Lyse Doucet first checked into Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel on Christmas Day 1988, as Soviet troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan at the end of a decade-long occupation. She expected to stay briefly. Instead, she remained for almost a year, and the hotel became her first Afghan home.

More than three decades later, it became the subject of her first book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, which has now won the Women’s prize for nonfiction. But while the prize recognises a remarkable work of reportage and history, the BBC’s chief international correspondent is more interested in what it might do for the country that inspired it.

“Afghanistan has largely slipped from the headlines,” Doucet says. “Perhaps this win will bring some attention to the country. None of us should be ready to accept a situation in which we live in a world where there is a country where girls cannot be educated after they’re 16, where women cannot go to university, where women are barred from so many jobs. This is something we should all be angry about.”

Afghanistan was not ever thus. After nearly four decades reporting from the country, primarily for the BBC, Doucet, 67, has watched it pass through almost every political experiment of the modern era: Soviet-backed communism, civil war, Taliban rule, western-backed democracy, and now the Taliban again.

“I was conscious that Afghanistan has a very difficult and violent history,” Doucet says. “I needed to find something that would draw people in rather than push them away. I didn’t want people to close the book and say: ‘It’s too dark. It’s too bloody.’ So a hotel was a device to tell the story in a way people could recognise.”

The Intercontinental Hotel – known simply as the Intercon – offered the perfect lens to tell a people’s history of the country. Built by the British in the late 1960s, it was once a symbol of a different Afghanistan. In the 1960s and 70s, Kabul was known as the “Paris of the east”, a vibrant hub of fashion, jazz, miniskirts and apres-ski resorts. Afghan pop star Ahmad Zahir – known as the “Elvis of Afghanistan” – performed at the hotel; Gloria Gaynor was a guest. Foreign travellers passed through on the hippy trail.

As the following decades saw immense political upheaval, the Intercon remained open. “Politics, like hotel guests, checked in and out,” Doucet writes. “As Afghanistan lurched through decades of trial and terror, laced with bright but brief beginnings, the Intercon was an unbreakable constant.”

The hotel staff who remained through those changes are at the heart of her story: Hazrat, the housekeeper who worked there from the hotel’s opening; Abida, the hotel’s first female chef; Amanullah, the engineer; and Malalai, one of the first female waiters.

“I have to pay tribute to the Afghans who helped me and spoke to me for the book, because in Afghanistan even sharing stories can have risks,” Doucet says.

Doucet began her career in journalism as a freelance reporter in west Africa for the BBC. She went on to cover conflicts across the world, eventually becoming chief international correspondent in 2012. Her book opens with the fall of Kabul in August 2021, and the disastrous American withdrawal, which remains one of the defining moments of Doucet’s career. She recalls watching the evacuation from the airport: military transport planes, helicopters and Afghans carrying only one bag as they fled.

“There was this fear at the end. People kept talking about Vietnam – that image of the people clinging to the last helicopter rising from the roof of the embassy in Saigon,” she says. “In fact, it was a hundred times worse – Afghans racing to the airport, clinging to the underbelly of planes. It’s been a really traumatising experience.”

Since returning to power, the Taliban have systematically erased women from public life through a series of draconian measures. Girls have been entirely banned from secondary education and university, women have been forced out of many workplaces and banned from public spaces, and strict adherence to the burqa is required. Last month, an official decree was passed effectively legally recognising child marriage. And just this week, a rare protest that erupted in the western city of Herat against arrests of women accused of violating hijab rules ended with two people killed, including a child.

“Five years in and it is getting worse. It is a stain on our world,” Doucet says. “But the courage of Afghan women is extraordinary.”

Doucet is also frustrated that the barriers facing Afghan women go beyond those inside the country. “There are Afghan women getting scholarships, but there are no visas now to allow Afghan women to come and study in Britain and in many other places,” she says. “They are meeting obstacles everywhere. We live very privileged lives here, and it’s not our privilege to give up on Afghans.

“People who were somebody in Afghanistan – activists, world-class journalists – find themselves having to start again from scratch,” she continues. “It’s something none of us would want to do.”

Doucet believes, though, that the world must be careful not to dismiss the achievements of the post-2001 period. “People often say: what did 20 years of international engagement achieve? Was it all for nothing? I always say it wasn’t for nothing. There were many mistakes, but that period helped create the most educated, the most connected generation in Afghan history,” she says. “When you see girls saying: ‘I want to get online, can you help me get a scholarship, can you help me get some kind of education?’ … They know their rights now.”

This month, for the first time, the EU is preparing talks with Taliban representatives in Brussels, despite concerns that engagement risks legitimising a bloody and despotic regime. Doucet is cautious about prescribing a solution.

“I’m a BBC journalist,” Doucet says. “My job is to explain, not advocate. But [some] mediators would say that it’s better to negotiate than isolate. The only change is going to have to come from within the Taliban.”

For now, there is little sign of change in the country. But Doucet is reluctant to surrender the quality Afghans themselves prize above all others.

“Afghans always used to say: the last to die is hope,” she says. “Afghanistan has possibly lived through every political system the world has tried – the thread through Afghan history is that nothing lasts for ever.”

When the artist Jackie Morris collaborated with the writer Robert Macfarlane to celebrate the names of plants and animals controversially removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, they never imagined their book, The Lost Words, would become a cultural phenomenon.

Grassroots crowdfunding ensured the book was bought and donated to more than three-quarters of primary schools in England, Wales and Scotland and to every hospice in the country.

The book sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and was turned into classical concerts, albums, theatre, hospital murals, jigsaws and boardgames. An exhibition toured for more than a decade and the movement became the subject of a recent film, Lost For Words.

Nine years on, the pair’s new collaboration, The Book of Birds, aims to open all eyes to the wonder and peril of 49 species on the British red or amber list of declining and endangered birds. With paintings by Morris and words by Macfarlane, the book is a twist on the classic field guides that inspired both authors, evoking the spirit and poetry of birds from avocet to yellowhammer.

Morris, who has sold more than 1m books worldwide, was galvanised by the Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds as a child. “It opened my eyes to life that is not human and is around me,” she said. “I hope there are young people who will find The Book of Birds and that it gives them that anchor and also wings. I also hope it helps birds become visible to those who don’t see them. It’s more important than any other book I’ve done.”

Macfarlane said: “We wondered what a field guide or bird book would look like if it asked not ‘what is that bird?’, but ‘who is that bird?’; if it worked to help readers not only identify birds, but also identify with them. There are 3 billion fewer birds in North America than 50 years ago; 600 million fewer in Europe. Our skies are thinner, our springs quieter. This is a savage loss. We wanted, in paint and word, to pull birds back into focus and splendour – and warn against their vanishing.”

Morris, whose favourite painting in the book is of the shearwaters she watches from her home on the Welsh coast, admits she is never satisfied with her bird paintings. “Can you ever do justice to something so beautiful? The wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe is so much more accurate than me, but I am always chasing a life-force and the soul of a creature when I’m trying to paint.”

The book, which took seven years to make, has already inspired an exhibition at the Bodleian library, The Wonder of Birds, which opens on 6 May and features unseen work by the pioneering ornithological photographer Emma Turner, art from the legendary 19th-century American bird illustrator John James Audubon, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s original handwritten annotations for To a Skylark.

Will The Book of Birds become another Lost Words? “I’ve never known a book to do things like the Lost Words did before,” Morris said. “I don’t think you can get that twice in a lifetime, can you? Is it going to be a catalyst for creativity in other people? I hope so.”

Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula)

Plump little Bullfinch (Plum Bird, Bulldog) perched among the orchard branches, plucking at the buds. Pink little Bullfinch (Lum Budder, Blood Olp) puffing out your salmon chest and swaying as you sing. Burly little Bullfinch (staunch neck, stout beak) piping out your creaky notes, there amid the blossom. Ripe rosy Bullfinch (crisp apple, bright bauble) lighting up the winter trees, calling in the frost.

Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus)

Killer with the barred chest, the brown cloak, the blue hood: assassin of the bluebell wood. Fabulous, murderous Sparrowhawk, you’re the bolt loosed from the ratcheted bow, the bullet from the barrel. Whipcrack speed and utter focus: the strike’s past, the hit done, wickedly fast, before we even realize it’s begun. When you’re around, the birdworld shudders, huddles, paranoid. Alarm calls spike the air. Too late: target located, locked on, destroyed.

… I once watched as you mantled over a back-garden kill. Then your implacable, crocodile eyes flicked to mine – and the blast-doors of a furnace opened. Suburban bird-god, hawkheaded Horus, your irises are greenish-yellow when you’re young, then darken as you age, from buttercup to burnt orange, and then at last to diabolic late-day red, maximum threat, as if you were heading into your own sunset.

Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus)

Where to start with you, Cuckoo? Your one-two call, perhaps, from high on oak or yew, which heralds spring anew then beats out summer’s hot tattoo. The curious beauty of your feathers; their smalty blue, their smoky, petrol hue. And we must not forget, of course, the chilling trick you pull on other birds – your devious, monstrous switcheroo.

… But perhaps no other bird marks time and place the way you do. I know this for sure, Cuckoo: without you, April would not bloom so true. Year after year we prick our ears and wait to hear your call peal out clear over sea-cliff and suburb, cemetery and heath, hill and combe. There are fewer and fewer of you, Cuckoo, but it’s still the case that the first time your crooked call rings spring in, it confirms the trueness of the turning world. It’s relief, release – an exhalation. We’re still alive. We’re still here.

Rook (Corvus frugilegus)

Rook, Rook, everyday crook, hawker of goods, cooker of books; Rook, Rook, of the bald white bill and the barefaced cheek; Rook, Rook, blackmarketeer of the rocking, stocky, blocky gait – three hops forwards, then one away; Rook, Rook, aka the Cra, the Craw, the Caa, the Croaker, the Brandre, the Brancher, the Percher, the pale-masked ’Daw!

Yellowhammer (Emberiza citrinella)

Goldsmith of the hedgerows, Yellowhammer forges sunlight into coins and chains of precious metal, on the anvil of hawthorn’s leaf, spindle’s berry and blackthorn’s petal. Yellowhammer turns footpath to treasure chest, field into Wunderkammer. Yellowhammer’s a lark dipped in ochre, a scrubland canary, a twenty-four-carat sparrow. Yellowhammer doesn’t hide his light under a bush; he sings from topmost twigs, from allotment spades and sprays of broom – he fires out his witty song with its spiky clamour, its unmistakable seven short notes and one long, carried on the breeze: Little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese! Little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese!

Lapwing (Vanellus vanellus)

Look – there are lapwings, facing the wind in fours and fives on fallow fields, hunkered on floodplains, floating over abandoned airfields, glimpsed from car, from train, in sunlight and rain. These are birds of farmland and marsh, lowland and levels, mud and grass and divot, who’ve followed the plough for a thousand years or more. Now, though, the great flocks of lapwings are gone, where once there were birds in such number that when they wheeled in flight it seemed the sky itself was on a pivot.

Corncrake (Crex crex)

Corncrake, that crazy, screwball caper-call of yours is also your name: crex-crex, crex-crex, crex-crex it goes, as you straighten your legs, flex your neck, then over and over and over again – a thousand times an hour or more – let rip a sound that carries a mile or six, a rasping, seismic hex that wrecks all chance of sleep; a vexing gameshow-buzzer; a gearbox grind; a pair of brief electric shocks; a no-subtext booty call; a double-blasted klaxon; plectrum on chitin; a c dragged over an x.

Turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur)

Heat lies heavy on the land, and high summer’s yellow stalks the meadows, leonine and patient. The river winds slow and fat through fields, cricketers move drowsy on the green, muffled bells peal from church towers, and through it all churrs the lulling, lazy plainchant of Turtle Dove – po-oorrrrrpooorrrrr-pooorrrr, po-oorrrr-pooorrrr-pooorrrr, over and over again – keeping the liturgy of hours. This is a song for daytime sleep; soft and soothing as cream; a hazy noon lullaby, a siesta dream.

I love giving books as presents. I rarely give anything else. I strongly approve of the Icelandic tradition of the Jólabókaflóðið (Yule book flood), whereby books are given (and, crucially, read) on Christmas Eve. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is the one I’ve given more often than any other; so much so that I keep a stack of four or five to hand, ready to give at Christmas or any other time of the year. It’s a slender masterpiece – a meditation on Shepherd’s lifelong relationship with the Cairngorm mountains, which was written in the 1940s but not published until 1977. It’s “about the Cairngorms” in the sense that Mrs Dalloway is “about London”; which is to say, it is both intensely engaged with its specific setting, and gyring outwards to vaster questions of knowledge, existence and – a word Shepherd uses sparingly but tellingly – love.

Most years, I like to give novels as holiday gifts, but this year I am thinking of sharing either Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations or one of Byung-Chul Han’s books, particularly The Burnout Society or The Spirit of Hope. The South Korean-German philosopher describes himself as an “optimistic refugee”, and his style is quite distinctive, blending various disciplines and philosophical traditions from east and west. These short but dense books may not exactly be cheerful, Christmassy reads, but they make excellent companions for anyone interested in “thinking about thinking” in a digital world of noise and distraction; for anyone concerned about the future of humanity.

There is a book I buy as a present that never goes out of fashion. It is The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. It is hardly about a soldier at all, but the title is good because it distracts people and thus the extraordinary plot creeps up and bites you before you know where you are. The narrative curls and twists; the narrator knows too much or too little. But at some point the appalling and ingenious nature of the treachery – what is called “cheating” nowadays – becomes apparent and you feel that you have been let in on some intriguing and explosive secret. It is perfect, thus, for Christmas.

To the young people in my life I give Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. It’s a series of perfect micro-fictions that both stand alone and build towards a deepening message on the nature of reality. It’s also an optimistic text that locates power in the individual. We can change things – if we know where to put our energy.

To my contemporaries, I give out whatever I think will do them good! Books are more than entertainment. We shouldn’t be shy about wanting to provoke or challenge our friends – or ourselves. This year it’s Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?

I’ve given copies of Claire Keegan’s Foster to so many friends, I worry about unwittingly doubling up. At just 88 pages, it makes a slender gift, but one that won’t sit onerously on a bedside table and whose concision hints at its specialness. Set over one Irish summer, the story is told through a child’s eyes, as she is sent to live with relatives during the final weeks of her mother’s pregnancy. Coming from a household of neglect into one of warmth, the girl’s observations about people reveal both a guilelessness and devastating insight.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is a gorgeous, brave and nuanced account of the novelist’s life – anchored in an astonishingly truthful exploration of her relationship with her mother, Mary. She describes her as “my shelter and my storm”, and in the book’s pages we meet Mary the celebrated feminist campaigner and Mary the volatile, threatening mother. Without ever flattening or reducing this formidable and complicated woman, Roy parses the ways her own life has developed – both as a rejection and as homage to her mother. The work is also unapologetically political, and after the horrors in Gaza, I appreciate an author who can speak to the world we are in. The book is beautifully bound and makes for a lovely gift, and I haven’t stopped buying it for people since the day it was published.

When The Wind in the Willows first came out, the reviews were mixed. “As a contribution to natural history,” said one, “it is negligible.” AA Milne set out to proclaim its genius. He used to give copies to people “as a test of character”. I feel the same about Terry Pratchett’s Truckers. It’s the story of a group of Nomes who have come to believe that the department store in which they live is the entire universe (its slogan is “everything under one roof”). A satire on consumerism, sexism, dogmatism and … you name it, it is above all warm, hilarious and wise.

Sarah Crossan’s Where the Heart Should Be is a gripping and moving free verse novel set in the time of the famine in Ireland. It brings you face to face with the tragedy and solidarity of those times. So-called YA, but a great read for anyone.

I have two books I keep stocks of to give as gifts. One, for book-hungry older children, is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: it’s dauntingly huge, yes, but also one of the most perfect adventure stories ever written, and I have found that the children it does catch hold of become dizzy with the pleasure of it. The other, to lure in children who have not yet become eager readers, is Sharna Jackson’s superbly witty High Rise Mystery series; I’ve not yet met a child who doesn’t adore it.

The book I have most often given, for over 20 years now, is Alice Oswald’s Dart, her miraculous translation of a river into polyphonic poetry. Ecologically and philosophically it is profoundly (and increasingly!) radical, and line by line it is a pure enlivening delight to read. I give it to people who never read poetry, as well as poetry experts. I give it to visitors, friends, newlyweds, students, grievers, swimmers; and I hope they pass it on to others, because nobody owns a river.

Since 2010, all five stories shortlisted for the BBC National short story award have been published in book form by the wonderful Comma Press. It’s always a stellar shortlist, varied in all ways other than quality. As gifts go, the anthology is perfect: first-rate fiction, the stories as compact as the physical book itself (you can carry it in the deep pocket of a winter coat). And, best of all, next Christmas you can give it to the discerning reader all over again.

As I’ve got older, it’s become harder for me to engage with books on that magical level that feels as if the whole world were concentrated in the palms of your hands. So when it does happen, the impulse is to share it. Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly is a gentle and compassionate novel that explores the nuances of queer love and friendship, the moral dilemmas of sharing someone else’s life through life writing, and the choices we make for our chosen family and those bound to us by blood. I’ve given it to many people so far, but the most significant was to the Casual Readers book club, where, uncommonly, there was unanimous love for the book.

Over the years the books I’ve tended to give most? Wise Children by Angela Carter and When Will There Be Good News by Kate Atkinson. Carter’s final novel is infused with such a high-kicking joyousness that it’s a pleasure to hand it to anyone. Atkinson is always good news, and this work of humane detective fiction is so satisfying that I can give it to folk who don’t know her work, trusting they’ll love it. But this past year the book I’ve found myself giving to most people is Michael Kohlhaas, a slim novella from 1810 by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Michael Hofmann. Why is the world in such conflagration again? Kleist’s tale about the consequences of injustice will never not be relevant and is so thrilling that once I started reading it I couldn’t stop for anything. Stunning.

I’m a lover of short stories and one of my favourite collections is Sarah Hall’s Sudden Traveller. The stories are simply stunning in their emotional and imaginative leap; her use of language is beautiful and glittering. As far as gifts are concerned, this is one you could give to someone who likes a quick yet wholly transporting read.

“Amos, a mouse, lived by the ocean.” Everybody in my family – maybe in my life – knows the opening line of the picture book Amos & Boris by William Steig. It’s the story of an unlikely friendship between a shipwrecked rodent and a kind-hearted whale, and it’s a combination of plainspoken and magical and deeply, even existentially, philosophical. There’s nobody in my life I wouldn’t give this book to – especially children and friends, and children who are friends – except there’s nobody I can give it to, since I have already given it to everybody.

I can tell which books I really love because I never have copies on my bookshelf. These are the ones I repeatedly give away, so that my shelves have become a repository for all the books that are not my actual favourites. Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask is a novel I have bought on many occasions. For anyone who needs reminding how straight-up fun reading can be, it’s a great reviver: funny, sharp, alive – and with a wonderfully dark undertow. I haven’t kept hold of a copy in years.

I give Rumer Godden’s novels to people – Kingfishers Catch Fire, perhaps, or The River – because a lot of readers don’t know her work. She’s such a warm and entrancing storyteller, but with a steely eye too, and ruthless truthfulness. She’s the best kind of comfort read.

I love to give Restoration by Rose Tremain at Christmas. I’ve never known anyone able to resist protagonist Robert Merivel – a young medical student who lands in the court of Charles II, rises quickly in the king’s favour, then suffers a catastrophic fall from grace. Honest, mischievous, spiritual and self-indulgent, Merivel is above all lovable. Tremain’s depiction of 17th-century life – contrasting the opulence of court with the brutality of the time – is gloriously bawdy one moment, and stop-in-your-tracks profound the next. And as an added bonus, the book’s cover, over the years, has always been Christmassy. Note: the sequel, Merivel: A Man of His Time, is just as wonderful – if not more so.

I often give Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. Best known for the Moomins, Jansson was also a mistress of the short story, and The Summer Book shows both the gift for parable that underlies the best children’s picture books and the literary economy of short fiction. The central characters are a little girl and her grandmother, and the story turns around the missing mother without ever mentioning her. There’s lots of beautifully observed play and adventure and attention to the natural world. It’s set on a small Finnish island in midsummer, among people who know very well how to appreciate sunlight, so good midwinter reading.

At Christmas I often give the gift of Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book – a collection of short stories selected by Ali Smith, and an exquisite companion to The Summer Book. These stories reflect Jansson’s core passions: small boats, islands, and the vital need for art and inspiration. They’re about land and sea, youth and age; my favourite is a description of two elderly women locking up their home for the last time – a house on a remote rock in the Pellinge archipelago I was lucky enough to visit – leaving the key and some purposefully muddled instructions for anyone who may be passing by.

The book I’ve given most often – by a large margin – is a collection of poetry called Fear of Description by my friend Daniel Poppick. I bought it before I’d ever met Dan, and it had been a long time since I’d got anything out of poetry. I was relieved and amazed to find myself laughing aloud, and then winded with emotion by the final line. I’ve given it since to friends, lovers, at least one parent – partly because it’s a pleasure to share work by someone I’m proud to be friends with and partly because it’s a low-stakes burden gift-wise, something you can dip in and out of with ease and pleasure.

The new Ultimate Spider-Man series deserves everyone’s attention. Written by the legend that is Jonathan Hickman, alongside artist Marco Checchetto, it’s the Spidey reboot we’ve all been waiting for. There have been many reinventions of everyone’s favourite webslinger, but nothing meets the moment like this does, and with Hickman’s incredible attention to character, it’s the best Spidey’s been in years.

I am not sure if it’s wrong to suggest you give the same book to all the vegans in your life, as if suggesting that all vegans are the same, but I do think Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead fits this bill. I love to imagine people I know reading it, even people who eat meat, who would probably like it too. It’s kooky and fun and strange; it’s important without being depressing. I think a lot about the scene at the annual Mushroom Picker’s Ball, which Janina, the main character, attends dressed up as a wolf. Actually, this book is rather festive.

I was given a copy of JL Carr’s novella A Month in the Country many years ago by a work colleague and it’s a book I’ve gifted ever since, so that others can have the joy of reading it for the first time too. It’s a profound, funny, elegiac meditation on lost youth and unrequited love, so sharply observed and economically written that it can be devoured in one sitting. For me, that makes it the perfect present: immediately pleasurable and something that stays with you for life.

I occasionally give The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann, in the (so far unfulfilled) hope that one day somebody else will agree with me that for narrative complexity and jagged emotional impact there is almost nothing that comes close to it.

Recently, I’ve been giving Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. Published a decade before Pachinko, it follows a Korean community in 00s Manhattan. I’m currently crawling through Middlemarch, and the influence of Eliot’s writing on Lee’s work, and Free Food for Millionaires in particular, is clear. If you’re looking for a sprawling contemporary novel with intersecting and heartfelt narratives, this is for you.

I am a great reader and buyer of 20th- and 21st-century poetry, but many of my cultured and sophisticated friends think modern poetry is “difficult” or “obscure”, not to say “incomprehensible”, and consequently don’t read it. So, deciding to proselytise, I give the recalcitrant friend a copy of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings, with certain key poems marked. Namely, the title poem, Broadcast, MCMXIV, Sunny Prestatyn, Afternoons, and An Arundel Tomb. More often than not, they’re hooked. Larkin, at his best and most inimitable, speaks to – and for – everyone.

The last book I gave someone was a birthday present that went down so well, I intend to fill a stocking or two with it at Christmas. It was Elizabeth Day’s One of Us, a dark comedy that slickly satirises the lives of a British establishment family. It’s brimming with sharp commentary on class in modern Britain and paints an intimate portrait of the super-privileged’s messy family dynamics. But most importantly, it’s a lot of fun.

On the theory that a gift should raise spirits, I opt for The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono – a naturalist’s quest to improve a strip of land. First published in 1953, it’s a reminder in these torrid times of what really matters in life, and how to make a difference. It can be read in an hour, and few books offer more joy or warmth for your buck.

Curtis Sittenfeld

Erin O White’s debut novel, Like Family, was published in the US last month, and I’ve already given it to two friends and my two sisters. I’m still planning to give it to my neighbour, my oldest friend and my sister-in-law. It’s about three intertwined families in upstate New York, and it’s smart and warm and queer (as in mostly about lesbians) and middle-aged and funny. Admittedly, I’m friends with the author in real life, but writer friendship obligates you to buy just one book; this for me is a case of true literary love. And the beauty of Like Family is that reading it will make you feel like you’re friends with the author, too.

Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn’t let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination.

Her case was thrown out, but it wasn’t the first time the voting age was challenged and it won’t be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children’s author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it.

Both Wall and Beauvais report that a common first reaction to the concept of ageless voting is laughter. Then people start to think, and often they end up saying that they can’t find any serious objections.

Wall first confronted the question 20 years ago, when he took on a PhD student who had been researching children’s parliaments in India. He soon came round to the idea that it was unjust that up to a third of the population was excluded from the democratic process, since political decisions affected them, too. As he became better informed, he realised that excluding the young was bad for society as a whole.

Beauvais agrees. In her tract she highlights evidence that larger electorates produce better decisions. Younger people’s gaze is fixed further in the future than that of older people, for obvious reasons, but older people have more experience, so they complement each other when it comes to prioritising societal issues. And children are observant and can ask questions that are troubling because they are so fundamental: questions about war, meat, money, love and death, for instance. When Greta Thunberg started campaigning for urgent climate action at the age of 15, Beauvais writes, many adults criticised her, but her position is now mainstream.

Children can also be silly and naive, of course. But if silliness and naivety were reasons to deprive people of the vote, many adults would come a cropper. In fact, although the human brain takes years to mature, it hasn’t completed that process by 16, 18, or even – for some parts of the brain – the early 30s. And however you define competence to vote, you’ll find that it doesn’t start or stop cleanly at any age.

This line of thought led Wall to conclude that the only criterion for eligibility to vote should be wanting to vote. Again, Beauvais agrees. But they disagree on the practical implications of this. Wall assumes that wanting to vote is the default and proposes that someone else should vote for the young person by proxy until they are able to do so themselves – as already happens for certain categories of adult in many countries, including the cognitively impaired. Most often, the proxy voter in the case of a very young person would be a parent.

Beauvais considers proxies risky – what if a five-year-old changed her mind and her parents refused? – and also difficult to implement, for example in the case of divorced parents. She would rather societies accepted that, though a person would have the right to vote from birth, it would be some time before they exercised it. In that time – the length of which would depend on the individual – the right would be purely symbolic. It would still mean something, just as it means something that everyone in the UK has the right to marry a person of the same sex even if many of them will never exercise it.

A common objection to ageless voting is that individuals who can’t be trusted to drink, drive or have sex shouldn’t be trusted to vote. But Harry Pearse, research director at the Centre for Deliberation, part of the UK’s National Centre for Social Research in London, says that’s a red herring. We don’t allow the very young to indulge in those behaviours because we want to protect them from the potentially harmful consequences, but voting isn’t harmful to the voter. It’s not as if we’re asking babies to make policy. They may vote badly, whatever that means, but again, so do many adults.

Some countries, including Scotland, already allow 16-year-olds to vote, so data exists on 16-year-olds’ voting habits. Five-year-olds are an unknown quantity, on the other hand, and Pearse thinks that’s a good thing: “Some healthy chaos gets chucked into the system.” For him, the beauty of democracy – for all its flaws – is its simplicity. When the rule is one-person-one-vote, politicians feel pressure to serve all constituencies.

In practice, Beauvais says, because we know so little about how the very young would vote, the voting age would probably have to be lowered incrementally. That way society could address any vulnerabilities the new regime exposed – the risk of a charismatic teacher capturing large numbers of young votes for a given political cause, say – before advancing to the next stage. The goal would still be to abolish the age threshold completely.

Many people feel that modern democracies have become calcified. In the past, when that happened, societies sought to expand the franchise, and in time, Pearse says, the expansion reinvigorated democratic life. At this point in history, the only way we can expand, short of violating the species barrier, is downwards in age. Beauvais sees that as much more than a political project. It invites us to stop thinking about participation in terms of competence or productivity, she says, and to focus more on our lived experience and interdependence. It’s about what it means to be an individual in society. In her view, we should all want Alisa Perales to vote – and not just for her sake.

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Further reading

Suffrage for Children by Mike Weimann (Common Threads, £18)

A Minor Revolution by Adam Benforado (Crown Forum, £24)

Give Children the Vote by John Wall, (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

In his 1925 essay “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” Arturo Schomburg writes, “There is the definite desire and determination to have a history, well documented, widely known at least within race circles, and administered as a stimulating and inspiring tradition for the coming generations.” Award-winning historian and writer Blair LM Kelley is a shining example of Schomburg’s call to action for creating a historical legacy that future generations will invoke for years to come.

Kelley is the current Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies and director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Her work focuses primarily on the Black American South and its activist legacies. For example, Kelley’s first book Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010) chronicles the everyday resistance of Black women and men against segregated streetcars and trains in cities across the early Jim Crow South.

Kelley’s newest book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (2023), uses her family history and archival research to expand our understanding of race, gender, and class in the South. Black Folk is a dazzling testament of research, storytelling, and analytical rigor that is accessible to both academic and nonacademic audiences alike. It is the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2024 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award, the 2024 Phillip Taft Labor History Award, and the 2024 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Nonfiction.

I sat down with Kelley ahead of the paperback release of Black Folk. We had a wide-ranging conversation about Black joy, her careful excavation of the interior lives of working-class Black people, quiet protest and resistance, and the influence of working-class Black women on Black activism.

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Regina N. Bradley (RNB): I have been rereading Black Folk and I want to start with the title, which you address in the introduction and pointedly say is not a reference to W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. What made you feel like you had to distinguish between a Duboisian understanding of race and class, and the one that you present in the book?

 

Blair LM Kelley (BLMK): I called it Black Folk because I just wanted it to be us, and inhabit a Black point of view. Every reader is welcome, but I wanted it to be grounded in community, I wanted it to be home. Home folks who we know. And I wanted it to be discernible by us as a story of us, by us, for us.

 

RNB: For me, the book conjured up Zora. Do you see yourself in conversation with folks like Zora Neale Hurston and Albert Murray? If you were to put yourself in a genealogical conversation, which books do you feel would be with Black Folk?

 

BLMK: Absolutely, the work of Zora Neale Hurston is an inspiration. Particularly for my Athens chapter, the second chapter, “Sarah at Home, Working on Her Own Account,” which is the story of Sarah Hill, a Black washerwoman who lived and worked in Athens, Georgia, where I use historic, New Deal–era Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews. Hurston worked as a WPA interviewer and drew on her profound understanding of the work of Black women. I talk about Hurston’s analysis and scholarship in that chapter and I explicate her story of a washerwoman, the short story called “Sweat,” which is so thoughtful and brilliant and careful.

In “Sweat,” the site of Black women’s work is all encompassing. The main character, Delia, was both fighting for her independence but then also tethered to her household and to a husband who was awful to her. In the end, her independent spirit and willingness to fight back really liberates her. So I love that story and I love the ways in which she is not only there as a storyteller but also as an oral historian, this ethnographer whose work is in the WPA, whose criticism of the work of others in the WPA undergirds my own analysis of the things we are missing in those interviews if we take them on the surface. Hurston’s work and just the brilliance that Sarah exhibits, the woman who is the washerwoman whose story I dig into, is so incredible and so she is really an inspiration for that work of digging deep, that care work that has to go into how we listen to this generation.

Of course, I’m always indebted to historians like Robin D. G. Kelley, Tera Hunter, whose work taught me how to even think in these ways, how to build the infrastructure behind the ways I want to storytell. I want it to read like a story, but I want it to sit in a structure that is historical, that is archival, that is grounded in oral histories and the things that we can know, ways of knowing about the past. And so I’m always indebted to them.

I’m also a huge fan of Toni Morrison and so I always want to invoke the ways in which she wrote about space and household and time and care with such beauty. And I really wanted to bring the beauty back to the ways in which we talked about regular Black people on an everyday basis and invoke that Morrisonian tone if I could.

 

RNB: Traditional historical narratives are so dry and impersonable and sometimes they dehumanize the subject in order to preserve academic integrity. I didn’t get that with this book. I know that this book is nonfiction. It is grounded in fact, but the storytelling is so absorbing. It reminded me of the oral tradition and how significant that is in understanding Southern Black history. You do that so beautifully with this book.

Can you talk a little bit about the significance of storytelling as an engine for history? Why is storytelling important for making the stories and the narratives that you are trying to highlight accessible to nonacademic audiences?

BLMK: What is so important is that people learn through story. We learn our past through the stories that we can tell. When I’m reading regular history, I’m always thinking about my folks and thinking, Well, how does that sound for their experiences? I’m always looking for the sound and the feel, even when I’m reading more traditional history.

I am frustrated with the ways in which people who are not formally trained as historians become the greatest leading historians in the country, because they can write for general audiences and people love history and they want readable history. So I also want trained historians to rise to the occasion of writing for a general audience, so that people can read our work. Folks should benefit from the things that scholars know, but it should be given to them in ways that they can be comfortable, that they can fall through the story on any level. You could read this book and not know any theory at all.

The other thing is that some of the beauty and the synchronicity of the story is bigger than me. It is ancestral. It is, there is no way in hell that I would have been able to find all these pieces that sit together so carefully, to find the stories that I found. Finding Sarah Hill, the washerwoman born in Elbert County, where my maternal ancestors are from, which I didn’t even—I never knew about Elbert County until I started working on my genealogy. Like Minnie Savage that I write about in the fifth chapter, who happened to be born in Accomack, the place where my grandfather was born, migrating probably within the same two- or three-year period as my grandfather to the city of Philadelphia. I have no idea if they knew each other or didn’t know each other, but her story, her oral history, fully narrates a story of migration from Accomack, Virginia, to Philadelphia that I can’t ask my grandfather about because he died before I was born. But just the happenstance of the way that finding Minnie rounds out the story I want to tell, that is just bigger than me. On top of all that, she was such a great storyteller! I mean, she snuck out of church to go run away to migrate, like who does that? And so, all of these things coming together at the same time, that is not just me. Me discovering in Accomack a whole labor organization started by Black workers that ends up in a racial massacre that I never read about in any history book. I’m writing a book about the working class, my grandfather is from this very, very tiny rural place; then, boom, I find a labor movement.

All those little pieces that snap together, they feel like the synchronicity that has been given to me, in order to tell this story. So, over and over and over again, it just felt like my path was laid.

 

RNB: It makes me think about how your book represents what Morrison calls “literary archeology.” You take bits and pieces of known fact and add sustenance and depth to it to make the story more rich and to humanize the subject. Your treatment of people in this book is not just as blips in history who are quickly covered over by whatever other significant and more well-established historical moments show up. For example, you brought up the Accomack protests, I remember saying to myself, “Wow. This is a lot even though the story sounds familiar.” I am familiar with the racial massacres and racial tension of the era but not familiar with Accomack as a place or the people. I am familiar with stories of Black people migrating from the “Deep South” but not the intimate particulars of why. You create an inside story, an interior narrative, that complicates larger historical events.

Black Folks gives an inside look into Black lives that would otherwise be frozen in time and unassuming in archival pictures, not knowing what their names were, what they did, or who they were.

Can you talk a little bit about how you created this interior understanding of not only Black working-class folk, but of the Black South?

 

BLMK: When I write, my goal is to sit on the shoulder of the folks I am writing about. What do they see when they wake up in the morning? What does that space look like? Who is family? Who is community? What is their neighborhood? Who is supporting them? Who is their enemy? Who is their friend?

So I just build out all those little things. I make maps and story charts for everybody that I write about. I use the technology that is available to me. I love a Google map. I will go back to an old neighborhood and if it still exists, I’m going to look at someone’s house. I am going to follow the pathway from the train to their house. What did they pass and what did the buildings really look like, and what did the train station look like?

My goal is to move through that neighborhood and make it feel as evocative and as cared for as an everyday experience as I possibly can. There are a lot of things that I do to research and build out a story that don’t even show up in a really direct way, but they help, they inform me, they enrich those small details.

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RNB: Black women are front and center in this book. For example, your research about washerwomen should win an award on its own. I’m going to read back to you a quote that I highlighted: “All Black women’s laundry work was born both in compliance with and defiance of white authority.” This made me think about my own great-grandmother, Mary Jones, who said, I will wash y’all’s clothes, I am not going to clean y’all’s house. She was very adamant about that. Your book made me think about how domestic workers connected to ideas of respectability and being ladylike, and how to maintain dignity and respect while pushing forward and taking care of their families.

Could you talk about how these women balanced the expectation to be neat and humble with the grind, the hustle, the I’m not going to just sit here and let y’all tell me what I can and can’t do.

 

BLMK: I love looking at the labor numbers around washerwomen and women who are maids inside households, cooks inside households. There was a trend toward women who had children, who had to care for family, who had obligations, wanting to do washer work. So, in fact they are the first stay-at-home generation who is working from home. They want to be there for their children, to raise their children, to be in proximate space, to build a household in ways that they were not allowed to as enslaved women. They set the terms of how the laundry will be taken in, when it will be done, when it will be bought back. They pushed back against all the stigmatization that happens about them.

They are a really formidable group of people, but they are behind so many of the protests against segregation that I studied in my first book, Right to Ride. They are riding streetcars to move that laundry around, so they don’t want to be insulted and degraded in those spaces. So they fight back. They don’t succeed in this first generation, but they are key to it.

When those women organize, they verbalize the need for protection from sexual assault that happens in white households. They verbalized that well before the turn of the 20th century. They are the very first people who I can see as the workers who are seeking out protection from being raped in those households, in labor organizing as early as the 1870s.

There is clarity of purpose that you can find among these brilliant washerwomen. And it just, it overwhelmed me, how powerful they really were.

RNB: This idea of thinking about the subtleties of Black activism, and how that made so many white folks uncomfortable, is one theme that kept coming up for me while reading your work. Especially in the Accomack chapter, where agricultural laborers organized for higher pay. Their resistance wasn’t loud. It seemed like many just said: I’m going to talk to you while we get something to eat, I’m going to talk to you while we working in the field. I’m going to talk to you after church. Usually when we think protest, we think loud and demanding. It really struck me how quiet much of the resistance was that you shared in the book.

Did you find that interesting in your research: Quiet resistance and how that pushes back against this popular narrative that you had to be loud and boisterous to invoke change? Because a lot of the change that you talk about in this book happened very quietly.

 

BLMK: I love that. A good Marxist would say that you can’t find this resistance among this population. It is a rural population; they haven’t developed consciousness enough to do this work; they have to move to an urban space; they have to be working in a factory; they would build their consciousness there.

But that just is not necessary. It wasn’t necessary, so much so because Black people in slavery developed those habits, those quiet habits that we can see in freedom, that is where they come from. You couldn’t do anything out loud as an enslaved person and live, at least not for long.

Black people developed the ability to speak in code, to talk in front of other folks and have them not understand exactly what was meant. They sang songs that sounded like one thing but in reality meant something completely different. They worshiped in secret and developed a brand of Black Christianity grounded in a different viewpoint, drawing on African cosmologies and a Black reading of the Bible. Black folks had been doing many things quietly all along, so they organized quietly too. They knew how to talk to one another without everybody hearing. And so of course as free people, they maintained those habits. They don’t appear to be organizing as a union until white people slowly start to recognize, well, wait a minute, no one is going to wash my clothes over the Christmas holiday, wait, none of y’all will wash my clothes over Christmas? That’s when they began to see that washerwomen had been talking, organizing. No one is going to pick these sweet potatoes because we wouldn’t let Black farmers join the all-white agricultural co-op, what? Huh? All the farmworkers in the county are going to ask for more money for their labor? How did that happen? Black workers used that church space, that grocery store, the field, the family gathering, the juke joint, communal wash pots in the backyards as a space to talk and think and theorize as workers. They were smart people.

I remember when I first went to graduate school, I got in some debate with somebody who said that people who did physical labor didn’t have time to think, and I thought, you’ve never worked with your hands before, have you? My first job was at a supermarket just scanning stuff and I had plenty of time to think. I was thinking the whole time.

So if you are in bondage or you are oppressed, while you are doing the work, you are thinking. You have plenty of time to share a quiet idea. You have time to develop a consciousness about the world and your place in it. They didn’t need labor organizers to tell them how to resist. No, the consciousness, the desire to organize was already there.

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RNB: Black Folk pushes back against the idea that integration is the dream. There is this notion that Black folks assimilate into society and everything will be all hunky-dory. But so many of the firsthand accounts that you included in this book said something like, I didn’t want to mess with no white folks.

What they are saying disrupts an indoctrinated narrative that we have been told about previous generations, that Jim Crow–era Black folks just wanted to be accepted by white people. I didn’t get that with this book, for which I thank you, by the way. Was that intentional? Did you consistently see that in the oral histories that you reviewed? How can you further break down that myth that Black people always have to be in proximity to white folks?

 

BLMK: The very first thing I did in graduate school was participate in a project called Behind the Veil at Duke University, which went out and interviewed Black Southerners about their experiences with Jim Crow. I was in two different Southern sites, my team did perhaps 50 interviews over that summer. And oh boy, people were just trying to get the safe buildings and good textbooks and equipment that white people had for their children, so that is why they wanted to integrate schools. It was not because they really liked white people or trusted them. After all, they knew white people just fine; their jobs had them working with white folks all the time. Especially people who worked in white households, they knew them, their children, their marriages, they probably knew more than the neighbors knew. White employers would forget that Black workers were there, they became invisible to them, so Black employees listened. They understood white people just fine, there was no magic sauce about white people, they were human like everyone else. Black agricultural workers knew that their knowledge of crops and science made white landholders wealthy. Black factory workers saw that the white supervisors sometime didn’t know as much about the work that they were doing. White supremacy meant that white workers didn’t have to know more to receive better jobs.

So Black people didn’t buy into the myths of white supremacy. They had to behave accordingly to live, but at no point are they thinking, Oh, white people, that is it. They got the nice stuff and we have the jacked-up stuff because they are better than us. No, they know it is because they took it. They took it. So they figured out that perhaps the best way for Black children to have better books and decent buildings that don’t fall down around them, would be to just integrate the schools. But the motivation was to get the better books and decent buildings. It wasn’t the idea that children needed to sit together because there is something magic that comes off of a white child that goes to the Black child and makes the Black child elevated. Black people knew that the Black child is just as good as the white child. They were never confused about that.

And so those interviews just hammered that home again and again. It was a strategy, it was an outcome of the planning of the NAACP, saying, I see you building this parallel world, it probably would be easier to get there if you just question segregation, go straight at the question. So that is an NAACP strategy, that is not Black thought.

Black thought really is more complex than that. Black people wanted what was due them. They did not think of their spaces and their institutions and their schools and their teachers and their ministers and their community as inherently less than just because they were Black. That is what white people thought.

 

RNB: That paranoia of quotidian everyday Black experiences angered me. I felt an irritation as I was reading that felt ancestral.

But joy is also a strong presence in this book. I want to hear your theorization of Black joy, especially as it relates to labor and the working class, because that is supposed to be oxymoronic. You are supposed to be working class and just toil day in and day out, and you don’t have any type of release. That is the expectation.

How calculated was it that you included these moments of happiness and community as joy? How do you theorize Black joy as a historian?

 

BLMK: Joy is a uniquely interesting Black experience. We talk about joy a lot, we sing about joy. The world didn’t give it, but the world can’t take it away. And that joy is transcendent; that is, despite the circumstances that are always going to be around, one can think, I have something inside me that isn’t dependent on you and how you treat me. I know who I am, I know the secret of whose I am, I got my folks, I got my ancestors, I got my God, and I’m all right, and I’m going to laugh with my folks. I am going to eat with my folks. We are going to drink, we are going to play, we are going to do fun things.

I never experienced being Black as an unjoyful thing. My grandparents, they could argue like crazy people, but then break into joy: like, what are we going to eat, and where are we going, and who is coming? And then it would just be in the yard, everybody talking and eating and laughing and playing games and jonesing on each other, my grandparents could tease the hot dickens out of anybody at any time, my grandfather was just hilarious, like he was just quick and mean and funny and just, always going back and forth with everything. So I experienced home as joyful and funny and full of music and laughter and dancing and celebrating.

They weren’t wealthy people, they weren’t ubersuccessful in any traditional American capitalistic accounting, but that didn’t make them unhappy. It probably made them a little bit happier than some other people just to have those spaces, where none of that was at play, where none of that was in effect. It was our space, they were hungry for those spaces: My grandfather and his brother sought out land in an all-Black enclave and they lived there and they were comfortable there, they built homes there, from their own hands because they knew that that turn within would help to keep them safe and would give them those spaces that were just free for their children, and grandchildren.

I write about my grandmother holding my hand so tightly when we were in public; on that land, my grandmother let my hand go because she knew she was at home.

RNB: Can we talk about home for a minute? I’m curious to hear your thoughts about an intentional pushback against South as a homeland to folks who aren’t white. When you think about the South as home, folks automatically go to the Confederacy, they go to the lost cause. And I say, Well, how does that include these other groups of people who don’t subscribe to that understanding of southernness?

I wonder how thinking about labor in the South speaks home? How can we tease out a stronger connection between home and labor and land, that is such a distinctively Black Southern thing. You have made it if you own land and if we get this land, you better not sell it.

 

BLMK: You got to keep it.

 

RNB: Yes. So, how do some of those markers indicate thinking about region as home, especially for Black folks?

 

BLMK: I think a lot about my grandmother’s garden. She was so tied to that land. She would wake up before dawn and be out in that field and paying attention to her vegetables and her fruit; she had a grape vine and strawberries and okra and string beans and greens and different lettuces and those big old cornstalks that would get so, so tall that they looked like towers to me as a little girl. She just knew everything about the soil, she would taste the soil a little bit to make sure it was right and did you need to amend it in any way? She would teach me about the green beans and when they were ready and when the strawberries were ripe and the right time of day to pick something. She would just put baskets out on the curb so that other people could take the fruits and vegetables that she had too much of. And she would take some to the church because somebody passed away, she was going to make that her thing on that line that were serving at the repast.

It was so powerful to me how that garden gave her space and peace and communion with her God. It gave her the ability to feed her family. It gave her a future through feeding her babies and grandbabies. It gave her the ability to be in community with other women and to mourn with those who mourn. It gave her preparation and a safety, those cans in that closet if things got bad, you just open a jar and then you have the basis of your dinner, even if things got tight financially. She would share those jars with different women who would come to the door.

That care was just so profound and that land gave that to her. So I can imagine what it was like for her when she first migrated and she couldn’t find an apartment where children were allowed, so her daughter, my mom, had to stay with someone who was not her blood relative. My grandmother lost the opportunity to mother her own child.

So, the migration was really a sacrifice for her. She lost a lot. She lost her relatives to tuberculosis, as they encountered disease environments that they weren’t prepared to live in, they started dying. Generations started dying in her family. So that land—that home she eventually built— represented safety, and allowed her to put her family and community back together.

All of those things told through her story tell you so much about what it means to be home, what it means to work and what it means to labor.

 

RNB: One of the things that I really appreciated was how you deromanticized the idea of the Great Migration.

 

BLMK: All my grandparents were migrants. And when they moved north, they were both stigmatized as country bumpkin Southerners but then they learned to embrace what the South gave them. My paternal grandfather had chickens in the alley in Philadelphia, he had a victory garden, he went to south Jersey to cultivate on land and from a man who was from his home county of Accomack. They must have had a little network and my grandparents met in Philadelphia, both from the Eastern Shore—like how the heck did that happen? They were talking. They are in community. Those communities had meaning over time. They were Southerners, they used the resources that they have in this new place to do new things, they don’t come empty handed.

RNB: Southern Black grandmothers are pillars in the community. I’m speaking as a grandmother’s girl, my grandmama was my world. Everything that I understand about the world I owe to her for giving me some kernel of insight and truth. Black grandmothers play such a pivotal role in your book too: What role do Black grandmothers play in how we understand southernness, class consciousness, and race consciousness?

 

BLMK: I’m in New Jersey, right, I’m not in the South, but I feel in part Southern because of her culture that she shared with me, that my grandfather shared with me. Their household, you could pick it up and put it in Georgia or South Carolina, and it would have made sense. Because of the way they ate, what they believed in, how they worshipped. It is so powerful to be raised by someone who was not ashamed of where she was from. It was a calling card, it was a connection. And for her to be like, baby, you are Geechee like me, because you love that rice. So I’m a preschool-aged girl wondering What is Geechee? because I’m more than 600 miles away from that space, but I am there because I’m in her kitchen, I’m eating her okra, corn, and tomatoes. I’m raised with an ethic passed down to her from her enslaved grandparents. She was born in the place where generations of her family had been held in bondage. And I carried that name. Blair is the last name of her ancestors, her mother’s maiden name, and the name of who held us in bondage, and the name of the plantation where they were held. She always wanted me to understand where she came from.

My nana, my paternal grandmother in Philadelphia, she was from the Eastern Shore. And so, even in the midst of Philadelphia, in a very urban space, she has these Southern habits and it is just so powerful to see: They are Southerners, they are not giving up, they are not ceding that as something that was wrong. They moved because they needed to, they had to support themselves and to find ways forward, to escape violence, but they aren’t saying, That is not who I am.

When I came to the academy a few decades ago, to say that you were a scholar of the South meant that you weren’t working on Black people. I’m trying to complicate that now in this moment, so many scholars have been in the process of complicating that and so I hope the Black Folk does the work of doing that too.

I’m really ready to write another book. This book is about my grandparents’ generation and now I want to write my parent’s generation. Just give me a contract to write it, dang it, and then I will be ready to go. 

Featured image: Blair LM Kelley. Courtesy of Blair LM Kelley

Helen Garner was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1942. She worked as a teacher and as a journalist before her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977. Garner has since published novels, stories, screenplays and several volumes of her diaries, but she may be best known for her acclaimed nonfiction, which includes The First Stone (1995), about a university college principal who is accused of groping two female students, and This House of Grief (2014), which tells the story of Robert Farquharson, on trial for the murder of his three sons. In 2016, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell literature prize for nonfiction. New editions of three of Garner’s best-known books have just been published in the UK.

For a long time, you were Australia’s great secret. How do you feel about all the new attention you’re getting in the US and the UK?
I guess it would be annoying if I’d had hopes, in all those years, that I’d ever get published outside Australia. But strangely, I never did. I’m aware this sounds like “little me” talk. But in Australia, in my generation and among those who were slightly older like Germaine [Greer], people would get their books published in London first, and then come back to us. You had to get out of here! That was everybody’s aim, because everything important happened somewhere else. I never felt I had to get out, though. Perhaps this was because I wasn’t really an intellectual. I was just somebody with a pathetic third-class degree who taught in high school.

Did that attitude have an effect on your style?
It meant that I didn’t adapt my way of writing for some fantasised international audience. I didn’t have to explain Australian things; to do massive introductory descriptions of Sydney harbour. I wanted to write about stuff I knew and had lived; about the sorts of people I’d grown up with.

Monkey Grip, about a single mother’s relationship with a junkie, was controversial when it came out, wasn’t it?
Yes. This bloke [a critic] said: she has just published her diary. I felt snarky about it, but I ignored it. It was much worse when I was attacked later for The First Stone. If I published something like that now, I’d be cancelled. People were mad with rage. They said I’d set feminism back 20 years [by suggesting the victims of the assault had overreacted]. I was flabbergasted by those attacks, and the way they went on and on. People would give me death stares in the street. I’d be in some cafe, I’d get a bad feeling, and turn round and there would be some young woman staring at me. But I get letters of apology now, which is very gracious. One said: “I was doing women’s studies at university, and I ran around with my little tin whistle of outrage. But now I’m out in the world and I can see things aren’t so black and white.”

What did you make of #MeToo, given that The First Stone anticipates the arguments around it?
At first, I thought: wow, this is great. Some of these guys are going to get what they deserve; they’re going to get their asses kicked. I was happy about that. But as it rolled on, so many people hitched their wagon to it. That terrible, self-righteous tone… The whole idea that some people get cancelled, and that other people are so tremulous and don’t feel safe when they hear an opinion. I find that repulsive and stupid.

Is it true you began writing nonfiction because your then husband was a novelist, and didn’t want you on his patch?
That was my third husband [the Australian writer Murray Bail], though he would never actually have said it. He had a very stern hierarchy of forms, and the novel was right at the top. He’d never written for money; he’d never been a journalist. But all my writing life, I’ve made a living as a freelance, and I love it with a passion because it gives you an entree into the lives of strangers. I don’t think he thought I was as good as he was, and I think that I unconsciously shifted to [a place] where we wouldn’t be rivals.

How do you feel about nonfiction now?
The First Stone sold a hell of a lot of copies, and from then on I began to feel I belonged on that side of the line. I feel at ease in nonfiction. I’ve learned how to use myself in it: to say to the reader, let’s look at this together.

You love a courtroom, don’t you?
My hearing is going now, so those strange acoustic spaces are difficult. But it used to be that I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. When you’re watching a trial, you’re watching how society tries to deal with human wildness.

Would you say that in a book like This House of Grief you’re fascinated by the line that separates the person who commits a crime, and the person who doesn’t?
It’s not really a line. It’s a very fine membrane, like a net – and you can put your foot right through it, and down you go. I’m not interested in psychopaths, because there’s no ethical struggle going on.

The American writer Janet Malcolm, a Freudian, has been a big influence on you. Did you mean it when you once said you should have been a psychoanalyst?
I think now that I wouldn’t have been very good at it. When I was kicked out of teaching [for giving an unscheduled sex education lesson], I should have joined the police. I reckon that would have suited me better. But I do find analysis fascinating, especially the way you see it in Malcolm’s work: that extreme concentration on what people are like when they’re talking. I’ve followed her example, especially as it’s laid out in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which is fantastic. I had the chance to meet her once. I chickened out.

What are you reading now?
A Heart So White by Javier Marías. I’m loving it. And I’ve had a bit of a resurgence with all those wartime writers called Elizabeth: Bowen, Jenkins, Taylor. Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Hare and the Tortoise is a really great book.

What about your next book?
It won’t be out until November, because it’s about my youngest grandson’s football team – Aussie rules, not soccer. He’s got all these exams, and I thought it would be distracting if there was a book out about him and all his friends. I love football. It’s so beautiful and, to me, heroic. The body language of footballers in moments of shame as well as triumph is like the postures you see in Greek sculpture. Really, it’s a book about men.