What I love about my Sunday Shelfie series is… well, actually I just love everything about it. Not only is it a chance to snoop around authors’ bookshelves, but you get some great new book recommendations, and so today I know you’re going to love Emma Forrest’s picks because she always manages to find interesting and unusual titles that the rest of us have somehow missed.
is a screenwriter, director and author of both fiction and non-fiction, including Your Voice In My Head, Busy Being Free and Royals.She is also the coolest new arrival on Substack. If you don’t already, please immediately subscribe to The Peaceful Transfer of Power, you won’t regret it.
But, what we really want to see are her bookshelves, right? And here they are:
How would you describe your collection of books? Any favourite genres?
Hmm, having lived there and then ultimately left there because my life circumstances changed, I do love Hollywood lore and stories about the creation of Los Angeles as both a city and a myth. I love What Happens Next which is a history of American screenwriting by Marc Norman. I love the memoir Magic Hour by Jack Cardiff who was cinematographer of choice for the screen's greatest Golden Age goddesses. I actually love the trilogy of memoirs by Asa Akira, who is one of the most successful porn stars of all time, and also a great writer, they’re particularly evocative of the Valley, where I used to live. The best Hollywood essayist is Eve Babitz - I admire tremendously Joan Didion but I can’t feel her the way I feel Eve, who was far messier. But the best ever is Is That A Gun In Your Pocket by Rachel Abramowitz - an absolutely riveting history of women in Hollywood, on screen and off.
How many books do you estimate you have and how are they organised, if at all?
Literally, no idea, I just know I have the bespoke shelf along my ceiling and an antique cabinet of my favourite books that my kid lost the key to and no locksmith has ever been able to unlock. They say I need a safecracker. I’ll get to it, for now I can only look at my favourite books through the glass. I organised them as if it’s a dinner party. I put Dolly Alderton next to Annie Ernaux as I feel they’d have a lot to talk about.
In percentage terms, how many of the total books on your shelves have you read?
I’d say 75%
Which three books are top of your TBR (To Be Read) pile at the moment?
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen which I can’t believe the socially trigger happy UK book stores stock (even though it’s a scathing satirical novel and won the Pulitzer for fiction). It’s a lovely blue Fitzcarraldo edition.
I will be re-reading Lola Kirke’s memoir of bohemian family dysfunction Wild West Village when it’s in stores, I have the proof and loved it but it’s got that yummy compulsive Eve Babitz feeling so I want to read it again.
I want to read Jean Hannah Edelstein’s upcoming Breasts, a memoir divided into Sex, Food, Cancer. I’ve just been sent the proof.
Which book on your bookshelf is the most well-thumbed/do you return to the most, and why?
Well, all of Eve Babitz, probably most of all Eve’s Hollywood. I also was so taken with the biography of her Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik, that I sent her a fan letter and now we are friends. Always send people fan letters when a book or film they make gets in your head! They may never reply and that’s fine, it’s almost beside the point if they get back to you - but it’s important for your brain wiring that you send them.
Which book on your bookshelf do you most often buy as a gift for others, and why?
The year it came out I gave a few people Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince where he makes an argument for them being artistic twin souls. It’s fascinating and it’s slim which is always a sell for me, like a movie that’s an hour and thirty minutes.
If you have a collection of writing craft books, which is your favourite and why?
I got a lot out of The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. She’s obviously a choreographer not a writer but I’ve used many of her tips, especially doing my work if ever possible when the world is not awake yet, so it’s just me and my ideas with no other humans yet present on the planet (or that’s how it should feel).
If you write within a particular genre, can you tell us your three favourite books within that genre (classic or contemporary) and why?
I wish I wrote in one fucking genre and so, I imagine, do my publishers. I think I’d be less hard to ‘plug in’ and I’d actually make myself and them some money. Readers who love my books love them, but I’m such a stereotypical ‘troubadour’ - the money comes in for a while, then the money goes out. Way out.
Which book on your bookshelf is your guilty pleasure?
I mean, you can’t really say the series of Rupert Everett memoirs are ‘guilty’ pleasures as he’s such a good writer, but they are definitely dishy and pleasingly bitchy.
Which book on your bookshelf do you feel most guilty for not having read yet, and why?
I haven’t read any of the Elena Ferrante novels - I have them all- but I don’t actually feel guilty about it. They were a parting gift from a dear girlfriend when I left LA to move back to London. I feel they carry in them the totality of her love and support so I am happy just to occasionally hold them in my hands.
Which book would we be most surprised to find on your bookshelf?
A cookbook - I can’t cook at all, I can combine things and assemble things but that’s it. This cookbook was a fundraiser for my kid’s school and is the only one I have.
Which book on your shelf would you take to a desert island, and why?
It might be stupid to say My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout’ because I’m on a desert island and it’s such a short book. But it’s a Holy Book, it’s a spiritual book. Every word in it is perfect and it makes me feel good just resting my hand on the cover, before I even open it again.
Which book is on your wishlist currently to join all the others on your bookshelf?
I can’t wait to get the new Taffy Brodeser-Akner, Long Island Compromise. She’s just phenomenal in every form she touches, be it journalism, novels, screen adaptation. I was going to buy it for a recent holiday but I am a one piece of hand luggage only never checks bags freak and it was just too weighty.
• Thanks so much again to
for taking part, I hope this has given you all some brilliant new additions to your own reading lists, and don’t forget to add Emma’s too!
Love this series. Love Emma Forrest and can confirm Long Island Compromise is 👍👍👍
Oh I love Emma, she was the wünderkind of nineties journalism, and then she had a relationship with Colin Farrell. I reviewed the book she wrote about that for Sunday Times, I loved it's very essential spareness.