AK Blakemore: ‘The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt was extremely silly and bad’

The poet and author on F Scott Fitzgerald’s perfect novel, losing faith in Ernest Hemingway, and the recent debut that blew her away

My earliest reading memory Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy, where an assortment of differently shaped dogs go on a walk, wormed its way into my subconscious when I was very young. The great dane (Hercules Morse, as big as a horse), the dalmatian (Bottomley Potts, covered in spots), the dachshund (Schnitzel Von Krumm with a very low tum) … I could probably still recite most of it from memory.

My favourite book growing up I had a lot of picture books illustrated by the great Korky Paul, and remember being obsessed, even as quite a young child, with the intricate grotesquerie of it all. He’s probably best known these days for illustrating the Winnie the Witch books, but my favourite was The Rascally Cake by Jeanne Willis, in which a rotund, green-haired man called Rufus Skumskins O’Parsley makes a cake out of disgusting things (rotten eggs, spider legs, garden snails and so on), only for the cake to come to life and attempt to eat him . Probably more than a little bit of Skumskins found its way into the protagonist of my second novel, The Glutton.

The book that changed me as a teenager I studied F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for my English GCSE and it entirely reshaped my brain. I still think it’s about as near to perfect as it’s possible for a novel to be. 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. There’s functional alcoholism, and then there’s whatever Fitzgerald was doing in 1923. Everyone should read it.

The writer who changed my mind I had a baby in May, and in the first weeks post-partum I read Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, by the poet and activist Adrienne Rich, while my son was napping on my belly . It made me realise that 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, creatively. But Rich writes so thrillingly of parenthood as a politically radicalising and artistically activating experience. Rich’s work has made me excited for the years to come as a writer, as well as a mother. I wish I’d read her a long, long time ago.

The book that made me want to be a writer Portrait of My Lover As a Horse by Selima Hill . I bought it with a book voucher in Foyles on Charing Cross Road, when I was about 14. I’d never heard of Hill, but I picked it up based on the strangeness of the title and cover. All of Hill’s poetry collections, as published by Bloodaxe, have this naive, under-designed quality to them. I read the whole collection front-to-back on the train home, and then again back-to-front. By the next day I was trying to emulate Hill’s guileless, cryptic style in my own, far less masterly, little poems. That was basically my apprenticeship as a poet.

The book I reread I often find myself revisiting bits of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In case you aren’t aware of it, it’s about a gender-swapping and functionally immortal Elizabethan nobleman who spends several languid centuries falling in and out of love and eventually achieving something like self-knowledge. Such a totally exhilarating, audaciously fun bit of work from an author who was, bless her, a bit of a Debbie Downer overall.

The book I could never read again The Sun Also Rises. I was worryingly into Ernest Hemingway, for a teenage girl, whereas now I think he’s a bit of a pillock.

The book I discovered later in life I’m 35 so I flatter myself nothing I could say really counts, but: I thought I’d use my maternity leave to finally give some Donna Tartt a go. I staggered through The Goldfinch and thought it was extremely silly and bad.

The book I am currently reading I just finished What Am I, a Deer? by Polly Barton, and I was totally blown away by it. It’s about how we have fun and what we find funny, how we choose our friends and construct our pet fantasies, and I loved it, and I love how Barton’s brain works. She thinks so profoundly about the minutiae of modern life and modern social dynamics and I somehow found myself feeling strangely optimistic about the world and the eccentricities of the people in it. A banger.