A Respectable Occupation by Julia Kerninon

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‘A fiery gem of a book’ - Christopher Reid, poet and editor of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters and the Selected Letters of Seamus Heaney.įree shipping to the UK. Julia Kerninon’s A Respectable Occupation joins the shelf of these biblioautobiographies books on how writers crave books, how books beget books, how tricky it is to move from the position of the reader to that of the writer, and stand there feeling you’ve earned the right to call yourself, finally, a writer.’ - Lauren Elkin, from her foreword They have origin stories of how reading and writing became as necessary as breathing. Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Jeanette Winterson – they all read, as Woolf put it, “to refresh and exercise own creative powers.” They can’t stop themselves from writing about reading.

‘The greatest writers are also the greatest readers. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside café on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a fluid, feminine answer to A Moveable Feast Her journey through her formative years entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, resulting in a vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a ‘respectable occupation’), peppered with fine portraits of her disjointed yet loving family. Julia Kerninon, one of France’s most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. ‘The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,’ Hemingway famously said.

A Respectable Occupation by Julia Kerninon