Chapter 1: What is Daisy Buchanan's latest novel Insatiable about?
I loved this book.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, his writing is so crisp, is so matter-of-fact.
Beautifully written. It's very stark in places. And I think she is the most extraordinary writer.
Not to get too, you know, invisible beret about this. And I love her books. I think they're brilliant. My parents read that book to me so many times.
If anything, it's actually a time for poetry, it's a time for slow text, it's a time for difficult text. Pretty dark, engrossing, suspenseful, plot driven. But I read that at least once a year.
Hi, it's Kate Evans here from The Bookshelf on ABC Radio National, and this is a podcast extra edition of the show, which is where every week you'll hear writers talking about the bookshelf that shaped them. But the odd thing today is that this writer herself hosts a podcast in Britain, where she goes around to writers' houses and literally looks at their bookshelves,
asks them what they read, examines their top shelf, and her podcast is called You're Booked. Her name is Daisy Buchanan. We'll get back to that name in just a moment. She's a journalist and a writer of non-fiction books, including How to Be a Grown-Up and The Sisterhood. And now she's written a novel called Insatiable.
So to kick off this conversation, I'll ask her about this sexy novel of hers before we turn to the books she reads. And what is it about her name, Daisy Buchanan? Isn't that a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby? Yep, I'll ask her about that too. But first, her novel.
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Chapter 2: What does the term 'greedy' mean in the context of Insatiable?
It's probably been on holiday with me appropriately and in the bath as well. But it is part of Marion Key's series about the Walsh sisters. And Rachel is sort of the difficult middle child. And she's been living in New York glamorously. gets sent to rehab after a cocaine overdose and thinks, you know, well, everybody is a little bit wild and this is just what life is like in Manhattan.
They've made a mistake and I shouldn't be in rehab at all. I'll just treat it like a lovely luxury spa holiday, as is the holiday of the title. And the really stunning reveal, I mean, it's Marion Keys. Every time I read her and reread her, I find something new and she blows me
my mind because she's so deliciously and addictively readable and she really really carries you every step of the way with her but she's doing something so quietly profound and unlike any other book I've read we know more about Rachel before she does and it's this really funny and moving exploration of addiction moving along and I can see um all of Armistead Mopan's books I think I've got this is um a shelf of the big hardbacks Harrisonbury
tattered paperbacks elsewhere but as a teenager I just loved those Tales of the City books so much and I couldn't believe I'd never seen anything as thrilling as San Francisco in the 70s and it's so smart because it starts with this main character Marianne who is quite naive she's come from Cleveland she doesn't really know what's going on she's quite sort of she's got a real midwestern sensibility and suddenly she is in this sort of thrilling queer subculture and
Everything about those books is just so inclusive and warm and filled with empathy. And, you know, I think you should read them in schools. You know, they're quite shocking, quite wild, but they just really, really encourage this sort of essential culture of kindness.
Are there other books, though, that you reread with as much sort of excitement as those two, The Marion Keys and The Armistead Morphin?
A few years ago, I discovered Eve Babbitts, who it's very much in Daisy Jane's territory. It's 70s Los Angeles. Eve Babbitts was kind of an it girl who wrote these beautiful, beautiful essays. And I suppose she was a little bit like a West Coast Dorothy Parker, but
that's not quite it and she is still alive she's still with us she was she has been remembered as famously the lover and sort of muse of Jim Morrison but there's so much more to her than that and Eve's Hollywood is her sort of her book of essays about her her wild times and being you know associating with all sorts of fabulous people and it's very glamorous and very squalid but then
her book Black Swans is about her sober life and how she becomes addicted to learning how to tango and when I think about all of those sort of you know the William Burroughs-y writers I've never really got on with the beats and how I think Eve Babbitt writes hedonism better than anyone I know but also she writes about negotiating that sober landscape so well I think I'd
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Chapter 3: How does Daisy Buchanan explore the theme of desire in her writing?
not such a long time. And I know I've just started rereading more Marion Keys. Is anybody out there? Because the heroine in that book, Anna, has a sort of fabulous job as a beauty PR. And what I love about the writing in that is the wish fulfillment element. There's a book I really love by I think Lisa Owens called Not Working.
It's about a woman who quits her job to do something more meaningful and really doesn't know what that is.
I think it's such a beautiful, poetic exploration of the tedium of work and how important it is that we fill our days with something and how I think so many of us are really addicted to work as something to numb us, that we feel as though if the right circumstances sort of came along, you know, we'd be fulfilled and we'd be doing some work that really made us passionate and excited.
And actually the truth of it is that
work is for a lot of us I think uh you know a marker and it's how we kind of justify doing the things we want to do um I know that it's the anniversary of Bridget Jones Diary coming up and I think that's really great on that subject as well and the sort of it's like a sort of a ecological system that no matter what you want to do and how much you want to do it in an office it's
You are often sort of thwarted at every turn. Everyone's so obstructive and everyone kind of has an agenda. And so much of it is just sort of being patient and trying to put up with things or think around things.
And it's so interesting, though, that you mentioned Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's diary, because as I was thinking again about your book today, I was pondering that Violet's first dreadful boss was similar to Bridget's awful boss, who's forever renovating her house. Both of them are sort of renovating their houses and braying about scatter cushions.
Yes, and I think because I have been such a long-term fan of Bridget, and I hope that it is a tribute rather than anything more legally problematic, but I did kind of write The Awful Connie as a little tribute to Perpetua.
Oh, Perpetua, that is her name, of course. Just dreadful. What else have you read recently that you've just loved?
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