Born in Vermont in 1973, American-Irish writer Tana French was raised in Italy, the US and Malawi and now lives in Dublin. French trained as a professional actor at Trinity College Dublin, and started writing crime and mystery novels between castings. Her first book, In the Woods, was published in 2007 and won a number of awards; since then she has published six more, including Faithful Place and Broken Harbor. Her seventh novel, The Wych Elm, is published by Viking and is out now. Tana French will be in conversation with John Boyne at Waterstones Piccadilly, London, on 21 February.
1. TV
My generation grew up with that world – ET and Stand By Me and The Goonies, small-town American kids riding their bikes around having high-stakes adventures and coming of age – to the point where it feels like part of the landscape of our memories. And we 80s kids grew up with a twist of the uncanny too: so many of our books and TV shows had a liminality, a sense of reality being off-kilter and flexible, that’s been excised from kids’ culture now. Stranger Things hits that note perfectly. I loved the first two series (except that one episode) and I can’t wait for the third.
2. Band
Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats
I know this is a sign of middle age, but it seems like too many bands nowadays are sanitised into nonexistence. Not all of them, obviously, but enough that I’ve got lazy – I end up just going back to my old loves. So when I do discover a great new band, it’s a pure joy. Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats are a rowdy, powerful mix of Americana, soul and vintage R&B, and they’re wonderful. Hey Mama is straight-up beautiful, and when my mind’s not working, I go for a long walk, crank up I Need Never Get Old or S.O.B. to 11, and blast the cobwebs right out of my head.
3. Book
The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally
I’ve just reread this for the dozenth time. It’s the story of a play put on by the first boatload of convicts transported to Australia. It’s historically fascinating, it’s got great characters – most of whom were real, and just as interesting in reality – and it’s moving, disturbing and beautifully written. It’s also a passionate call to understand that the arts aren’t some trivial indulgence for the elite; they’re a crucial force that lets us make sense of our own emotions, enables social mobility, brings us to the empathy and sense of connection that make us human and let us create a cohesive society.
4. Painter
An Italian artist who just had an exhibition called The Essence of Light and Silence at the Pontone Gallery in London. Years ago, my now-husband and I passed a little art gallery in San Gimignano, and a painting by Massagrande stopped us in our tracks. It showed the stairwell of a derelict building that had been beautiful once – delicate stair rails, patterned floor tiles, light falling from some high window. All his paintings have that haunting quality of existing on some borderline between past and present, steeped in memory and strange light.
5. Restaurant
A new Italian restaurant that makes possibly the best pizza I’ve had in Dublin. I’d happily eat their pizza margherita with Parma ham every night. When I moved here in 1990, “pizza” meant you picked up a disc of half-cooked bread in the supermarket and topped it with tomato puree, shredded cheddar and chopped processed things out of stainless steel buckets. Those days are long gone, but really good pizza still feels like it should come with a choir of angel voices.
6. Website
It’s an Irish satire website, and when they get it right they get it bang on. The last couple of years, it often feels like the mainstream media can’t do the news justice, because they have to be neutral and matter-of-fact about events that are flamboyantly ludicrous. The satire websites are, ironically, the only ones that have the space to talk about the news with sanity and clarity. (A few weeks ago WWN’s headline was “May’s Brexit Legal Advice Just Head-Exploding Emojis”, which covers the situation nicely.) The only problem is, these days it can be hard to tell what’s the WWN and what’s the actual news.
