My earliest reading memory
In her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel remembers learning to read at school as a “wearisome uphill trail in the company of Dick and Dora”. My mother had taught me to identify some words before I started school but it was in the classroom, in one of the “readers” that had bored young Hilary senseless, that letters and spaces and full stops left the page as code and reassembled in my head to make a story. Exhilarating.
My favourite book growing up
Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War was the book of my childhood. Carrie Willow and I shared an overactive imagination, an eldest child’s sense of responsibility and a dependence on hair slides.
The book that changed me as a teenager
My teenage reading began with Howard Spring and Agatha Christie, but was thrown into peril by the purchase – on a school trip to the Isle of Man – of Flowers in the Attic by Virginia Andrews, a lurid tale of a brother and sister who are locked away by their mother and fall in love. I was saved from a lifetime of such carry-on when a neighbour gave me a copy of The White Album by Joan Didion. I read her account of being sent to buy a suitable dress for Linda Kasabian, Manson Family member turned state witness, to wear in court. From my small bedroom in the midlands of Ireland, it seemed that the world was opening itself out for me.
The writer who changed my mind
Like many Irish girls, I first encountered Edna O’Brien through The Country Girls, flicking through the pages to find the dirty bits I presumed had led to its banning by the Irish censor. Much later, I reread it and understood that O’Brien had done something much more subversive; she had dared to show that women – Irish Catholic women, if you don’t mind – had inner lives.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I came to writing by accident, when a friend cajoled me into joining a writing group, so there was no moment when I decided I wanted to do this. In my early 20s, I did, however, close Toni Morrison’s Beloved thinking I would give anything to be able to make something that beautiful.
The book or author I came back to
I had a hard time with the Brontës. I adored Jane Eyre up to the line “Reader, I married him”; she lost me after that. I read Wuthering Heights twice and on both occasions found it demented.
The book I reread
I picked up Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin in a sweep of the Penguin Classics section of my local bookshop when I was 18. I went back to it when I was writing Trespasses, hoping some of the terrible, blinding lust would find its way on to my pages. (It is not for me to say if it worked.)
The book I could never read again
In my early teens I read Gone With the Wind over a weekend, my head turned by Scarlett and Rhett. What I remember now is the racist way in which Margaret Mitchell portrayed Black people and the book’s nostalgia for the good old days before slavery was abolished. Dangerous stuff.
The book I discovered later in life
A few years ago, I listened to an audiobook of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene and was floored by it. Admittedly, the experience was greatly enhanced by the fact that Colin Firth was the reader.
The book I am currently reading
A proof copy of Una Mannion’s second novel, Tell Me What I Am. Haunting, gorgeous and in the shops in May.
• Trespasses by Louise Kennedy (Bloomsbury, £8.99) is on the Women’s prize longlist. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
