Required Reading: 10 Books That Changed ‘Fruit Fly’ Author Josh Silver’s Life

Privilege is a slippery thing to define in literary circles. While many have it, the commodification of personal struggles and systemic trauma can also be a kind of currency for those who don’t. That tension animates British author Josh Silver’s Fruit Fly, a lively and buzzy—no pun intended—debut novel in which a well-to-do author entangles herself with a young, gay, drug-dependent sex worker in order to defeat her writer’s block.

Below, Silver shares the 10 books that paved the way for his own:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
I read Great Expectations as a teenager, not expecting it to be the kind of book I would enjoy at all. Instead, I was completely pulled in. It was funny, strange and exciting, and full of these enormous characters who seemed to propel the story simply by being themselves and making terrible or brilliant choices.

I think it was the first time I understood that plot does not have to feel imposed on a novel. It can come entirely from character, from what people want and what they are willing to do to get it. Mostly, though, I remember being surprised by how funny Dickens was. It completely changed my idea of what a classic could be. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The scale and scope of The Handmaid’s Tale blew my mind when I first read it, but what stayed with me was how intimate it felt.

Atwood creates this enormous political and social reality,

Atwood creates this enormous political and social reality, but we experience it through human relationships, desire, memory, fear and the small negotiations people make in order to survive. It taught me that the bigger the idea, the more important it can be to find the most human way into it. I think about that a lot when I write. You can build an entire world, but ultimately it is the people inside it, and what they do to one another, that make us care about it.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
I read A Thousand Splendid Suns on a family holiday when I was a teenager and became so attached to Mariam and Laila that finishing it felt like being forced out of a world I was not ready to leave. I cried so much at the end that I went for a walk by myself because I did not want my family to see me. I think it was one of the first books that showed me the extraordinary intimacy a writer can create between a reader and a character.

I did not just want to know what happened to these women. I felt as though I knew them. I have been chasing that feeling in fiction ever since. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
I loved how dark and funny this book was, and how much Braithwaite manages to explore through such an outrageous premise. On the surface it is about a woman whose sister keeps killing her boyfriends, but underneath it is about loyalty, resentment, beauty, family and the things we are willing to forgive in the people we love.

I found the tension between those two things

I found the tension between those two things so exciting. It never loses its humour or becomes weighed down by what it is trying to say. As a writer, it reminded me that you can use something heightened and even absurd to get at something completely human. Erasure by Percival Everett
Erasure is a book that made me excited about what satire could actually do. Percival Everett takes enormous questions about race, authorship, publishing and who gets to tell whose story, then makes them incredibly funny without ever making them feel less serious.

I thought about it a lot while writing Fruit Fly, which asks some similar questions about our appetite for other people’s experiences and what happens when a writer starts treating suffering as material. Erasure gave me confidence that a novel could interrogate difficult, uncomfortable ideas while still being playful, provocative and properly funny. She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark
I love how Eliza Clark lets fiction get properly weird.

These stories can be funny, grotesque, sexy, unsettling and completely absurd, sometimes all at once, without feeling the need to explain themselves. Hunger and appetite run through the collection in all sorts of strange ways, but underneath the extremity there is always something recognisably human. Reading it reminded me that fiction does not always need to behave itself. Sometimes pushing an idea somewhere strange is the best way to find something truthful.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham I remember finding

The Hours by Michael Cunningham
I remember finding The Hours incredibly exciting when I first read it, particularly the way Michael Cunningham plays with form. I loved the melancholy that connects these three women living in different times, and the way he uses Mrs Dalloway almost like a prism, showing how a single novel can be written, read and lived through completely different lives.

It made me think about the strange relationship between fiction and reality, and how a book can become something different depending on who is holding it. I loved the film just as much, which almost never happens. It captured the same atmosphere I had fallen in love with in the novel. Beautiful, sad, and completely absorbing. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Maté
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts was a big part of my own journey into sobriety.

I read it at a time when I was trying to understand addiction and, honestly, a lot of my own behaviour. Gabor Maté writes about addiction with such compassion, looking beyond the substance or behaviour to what someone might be trying to soothe, escape or survive. It helped me move away from seeing addiction simply as a series of bad choices, and towards understanding the pain and history that can sit underneath it.

I found that enormously helpful when I

I found that enormously helpful when I was getting sober. It is a book I have returned to because it reminds me that understanding why we do something does not mean excusing it, but it can give us somewhere to start. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting changed the way I thought about fiction as a way into someone else’s psychology. Irvine Welsh writes characters making destructive, selfish and sometimes terrible choices, but he never reduces them to those choices.

We are allowed to understand the history, addiction, friendship, environment and desire underneath them without being asked to approve of their behaviour. When I was a kid, I thought the point of life was to make everyone like you, and I think that followed me into how I initially understood stories. I thought I was supposed to root for the protagonist. Trainspotting helped dismantle that idea for me.

When I started writing, I promised myself I would never try to make my characters likeable, only understandable. I want to know what has happened to someone that makes the choices they make feel inevitable to them. I also loved how funny the book was without diminishing the darkness of what it was depicting. The film is incredible too, one of those rare adaptations that feels as alive, distinctive and uncompromising as the novel that inspired it.

Books v. Cigarettes by George Orwell George Orwell

Books v. Cigarettes by George Orwell
George Orwell has been a favourite of mine since I read 1984 at school. I remember being struck by how simple and direct his language was, while the ideas behind it were enormous. I later discovered his essays and Books v. Cigarettes became a favourite. I love how he can take something seemingly ordinary and use it to explore a much bigger idea without ever making the writing feel grand or inaccessible.

Politics and the English Language also crystallised something I had always loved about his work. His belief that writing should prioritise meaning over ornament felt exciting and liberating to me. There was something freeing about realising you did not need to dress up a thought to make it intelligent. I still think about that whenever I write. I want the ideas to be complicated, but the language to be as clear as possible.

Source: www.vogue.com