Audrey Magee: ‘Reading The Bell Jar at 17 was immersive, thrilling and exhausting’

My earliest reading memory
In the Jungle, a book about counting animals. I was three or four. The colours were vivid, the animals exotic, and I read those pages thousands of times.

My favourite book growing up
Across the Barricades by Joan Lingard. Growing up in an Ireland riven by division, the story of love and kindness in Belfast between Catholic Kevin and Protestant Sadie was a balm for me.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I was 16, in school, when I first read Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras. After a diet of English/Irish writing that told me what to think and how to feel, here was a writer who created a space for me, the reader, to think as I wanted to think, to feel as I wanted to feel. It thrilled me.

The writer who changed my mind
I was 21 when I first read James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I was living in Aachen, then in West Germany, and embracing all things European, adamant that, with the exception of Beckett, Irish writing had little to offer beyond narrative. Joyce debunked that notion.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I had always written – letters, diaries – and had dabbled a little in writing plays and short stories, but becoming a writer, especially in Ireland, seemed a monumental aspiration. At the age of about 24, living in Australia, I read Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water. Frame somehow made the act of writing a book seem tangible. Her writing is raw, unadulterated, and I hugely admired the courage required to write so searingly and honestly of madness.

The book or author I came back to
The Trial by Franz Kafka. I had read it in German as part of my undergraduate degree but knew that I was missing so much. I adored the indulgence of reading it in English.

The book I reread
I read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks first in my 20s, relishing the depictions of youth and artistic aspiration. With the recent publication of Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, I read Buddenbrooks again, this time bonding with the characters in middle age. I look forward to reading it as an old woman to see how the writing holds up.

The book I could never read again
Reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was an utterly immersive, thrilling and exhausting experience at 17. I would be afraid of reading it again, afraid of diluting or tarnishing that wonderful time I spent in that space with Plath.

The book I discovered later in life
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I can’t believe I reached my 40s before reading that book. How did it elude me?

The book I am currently reading
A Mercy by Toni Morrison. I am going through a bit of a Morrison thing at the moment.

My comfort read
Books on grammar. Three books – The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr and EB White; Grammar Rules: Writing With Military Precision by Craig Shrives; and Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss – are always close to hand, ready, when in doubt, to soothe and comfort.