Claire Messud on Virginia Woolf, 'The Little Prince,' and The Book That Kept Her Up Too Late

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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Inspired by family stories comes This Strange Eventful History (Norton), Claire Messud’s seventh novel, along with a collection of autobiographical essays that have appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Paris Review.

The Connecticut-born Messud (it’s a distortion of a common Maltese surname, Mifsud) attended five schools and lived in eight homes in three countries by age 12. Her father was French from Algeria (who counted Derrida as a classmate), her mother Canadian and the family lived in Sydney and Toronto (where her mother wouldn’t let her wear pants to school). She met her husband, New Yorker critic James Wood, as a graduate student at Cambridge via Andrew Solomon the night before her 21st birthday. (The couple’s first kiss was during the Great Storm of 1987.) She dropped out of Syracuse University where she was pursuing an MFA. Later, when she was a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg Zu Berlin, she, Wood, and their two children lived in Berlin. They now live in Cambridge, MA, where she teaches fiction writing at Harvard.

Her 2006 novel, the NYT bestselling The Emperor’s Children, was long-listed for the Booker Prize. She’s been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

She has two beagles; pandemic read Anna Karenina as a family and War & Peace as part of Yiyun Li’s book group; temped at a London publisher; writes fiction in longhand; received a typewriter when she turned 6; lived in the same building as Christoper Hitchens in D.C. who once asked her, “Would it kill you to write something people actually want to read?”

Likes: Boredom, reading while lying down, keepsakes (a bread knife, embroidered handkerchiefs) from her grandmothers, and TV.

Dislikes: Waste.

Fan of: Camus; sculptor Sarah Sze and London Grammar vocalist Hannah Reid; Paris (where she studied for a semester while an undergrad at Yale).

Good at: Typing fast and repairing sweaters.

Not so much: Cooking. She serves up her book recs below.

The book that…

… kept me up way too late:

Mary Kay Zuravleff’s terrific American Ending, the utterly engrossing story of Russian immigrants to Pennsylvania's coal mining country a century ago. Zuravleff makes every detail sing.

…made me weep uncontrollably:

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince does it every time, even now. When my kids were little they eventually asked me not to read it to them, because I’d cry each time.

…I recommend over and over again:

The wonderful novelist Amitav Ghosh’s first non-fiction book In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale is an account of his graduate work in Egypt in the 1980s, uncovering the history of a 12th century Jewish trader and his Indian slave. The upheaval and migration that we think of as contemporary have existed for a millennium or more.

...shaped my worldview:

The novels and essays of Virginia Woolf. I only recently realized how thoroughly my literary principles were shaped, in my youth, by hers.

…I swear I'll finish one day:

Elsa Morante’s History published in the ‘70s, about the Second World War in Italy, it’s considered Morante’s masterpiece. It’s also 600 pages long. I’ve owned a copy for 8 years, and have yet to get through it, but I will!

...I read in one sitting, it was that good:

Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed is at once deeply moving and wryly funny. The story of a valiant but struggling mother, her drug-addicted daughter and beloved granddaughter, Boyt’s beautiful seventh novel is unputdownable.

…currently sits on my nightstand:

Teju Cole’s Tremor is next on my list. I’ve been a fan since Open City.

…I’d like turned into a TV show:

Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel Caledonian Road, an amazing, sprawling Dickensian book about a large cast of characters around London’s King’s Cross, just in the wake of COVID lockdown. I trust it will be turned into a TV show, and I can’t wait to watch it. Editor’s note: She’s right.

…has the best title:

Surely has to go to Chris Kraus for I Love Dick?

...has the best opening line:

Ah, I’ll still have to say Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” A hard one to beat.

...has the greatest ending:

Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, written during World War Two in Germany, is about a modest couple and their attempts to resist the Nazi regime. I think often about the ending of that novel–a dark one–and about a particular, oddly hopeful, line that expresses a profound truth about our humanness.

…broke my heart:

Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Forays Into a Vanishing Landscape is an achingly beautiful memoir about the beloved landscapes through which he has walked all his life, and the painful changes that they’ve undergone.

…features a character I love to hate:

Again, an oldie but a goodie: isn’t Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca one of the most deliciously hateworthy characters of all time? She’s been a villain in my imagination since I was probably 13 years old, and remains unforgettable.

...I brought on a momentous trip:

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I first read it while traveling alone in Asia the summer after I graduated from college, carrying that fat black paperback around in my backpack, reading it while I ate at roadside cafes, or by dim light long into the night when I had electricity in my room. It was a great, if unlikely, companion.

...I’ve re-read the most:

Possibly the Tintin books. I read them so many times as a kid that I could cite bits off by heart. Later, I read them to my kids. Recently a friend gave me the set and I read them all over again. Just last week another friend and I were laughing about the character of Jolyon Wagg, the persistent insurance salesman…

…sealed a friendship–and a relationship!

On Valentine’s Day, 1988, the first year of our relationship, now a lifetime ago, when I was at grad school in Cambridge, my now-husband planned a trip into London and kept our destination a secret. He took me to hear Toni Morrison read from Beloved, which had just been published, and gave me the book– then we stood in line and she signed it! Signed and sealed, 36 years later.

...everyone should read:

Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship, which is her account of spending a year teaching a young incarcerated man to read. Everyone should understand what it means to gain power over language–it’s transformative and radical.

Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:

I’d live in the London Library, a wonderful subscription library in St. James’s Square, where I worked on my first novel many years ago. At the time–maybe still?–there were comfy armchairs scattered about, and there was a rule that if someone was sleeping in one, you weren’t allowed to wake them up.

American Ending by Mary Kay Zuravleff

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

History by Elsa Morante

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

Tremor by Teju Cole

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh

Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada

Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo

The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé

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