The reader's-life interview is a genre with a low floor and a high ceiling. At its worst, it's a promotional checklist of approved influences. At its best, it's an act of intellectual autobiography — a writer revealing not just what they read but how reading shaped the apparatus they think with. AK Blakemore's version lands closer to the ceiling than most, and the reason is specificity. She doesn't just name Fitzgerald; she names what Fitzgerald does: 'all the stupid loveliness and yearning in the world, distilled down into image after image, with a core of white-hot rage, at the way extreme wealth enables — necessitates, really — extreme cruelty.' That is a reading, not a citation. The throughline from childhood to now is a taste for the formally strange and the grotesque. Korky Paul's intricate grotesquerie, Selima Hill's 'guileless, cryptic style,' Virginia Woolf's 'audaciously fun' gender-swapping immortal nobleman — Blakemore is consistently drawn to work that smuggles serious formal experiment inside pleasure. This is not an accident of taste; it maps directly onto her own work. She notes that something of Rufus Skumskins O'Parsley, the villain of a children's picture book who bakes a cake from spider legs and rotten eggs, found its way into the protagonist of her second novel, The Glutton. Literary influence, here, is a matter of texture and obsession as much as tradition. The most striking entry is the Adrienne Rich one, read in the post-partum weeks with her son asleep on her belly. Rich's Of Woman Born repositions motherhood as politically radicalising and artistically activating rather than creatively diminishing — and Blakemore names the specific wrong assumption she'd held until then. 'I'd wrongly — though, perhaps, understandably — held on to this notion that mothering would necessarily mean setting aside the work of the imagination, and a narrowing of my horizons.' The correction arrived at exactly the right moment, which is the best and rarest kind of reading experience. The Hemingway arc is a small comedy of maturation: 'worryingly into Ernest Hemingway, for a teenage girl' at one end, 'a bit of a pillock' at the other. The Jane Austen reversal is sharper — Blakemore names the reductive cliché she'd subscribed to ('novels about rich people having dinner at each other's houses') before dismantling it with a self-aware joke about her own current status as a person with Chanel foundation and a mortgage. The joke lands because it's also a point: Austen requires a certain life-experience to decode properly. The Donna Tartt paragraph is the piece's sharpest moment. 'I staggered through The Goldfinch and thought it was extremely silly and bad.' Four hundred pages of critical apparatus distilled to twelve words, delivered without explanation or apology. Whether you agree or not, the confidence is the thing — this is a writer who trusts her own reading, which is rarer than it sounds. Polly Barton's What Am I, a Deer?, the current book, gets the opposite treatment: 'a banger,' 'totally blown away.' The full range, held without hedging.
