MA in my 20s. It was around this time that I discovered Raymond Carver and loved his deceptively simplistic style, and how much is said through pauses and blank spaces. I also loved how often the dialogue was awkward and repetitive, but how natural it felt in that awkwardness. I could name any number of short stories that I loved, but this is the one I return to now.

It’s interesting to read it again now knowing what I know. So many of his stories were about drinking and alcoholics, with a subtext of crisis. In this particular story, there is a steady mood of provocation, in the furniture out in the yard, the main character challenging the young couple and getting them drunk, dancing with the young girl, and the hold he has over her and her inability to admit to it. How it lingers and stays with her beyond the page.

First published in Quarterly West, 1978 and subsequently in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988

‘Hills Like White Elephants’ by Ernest Hemingway

Carver introduced me to the other minimalist writers of that time: to Hemingway, and Cheever. I have often used this story as a good example of dialogue and what is left unsaid. The tragic decision between the couple is not spoken of but it saturates their every word and their every move; and of course, again, alcohol plays centre stage, the beers on the table, the brand Anis del Toro painted on the bead curtain, which acts as a distraction from the painful emotional conundrum the couple are in.

First published August, 1927 in Transition, then later in a short story collection, Men Without Women, Charles Scribner and Son, 1927

‘Reunion’ by John Cheever

This is a spectacular short, short story in how it shows a whole life between this bullying man and his son in so few pages. Again, it involves alcohol, but it also absolutely nails that ambivalence a boy feels towards his father, desperate to be recognised and to be loved, in admiration but also shame. And how he sees himself reflected in his father’s behaviour – “as soon as I saw him, I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom.” But instead of spending quality time together, his father proceeds to bully each waiting staff in each of the four places they go to attempt to have a drink, in a feeble attempt to project his authority – is this because in classic narcissistic style he is filling the void of his inadequacy? Or as a deflection from the difficult stuff, having a frank correspondence with his son? It is full of a sad acknowledgement, a coming-of-age tale of desperation.

Looking back now on these stories and why I was drawn to them, it feels like an odd premonition, as if I knew in some part of me where my father would end up.

First published 27th October 1962 in the New Yorker, and later collected in The Stories of John Cheever, Knopf, 1978

‘All I Want’ by Joni Mitchell

Six months after my daughter was born, my father died alone on the floor of a B&B in Ilfracombe having lost his wife, his business, home, and been deported back from San Francisco where he had been living for the past 20 years. He was an alcoholic, but had only been drinking for ten years or so. After he died and I had my second child I fell into a wild kind of depression and had repeated fantasies of escape, running from my life which suddenly felt like a trap. I was isolated, yes, at home with my children, but I was also grieving. Each night after the children’s bath, I would sing them to sleep and I always sang the same song:

“I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, looking for something what can it be?”

When they were a little older, I snuck away from them and my husband for a week’s writing residential in a stately home in Ireland. On the last night a friend threw a dinner party in her apartment and another writer got out his guitar and I sang this song to a room full of strangers. When I stood to top up my glass, my new friend said to me, “Maybe you need to find a different song to sing to your children from now on.”

From the album Blue, Reprise Records, 1971

‘The Wreck’ by Don Paterson

I was consumed with loss, and with the tragedy of addiction, how it had claimed my father so quickly, and the literature and music I surrounded myself with at this time reflects that. This was one of the poems I was struck by.

“…the bull-black, deadweight wines that we swung/towards each other rang and rang/like bells of blood, our own great hearts./We slung the drunk boat out of port/and watched our sober unreal life/unmoor, a continent of grief;…”

The heavy weight, the desperate sadness of that unmoored state, the ‘unreal life’ believed in.

Published in White Lie: New and Selected Poetry, Graywolf, 2001 and available to read online at the Poetry Foundation website

‘Troublesome Houses’ by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and the Cairo Gang

When I was in the car with my children, I listened to songs on repeat, this being my favourite. I imagined the troublesome houses were places to go and drink, but I think they are more likely a brothel. “She said, when I got home to leave her alone. She could taste trouble on my mouth.” For me this song captures the love and repulsion of addiction, – “the deadweight wines that we swung” What a grip it has on the body and the heart: “I couldn’t withstand the glorious day without seeing those troublesome faces.” He wants to stop but he also can’t.

From the album The Wonder Show of the World, Drag City, 2010

‘Garden’ by Sam Willets

When my world started to fall apart, my husband and I facing separation, I grasped at doing something good, and took on voluntary work at Hackney Recovery Service, in affiliation with St Mungo’s, teaching alcoholics in recovery. I cycled there each week as if my life depended on it. I took them this poem, and they loved it so much they printed it out, framed it and hung it on the wall in the waiting area.

“Look at your life,/to your one given garden.”

Sam Willets was a heroin addict for ten years and this collection is full of the pain and contradiction of that state, with the urgency of something that demands to be written. This poem held a lot of resonance for me too, as it felt as if I was also in recovery. I was trying to reclaim myself.

From New Lights for the Old Dark, Cape Poetry, 2010

‘Under the Influence’ by Scott Russell Sanders

This so perfectly captures the experience of being the child of an alcoholic, and is an expert example of a personal essay. Sanders is a master craftsman and brilliantly demonstrates the flexibility of the form in his switching between time frames throughout, both in the mind and emotion of the child and the perspective of the man, still under the influence of his father’s illness even years after his father’s death. I often teach with this essay as it is an exquisite example of creative nonfiction and it encapsulates why I fell in love with this form.

First published in Harper’s, November 1989, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Secrets of the Universe, Beacon Press, 1991 and in The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books, 1995