Sunday Shelfie with Milli Hill

Two weeks ago, I started our last Sunday Shelfie by asking those in the UK if you had weathered Storm Bert, and this week I start the same way with Storm Darragh. Now that the wind has (hopefully) died down, we can venture back outside but not before this week’s author shows us their bookshelves.

For those who don’t know, Sunday Shelfie is all about having a good poke around the books that grace writers’ shelves, not only do we get to know a little more about them but we always pick up a load of new book recommendations.

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This week, writer, freelance journalist and Substack bestseller, Milli Hill is talking us through her bookcases.

Milli is the author of the bestselling Positive Birth Book, Give Birth like a Feminist and My Period (a book for preteens). Her fourth book, Ultra Processed Women, will be published by Harper Collins in 2025, with a fifth book to follow in 2026. To date, her books have been translated into seven languages.

And, if you are not already following her brilliant Substack, The Mule, you can find it here:

And so, without further ado, let’s have a look at some of the books on Milli’s shelves:

How would you describe your collection of books? Any favourite genres?

I feel like my book collection tells the story of my life, really! I read English Literature at university and still have all the texts I studied back then. After that I went to drama school so have plenty of playscripts. I kept reading novels and poetry, too, and then, around about age 25, I read The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer which blew my mind, and I think began my love affair with non-fiction.

Then comes my therapy years – I trained and practiced as a Dramatherapist (a type of creative psychotherapy) in my late 20s and early 30s. I absolutely devoured every psychology / psychotherapy book I could get my hands on, which I think was a quest to understand myself as much as anything academic. Then it slips into the birth years! When I was pregnant for the first time I was terrified and turned to books to learn more about what birth would be like, and then after my first child was born, I became interested in mothering and read a few books about that. Of course that snowballed into writing two books about childbirth myself (one practical guide, one about the politics of birth), and then I moved on to menstruation and wrote a book on that for preteen girls.

About three years ago, I had a massive clear out of my birth books and gave a lot away (although I still have a lot!). Most recently, I’ve been writing a book about the impact of ultra processed food on women’s health and reading books about food, diet and the environment.

Over the past decade or so I’ve also read a lot of classic children’s books aloud to my children, some of which I read in my own childhood, like The Secret Garden; others which were new to me, like the Moomins and Anne of Green Gables. I also read A LOT online, especially when I’m researching a topic. As someone whose first love was literature and poetry I seem to have strayed a long way into non-fiction?! My goal for 2025, now that I have two books in the process of being published, is to kick back a little, catch up with my TBR pile - and start reading more fiction again!

How many books do you estimate you have and how are they organised, if at all?

I reckon hundreds, but they are not all in one place in the house so slightly hard to estimate. My kids told me recently that 1,000 books equals a library and they think we have 1,000 or more. I think, including all the kids picture books (some of which I’m finding hard to part with even though their picture book days are over) they might be right. Oh, and they are not at all organised. To take these pictures, I’ve had to tidy up small sections of them. In reality, nothing about my life is organised, I feel like that’s normal. I’m suspicious of highly organised people, especially if they have more than one child!

In percentage terms, how many of the total books on your shelves have you read?

I remember a lecture I had at university where the lecturer quoted Samuel Johnson, “The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” The lecturer talked about how Johnson doesn’t say a man has to read half a library to make one book, only to turn over half a library. I think about that quote often. I have definitely turned over many, many books. I think you can get the measure of a lot of non-fiction books by just turning them over, dipping in and out, and then letting them go. It’s only the ones that are really brilliantly written (and this is rare in non-fiction!) that I will end up reading from cover to cover. So I’ve turned over 100% of my books, and read about 60% or so from cover to cover, I’d guess.

Which three books are top of your TBR (To Be Read) pile at the moment?

1. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest by Suzanne Simard (I’ve just finished Braiding Sweetgrass and the dreaded online bookseller suggested this one next. After the horrors I uncovered researching Ultra Processed Women, I’m feeling the need to read books about the beauty of nature).

2. Butter by Asako Yukuki (this is for the next meeting of my local book group!)

3. Hounded by Jenny Lindsay (she sent me this because, as a cancelled or ‘hounded’ woman I’m in it! And then it completely disappeared?! So now I have to replace it and finish reading it!)

Which book on your bookshelf is the most well-thumbed/do you return to the most, and why?

My poetry books. For me, a poetry book is a bit more like a music album than a book. You are in a particular mood and you think, I need to listen to that particular Joni Mitchell album, or I need to read some Louis MacNeice. A life goal I have at the moment is some special new shelves, just for poetry, in my living room, so that I can sit nodding by the fire, and take down a book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look my eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…someone should write a poem about that…

Which book on your bookshelf do you most often buy as a gift for others, and why?

I think it depends on the person and what they seem to need at that moment in time? I like the idea of books and poems as medicine. As a dramatherapist, story and metaphor were the medicine - both the container for difficult feelings and also the crucible in which the alchemy happens. There is a saying that ‘stories go to work on you like arrows’. Sometimes you can be talking to a friend and suddenly a book will come into your mind and you’ll realise it’s absolutely the book they need to read right now.

If you have a collection of writing craft books, which is your favourite and why?

I have read one or two. I love Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott because it’s so honest and funny. Her images in the book, of the homework project being completed one bird at a time, or of the car driving at night with the headlights only illuminating the road just ahead, but nevertheless making progress towards its destination, stick with me when I am working on a book and feeling like the task is impossibly overwhelming. I started 2024 by trying to do Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way but I think it worked on me too effectively as my creativity exploded and by mid February I had written a book proposal for Ultra Processed Women. That led to me spending every waking moment for the rest of the year, glued to my laptop, so I haven’t been able to do those lovely ‘Morning Pages’ much since! I’m hoping to go back in 2025.

If you write within a particular genre, can you tell us your three favourite books within that genre (classic or contemporary) and why?

Well first of all this has made me think about what genre I write in…’women’s health’…I guess…? And then that made me have a bit of an existential crisis because I realised I don’t actually have much passion for any women’s health books – so why am I writing them? Errr… Anyway. I’m going to tell you three non-fiction books I love because I think, each in their own way, they have a transformative power. They all switch on a lightbulb that will never again be switched off, and that is what non-fiction should be about.

1. What Mother’s Do: Especially When it Looks like Nothing by Naomi Stadlen

2.Love’s Executioner: and other tales of psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom

3.Women who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Which book on your bookshelf is your guilty pleasure?

Jilly Cooper of course! I’ve read them all and I bloody love her!! No guilt, only pleasure!

Which book on your bookshelf do you feel most guilty for not having read yet, and why?

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. I started it but then it just slipped under the bedside table and is still down there, all dusty with a few others. I’m hoping to return to in 2025. Hang on, there’s a bit of theme developing here, isn’t there – 2025 is like this mythical year where I tidy everything, read all the books on my massive TBR, and become that perfect highly organised person I’ve already said I’m suspicious of, isn’t it? Hmmm….

Which book would we be most surprised to find on your bookshelf?

Sex Lives of the Popes by Nigel Cawthorne. That’s one of my partner’s books but I think it’s the most surprising and hilarious concept for a book and I wish I’d thought of it myself.

Which book on your shelf would you take to a desert island, and why?

The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Moor. I discovered the artist and writer Monia Sjoo through the amazing FiLiA conference, and this set me on a whole path of thinking about the sacred feminine, how it’s been hidden from women, and what the impact of this has been on us. I have only ‘turned over’ Sjoo’s book so far but a desert island would give me a chance to give it the time and attention it deserves – sounds blissful, when is my flight? Sometime in 2025?!

Which book is on your wishlist currently to join all the others on your bookshelf?

I don’t think I have any more books on my wishlist at the moment. I just want to read the ones I’ve already got. I think 2025 will be my year for that!

• Thank you so much to

Milli Hill

for sharing her bookshelves with us. Don’t forget to check out her Substack, plus subscribe to White Ink as a free or paid subscriber for not only more posts like this one but a whole archive of material including dozens of guest essays on writing craft by other brilliant authors.

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Until next time…