This week on the Penguin Podcast we talk to writer, critic and curator Charlie Porter about his first novel Nova Scotia House, discuss queer books and the importance of hearing queer voices in art. Plus we provide plenty of book recommendations for LGBTQ+ stories.
Click the button below to listen to this episode or continue scrolling to explore the books discussed.
Alongside the Penguin titles you can explore below, Charlie, Zeljka, Ruby and Rhianna also mentioned:
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Miles
Carol by Patricia Highsmith
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
All Fours by Miranda July
Miss Major Speaks by Miss Major Griffin-Gracy
Venus as a Boy by Luke Sutherland
My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
You can listen to the music of Nova Scotia House via Charlie's Spotify playlist.
Explore the books discussed in this episode
Episode 5 transcript
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hello, welcome to Ask Penguin, the podcast series from Penguin Books. I'm Rhianna Dhillon, and every episode I get to meet different authors to talk about their work, along with putting our listener questions to some of the experts working here at Penguin. I probably like you, have always been a reading obsessive. There wasn't a day when I wouldn't be reading. Hangleton Library in Hove was like my Mecca. It was where I made so many of my greatest book discoveries, although I was always quite gutted about the six-book limit. So to be let loose at Penguin is honestly my dream gig. And if you look back through our archive, you'll see that we've already covered a whole range of literary topics from romance novels to winter reads to historical fiction. And today we're getting to a subject that I'm really looking forward to covering; queer literature.
So of course, LGBTQ+ writers have been telling stories forever, although historically, these stories have often been marginalised. But in recent decades, the diversity and complexity of queer books available has expanded enormously. And what I especially love is how queer fiction can give us insights and offerings on alternative or overlooked perspectives on our shared history. With all that in mind, I am delighted to introduce writer, critic, and curator Charlie Porter, who's joining me today to discuss his unmissable first novel, Nova Scotia House. It's a deeply emotional, intimate account of the AIDS crisis and its aftermath, told through the mind and memories of Johnny Grant and set between contemporary times and the early 90s. It's both a love story and a lament taking readers to the heart of a relationship, a community, and an era. Charlie, thank you so much for being in the studio with us today.
Charlie Porter:
Thank you, thank you for having me.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And congratulations on the book. It's gorgeous. It's a really, really beautiful piece of work. And although it's not your debut book, it is your debut novel. So how did you approach writing a fiction and how did that process differ from your nonfiction work?
Charlie Porter:
Well, so I've been writing fiction for like forever, but just not in public. And it's the same thing but the other side of writing. So, my nonfiction books are all based on primary sources. So they are like based on research or letters that I can read or conversations that I can have. So sentences in my nonfiction are, they're like Lego, they're little building blocks, and they build and build and build and build and they make a book. And we put images in, so then it's, you know, the structure is very much like boiled down, boom info, info, info. Fiction is like, hey, let's start a sentence and maybe let's finish it at some point. But the thing is, is that if I were, if we were to transcribe what I just said, that sentence would last a long time. It just is that we assume when we're writing that we have to neaten it and make it, make it like, you know, specific and shortened and stuff and I've always written fiction just trying to get as close as possible to the way the brain is or the way that the mouth is, the way we speak actually, and the way that in a sentence we can kind of stop the sentence kind of halfway through the sentence and add something else in, add something else in, add something else in, then finish it, get bored, move on to the next one.
Rhianna Dhillon:
When I started your book, I was like, oh, OK, it's a different form. You have to, I almost had to rewire my brain briefly. And then I started to read it out loud. I was like, oh, this is where it lives. So do you, is your book supposed to, was it kind of made to be read out loud?
Charlie Porter:
I mean, it's funny because I never read it out loud when I was writing it until we got to editing. So it's not, it's not, but it reveals itself when you read it out loud because I think if you, yeah, once you've unlocked that, then that can allow you to breathe, I think, it can look like it's really fast, but actually in the sentence there is breathing to be found and, and breathing is really important to me in writing because I think that writing is a physical act, like it's an embodied act, it's not just a kind of tense kind of trying to get words down in kind of panic. But yeah, if you read it out, then you can kind of find that breathing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. So how did you find reading the audiobook because you read your own audiobook for this?
Charlie Porter:
I loved it so much! I loved it. The novel happens all in the mind of the main character, Johnny. So that entire thing is either him talking to us in present day as things are happening to him in present tense, or him remembering back. So as a reader, I don't give you any clues. So like, you know, if you write in the third person you can say ‘he walks into a room, the room is dark.’ It's, I mean, It'll be a better sentence than that, the room is dark, yeah, I mean, but you know, you can set the scene before the character walks in. But when it's all in the mind of someone, it has to just be what that character is experiencing. So when I was preparing for the audiobook, I spoke with the producer beforehand and they were brilliant and they were like - the thing to do is that when you read a sentence, wait, shall I read a sentence? The book is handily just here. I will show you what I mean. Right, so right at the beginning, there's the sentence, so it starts, ‘let me sort through who I am, won't take long.’ And then there's the sentence, ‘Paintings by Jerry.’ So the way you would read that normally is ‘paintings by Jerry’ and the producer was like, the reader has no idea apart from what you're telling them. So what you have to do is when you say the word ‘paintings’, you have to pause to give the reader the chance to imagine a painting so they can then know what you're doing with it. So it was like, so I read it as ‘paintings by Jerry.’ And then the next line, ‘some books that don't depress me.’ And, it goes on ‘the furniture is Jerry's mostly made by his friends, two pairs of sneakers. A pair of boots’ and it's so it's about this thing with pausing and I think the thing with audiobooks, the big secret of audiobooks is that you think that you're pausing and you're not pausing at all like you can pause so much more and you know that you the instinct is to rush and rush and get it done and actually there can be more and more and more air.
Rhianna Dhillon: And the story is kind of set in a version which I guess if you know London it feels very recognisably London, but you don't actually say you're in London.
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, never.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So how much thinking went behind that, you know, how deliberately were you trying to evoke a sense of a place without ever naming it?
Charlie Porter:
Really, really super deliberately and for me, the fiction that I write is the weakest version of speculative fiction you could make, and the world I imagine is like a paper away from this world. And the reason for doing this is, is that, in particular with this novel is that I hate nostalgia. They go out, there are bars, there are clubs. So if I was to name the bar or name the club and have them go to an actual bar, then readers might be like, oh yeah, I go there too. I love it. I love, but it was better then or I had this, and they, they framed their experience into it and I wanted the reader to be experiencing it as if for the first time through Johnny and be focused on the story rather than getting into nostalgia. So, but also I kind of like this sense of a city that you know but you don't know. It also lets me play with stuff as well, like it lets me do fiction. It allows me to play with the city. I can invent my own city within a known thing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And Johnny and Jerry go on walks and they're so kind of, they're so visual and so beautifully described but not overly descriptive, which I love. Is that you remembering? Or were you walking and writing, or how did you..?
Charlie Porter:
So I love walking, like normally. So I live in Shoreditch and I normally walk to this office where we're in Vauxhall. It's like a 75 minute 75, 80 minute walk. I love it. So the walks in the book are walks that I know. But the walking is really important in the book. I mean, I think anyway, when we walk, we say things that maybe we don't say to each other sat down.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Because we're walking next to each other and not looking at each other?
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, exactly, and walking allows thinking as well. You can think in a different way, yeah, it's less kind of interrogation…
Rhianna Dhillon:
…and the pauses are less loaded.
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, exactly, yeah, and you can maybe pause for a bit and then carry on or. So, but then also in Chapter one, they, Johnny and Jerry, go on a walk the first afternoon they meet and their bodies bang into each other and that's the sign to each other that they're attracted to each other. So it's also what bodies do with each other on a walk. It then allows me later on to write about sex in the same way. It's very physical, descriptive, not embellished, like no metaphor, but just saying what it is. So walking. allows the book to be physical, like it's about physical acts and elementality.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And it's so beautiful and heartbreaking, and there are so many beats in it where you almost just have to, well, I had to just sort of pause to kind of, you know, breathe in a different way. So how did you sort of navigate that balance between these really life-affirming moments and then the grief in your book, as you mentioned, especially considering the impact that the AIDS crisis had on this particular community during both the 90s but also today which you make very, very clear distinct points about?
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, yeah, there's definitely structure and hand holding from me in in the book in terms of how I approach death. What was very important to me from the beginning was to never have an exploitative storyline using HIV/AIDS. So it's never a plot point, it's, there's never a twist. Do you see what I mean? There's never a, will he die, won't he die. It’s really important. I mean, I find that sort of storyline so boring anyway. But I think with the AIDS crisis, it's really important not to exploit a story. So right away in the, I'm not quite sure what page it's on, but it says, you know, that they have four years together. It's clear from the beginning that Jerry will die. The reason I created Jerry was that I wanted to have this voice from the past talking to us today through Johnny to bring his memories, of how of this experiment, these experiments in living and this approach to living from before AIDS crisis and bring that into the day. And so the opening chapters, they're getting to know each other and Jerry's telling him all about his early years and his experience in squats or his experience in sleeping in bed or they know all this stuff that, all the, you know, their friends that made furniture, all these stories about the 60s and 70s that I wanted to bring today, but then, yeah, I very definitely use the party scenes as levity. I use the sex scenes as levity. I wanted the sex scenes to be as hot as possible.
Rhianna Dhillon:
They were hot and they were like gasp at moments as well, like brilliantly explicit.
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, and so and the kind of most, most sex scene happens just before Jerry begins to be in his final days and it's done very, very, there's definitely a kind of art to it, like so I try and give the reader as much space to be ready for what they're gonna go through, and then as we go through it to try and be as calm and, to breathe as much through it as possible, whilst also giving Jerry the full space, you know, not flinching and not looking away, being with him right to the end.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Because he approaches it with such humour, actually, not always, but it's kind of almost like hard to know if he's doing that for himself or for Johnny or for both, I suppose, of just this is a coping mechanism to get through the worst thing that's going to happen.
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, exactly, and that's exactly it. We don't know, he doesn’t probably even know whether he's doing it for himself or for Johnny. It was important that the novel was set in these years, 91 to 95. In '96, antiretroviral treatments were introduced which made it possible to live a full life with HIV. So, these are the years just before that, and it begins in '91, which is 10 years after the first cases, first reported deaths from AIDS. And so, Jerry has lived through it and now he's dying. So, it's also that that sense of like he's lived through it, and now he's dying, so there's so much grief and sadness that he has to face and feel. And then, yeah, this sense of if he just lived a bit longer, he could have maybe had the medication that could have prolonged his life. So, it's structured very, very specifically to try and help the reader, and often readers who are the same age as or a bit older and who lived through it, they've often said they have to put it down for a while and they have to give themselves time and that to me is just, yeah, it's just extraordinary that, yeah, that it touched them that way. It's so weird because like when people first read it and said how it had affected them, my instinct was to apologise because no one wants to upset anyone, you know, but I've written it, you know, I'm not, and actually it is meant to be cathartic. And one of the things that those of a generation or two above me say is that through those years their friends were dying, their friends were dying, their friends were dying, and their work or their families would just expect them to carry on as normal. And they'd have no space to grieve and. And they've lived their life without having had the space to grieve. So part of the reason for writing the book was to give people a space to grieve now. So yeah, it's OK to put it down for a while.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Before we wrap up, we need to talk a little bit about the AIDS Memorial exhibition and the Quilt Project, which is such a crucial point in the story and you've really, oh, it’s such a brilliant idea to reproduce some of the quilt panels in the book. So, what did that mean to you to be able to use those images that you didn't just have to describe them, you could just show them and the weight of what they mean is so evident in the pages.
Charlie Porter:
It's just the biggest honour to be able to feature the quilt in the book. So, I started writing the book in 2020 and then in 2021 I went to an exhibition, a display of the quilt of the UK's memorial quilt. The story with the quilt is that, the quilt was something that was started in America to memorialise those who'd lost their lives to AIDS. And it was because at the time, it's so wild to try and imagine it, but at the time, so many families refused to accept about their loved ones, refused to acknowledge them, or funeral homes would not accept the bodies. So these people were dying and there was no way of memorialising them. So, this activist called Cleve Jones started a project where friends or family members could create a quilt that's 6 ft by 3 ft and those quilts were then, these panels were then made into square blocks. And it grew and it grew and it grew, and in America it grew so big that by the 90s they could display it on the entire National Mall in Washington, which is that big, big green strip of land you see on the news when they show the memorials or the White House in Washington, the vast, vast, vast memorial.
And an activist in the UK called Alistair Hulme saw the quilt and he brought the idea back to the UK. He set up a UK chapter for it which was much smaller and volunteer run, in the states, it's a proper set up charity. But the exact same effect, this profoundly moving memorial. But when antiretrovirals were introduced, the UK project collapsed, it kind of collapsed, you know, because people stopped dying, so no one was making more panels and there was no structure set up to keep it going. So it just went into storage and it was in storage for nearly 20 years, and then in 2014, a group of volunteers from HIV charities got together to get the UK quilt out of storage. And they are the most incredible people and they're doing all they can to get it to be seen. So basically, after I saw one of their displays in 2021, I was like, oh I can have Johnny visit the quilt. This can be a way that he tries to come to terms with Jerry's death in the present day. But it was a couple of years til I got to write those pages, and it was in early ‘24 that I messaged the quilt people and was like, hey, you know, I'm doing this, would you? Could I get your permission to feature some images of the quilt? And they've been so generous and there are eight images of quilt panels in the book. And at the time I was like, you know, I'd love to help you get it be seen, I'd love to help you get it be seen more widely. And so last summer I was like, you know what, let's just like go for broke and let's just like, let's just see, you know, and so I was like, and I wrote an email to the director of Tate being like, hello and just was like, hey, you know, have you ever considered having the quilt in the Turbine Hall and I suggested a way they could do it that could happen that could like go through you know avoid going through all kinds of systems of planning and stuff, do it really quickly and they've been amazing and they pretty much straight away agreed to it and so it's happening this June.
The entire quilt will be in the Turbine Hall from June 12th to June 16th, and so it'll be the largest ever display of it and it's following the idea of, of it being in the National Mall in Washington. It was so powerful for the quilt to be in one of the most iconic public spaces in the world. And the Turbine Hall is pretty much the most iconic public space in this country, so the power of having the quilt present in the Turbine Hall, it's really incredible. So, it'll be free for anyone to come and see, so please do come to Tate Modern 12 to 16th of June.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Fantastic. That's amazing. That's gonna be incredibly moving.
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, yeah, it will be.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It's always a hard question to ask a creator, but what is the one thing that you want people to take from your novel, is there something that you want them to sort of leave thinking about?
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, it's this word elemental that I keep saying, so it's about elemental living and the possibility of elemental living. The possibility of actually considering what you're doing. And actually being like, oh yeah, I can do that, like whether it be cooking a more elemental way, you know, the thing of actually buying the ingredients yourself rather than getting them preproduced or wrapped in plastic, you know, like simple things, growing them if you can, but like, but you know, it's being kind to each other, you know, thinking about the way you live, thinking about the possibilities of how you can live, being active. I always hope that readers can be active in the book or feel engaged or feel encouraged by the book. Yeah, elemental/elementality. That's the thing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Charlie, thank you so much for chatting to us. So Nova Scotia House is available now from wherever you buy your books, and you have kindly agreed to stay and answer some of our Ask Penguin questions.
Charlie Porter:
But not the one about romance. I can't do that. I'm sorry…
Rhianna Dhillon:
So of course our series loves to celebrate authors like Charlie, but we're also delighted to spotlight some of the people working with them behind the scenes. I'm joined in the Penguin studio by Ruby Fatimilehin and Zeljka Marosevic. Thank you both so much for coming in. You've volunteered or you've been volunteered to help answer some of our Ask Penguin questions that have been coming in via our social channels. So before we get into those recommendations, can we hear a little bit about what you both do here at Penguin? Ruby, do you want to start?
Ruby Fatimilehin:
So I work at Hamish Hamilton, which is a fantastic imprint based in Penguin General. We publish literary fiction and nonfiction. I've been here for about three years, in the editorial team, and it's a wonderful job working with so many fantastic talented authors. One book that I'm working on at the moment that I'm very excited for is called The Leveret by Anna Goldreich, and it's out in May next year, so not for a little while yet, but just starting to plug it already because it's that good. And it's about a lesbian couple who've been trying to have a baby for quite a while and they've had a few miscarriages that have ended quite early on, and then they have one that kind of ends later stage pregnancy and it's very traumatic for both of them, and they move out to one of their grandmother's cottages in the rural countryside to try and process the loss and the trauma. One of them, Phoebe, who didn't carry the child and kind of is the more masculine presenting person in the relationship, throws herself into her work, is very avoidant, and Claire stays at home and kind of slowly feels like she's losing her mind. And one day she goes for a walk into the forest and she finds an abandoned leveret, or baby hare, and straight away identifies it as her own child, carries her around in a sling, talks to it in a baby voice and everyone in her life is on the one hand, quite concerned but also quite glad that she has something to get out of bed for in the morning. And it's all about the way that we process loss and trauma and grief, and it's just wonderfully written, very emotionally intelligent, and it's a fantastic novel, and I'm very excited to publish it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That sounds amazing. Zeljka, what about you?
Rhianna Dhillon:
So I'm editorial director at Jonathan Cape, and I publish across fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Cape is a literary imprint within Vintage, which is a division here at Penguin Random House. And the book that I'm most excited to working at the moment is Ocean Vuong's The Emperor of Gladness. So this is Ocean Vuong's much anticipated second novel, and it's the story of a young man called Hai who is rescued - he wants to take his own life and he's rescued by an old woman called Grazina who is suffering from dementia, and the two of them form an unlikely bond and basically save each other. And it's really beautiful. It's about community and chosen family, and it's told really from the heart of America and really does sort of affect you in heart and mind as you're reading.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Amazing. They're good, aren't they? So our very first Ask Penguin question today is from Keif, who asks; what are the classic literature reads for lesbian and queer women?
Ruby Fatimilehin:
Should I go?
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, Ruby, jump in.
Ruby Fatimilehin:
So this was a hard question because there are so many amazing books to choose from, you know, from, The Color Purple to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, there are just, you know, there's an absolute wealth of amazing lesbian literature. One book that I hold kind of incredibly dear to my heart is Zami by Audre Lorde, which is a biomythography which is kind of a mixture of biography, myth and history all rolled into one. And it starts with Lorde's childhood in Harlem in the 1930s and 40s and the horrific racism that her family and herself experienced and then kind of follows her travels to Mexico to escape McCarthyism and the conservative attitudes in America at the time, and then back to New York and her engagement with the lesbian community there. And it's just a wonderful book, so immersive, so rich, and yeah, one of my favourites.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Perfect, thank you. Zeljka?
Zeljka Marosevic:
Again, I struggle to choose, so I might just list a few, but then dive in on one. So the ones that came to mind were Chelsea Girls by Eileen Miles, which is an amazing look at the New York queer scene, Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, who's an author we publisher at Cape, and that is a comic book series about a group of lesbians and all of their kind of intertwinings and relationships.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So was that where the Bechdel test came from?
Zeljka Marosevic:
Yeah, yeah, she came up, yeah, she came up with that. Carol by Patricia Highsmith, and then the one that I want to talk about was Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, which is maybe less well known, and this is a book that I republished at my old job at Daunt Books. And it's the story of a young, depressed PhD graduate in San Francisco who wants to throw herself off the bridge but instead decides she will attend her twin sister's wedding. So she travels across the country and is really hoping to stop this wedding from happening. She doesn't want her twin sister to get married, but instead what happens is this incredible story of two sisters who are really approaching life in different ways, finding a way to come together, and it's a really amazing queer coming of age in this like very hot ranch and there's lots of swimming pools and arguments and twists and turns, but it's a really stylishly written book from the 60s that feels really ahead of its time.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Gorgeous. I love that there are lots of swimming pools is like a selling point for the books, genuinely. Charlie, what about you?
Charlie Porter:
So I've gone like classic classic, try to think of classic classic because the thing is is that like queer women couldn't write. Women couldn't write. I mean, like, so this idea of what is a classic or assumption of the classics, whereas actually those are just the books that mostly men were able to write. So I was thinking about Emily Dickinson and about poetry, and now I'm saying this I can't talk about it because I've not read it. I'm going to read it for the next project that I'm about to start doing, so I come with no authority, but Emily Dickinson was a poet who was under-published in her time, I think only 10 poems were published or something but she wrote about 1800 and she's now understood to be queer and is one of the most important figures in poetry.
Zeljka Marosevic:
She wrote on everything didn't she, like on envelopes and tiny pieces of paper…
Charlie Porter:
Yeah, yeah exactly, so yeah, Emily Dickinson is my classic.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's brilliant. That's a really lovely one. So, a listener would love some recommendations for books with pansexual or demi-sexual representations and bonus points if the characters are in their 30s, which I really love, by the way, because I read so many books, I'm like, I feel like I would love this a little bit more if the characters are a little bit older. So this is a good, it's a good one.
Ruby Fatimilehin:
I'm gonna bend it a bit and say in their 30s or over because I think probably the question’s about older characters. So the one that came to mind was All Fours by Miranda July which came out last summer and has been a huge success. And it's the story of a woman who's in her 40s who basically has something like a midlife crisis, and her ways of dealing with this are quite unusual, but they involve redecorating a hotel room basically, and in that falling in love with this guy who's unavailable, and then eventually opening up her marriage with her husband and thinking of different ways to deal withthe perimenopause and with midlife, and also exploring her own queerness in that, and it's a really wild, fun novel that has been from what from all accounts, life changing for lots of people.
Rhianna Dhillon;
Any swimming pools?
Charlie Porter:
I mean, it's in LA, right? It's in California. Yeah, so is it in California? I've not actually read it, but that's where I think it is…
Rhianna Dhillon:
I was joking.
Ruby Fatimilehin:
That's a good question though.
Rhianna Dhillon:
You said you had a couple?
Ruby Fatimilehin:
I was also gonna say Orlando by Virginia Woolf, because that is a novel about a character who switches gender halfway through and has lots of relationships over many years and actually ages way beyond 30 and 40 in that book.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's a really great shout. Sarah is after a memoir of an LGBTQIA+ trailblazer, and I feel like this will have a lot of answers. So Ruby…
Ruby Fatimilehin:
I think the first one, I've got two that I'd like to mention, the first one is a memoir from, well, journals from Derek Jarman. So Derek Jarman, a wonderful polymath filmmaker and great writer of autobiographical literature. His first volume of journals, Dancing Ledge kind of chronicles his journey to London and his friendships with people like David Hockney and him exploring the gay nightlife scene, pre the AIDS epidemic and how that kind of destroyed everything. And it's just wonderful because it's written with such candour and it's just like a window into a life, into a moment in history that is just so amazing to be part of, to be just there in the in the club with him. So that one's fantastic and, as are, you know, Modern Nature and many of his other books as well. The second one that I'd like to recommend is a bit more recent and it's called Miss Major Speaks and it's written by Miss Major Griffin Gracy, who is this wonderful transgender elder activist and was a veteran of the Stonewall riots. And she wrote this fantastic book a couple of years ago which kind of chronicles her life, the struggles that she's faced, the moments in time that she's lived through, and then also kind of talks about the future and the future of black liberation, of trans liberation, where we go from here. So it's incredibly galvanising and powerful and just a wonderful read. I mean, she's so funny as well, so it's lovely.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That sounds brilliant. Thank you.
Zeljka Marosevic:
Jeanette Winterson, who is a Cape author, and two of her books, so Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was actually published, was an autobiographical novel and it's the 40th anniversary of that book this year, which is amazing. And that's the story of a young woman called Jeanette, and the story of her upbringing with her mother, and her sort of coming of age story. And then years later, Jeanette published Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, which was a memoir going behind the scenes of that novel and talking about how that was a real, those were real things that happened to her. And again there's a queer coming of age, and the line is something that her mother said to her, which I think is such a haunting and powerful, line about queerness and choosing to go against the grain.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And Jeannette Winston has been on the podcast as well, so if you're interested in learning more about Jeannette, she was one of the best interviewees, so much fun. I think she's in our Winter Reads episode, so do go back and listen to that.
Zeljka Marosevic:
And she has a new book coming.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Good plug. That's a brilliant one. Charlie?
Charlie Porter:
So I'm gonna recommend the autobiography that Angela Davis wrote in 1974. Angela Davis is still alive, an activist, philosopher, deeply involved in the civil rights movement. Her autobiography in 1974 was written after she'd been incarcerated. It's the most extraordinary humbling read. She came out in 97, so it's not about her queerness, but the roots of everything about her beliefs and commonality and camaraderie, everything that matters, it's all there and it's one of the best things you'll ever read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wow. And we have another reader who is asking for recommendations for sapphic crime novels. Did anything come up immediately for this?
Charlie Porter:
I mean, I'm going on that flip of like what people, what writers weren't able to write. So Patricia Highsmith couldn't write about her life because of the time she was writing it. So, but we still read Patricia Highsmith and so Patricia Highsmith is one of the most important writers one of the most important queer writers, and uses crime and uses this structure to talk about humans, which you can then use to read about her queerness and her attitude to the patriarchal world or the world into which she's born. So although it's not a sapphic crime novel in terms of the fact that the protagonists aren't queer women, it's all there.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. Was there one in particular?
Charlie Porter:
I mean, everything, I mean, the ‘Ripley’ series…
Zeljka Marosevic:
She sort of thought of herself as a bit of a Ripley character, that she had these two sides to herself and was hiding one thing and a real identity.
Charlie Porter:
The ‘Ripley’ series is one of those sorts of series that's great to give yourself a present of each one every summer.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I love that.
Charlie Porter:
I did that over a number of years, like start with The Talented Mr. Ripley, then on your next summer holiday, give yourself the next one. That's how I treat crime series. It's like give it to yourself once a year.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's really cool. So we've got another reader who is looking for romance books with good non-binary representation, Ruby?
Ruby Fatimilehin:
So I've got two recommendations for this question, and I would say as well that the characters are probably better described as genderqueer than non-binary. I would think they wouldn't necessarily describe in that way. But, the first book is called Venus as a Boy by Luke Sutherland, and it's absolutely fantastic, it's a really wonderful book that deserves to be better known. And it follows the main character, Desiree, who is born and raised in the Orkney Islands and experiences kind of really extreme horrible bullying and then moves on to London, becomes a sex worker, and has these sexual encounters through which the people that they have sex with end up kind of seeing angels and witnessing Heaven, it's very surreal. And then at the end of the novel, sorry for the spoiler, they start to turn to gold. So it's very, you've got to kind of very much suspend disbelief, but it's written in this beautiful, really kind of descriptive lyrical prose, and it's just a wonderful book and it just plays with form in such an interesting way. So that's really, really interesting. I guess that one's more about desire than it is about love. But then the second one I would love to recommend is My Tender Matador by Pedro Lemebel, and this was republished by Pushkin Press last year, or earlier this year in fact and it features an offbeat kind of wonderful romance between the Queen of the Corner and then this kind of young revolutionary character called Carlos, and it's set against the backdrop of Pinochet's Chile, and it's kind of at the end, the final days of the dictatorship. And it's a really interesting novel because it kind of, I mean, different publishers have described it as, uh, the Queen of the Corner as either a drag queen or as a trans woman, but actually I think it's very much related to this very kind of specific 1980s kind of transvesty South American identity, but it's just so funny, it's hilarious and it's so unusual to see this kind of romance brought together with this kind of political suspense, it's a really great book and yeah, it should be really widely read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Love that. Finally, Angelina has asked; do you have any bisexual representation recommendations? Gosh, that's a mouthful.
Zeljka Marosevic:
What came to mind immediately for me was Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney; the two main characters in that are a couple who break up and then get back together again and I mean, it's Sally Rooney's first book, what's not to love? I still think it's her best, yeah.
Charlie Porter:
But I was gonna say Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, which I think was his first book, a very early book, and it's as cool as anything, like the temperature is set there and they're all like really I mean we now recognise the characters probably as reality TV characters like kind of, you know, Paris Hilton. In those days it was really, it was a real kind of these kind of Californian like oh affected. And it's before Bret himself came out, so like, you know, it was written in a very, very different time. But yeah, Less Than Zero, Bret Easton Ellis
Rhianna Dhillon:
Perfect. Thank you, Ruby?
Ruby Fatimilehin:
So those are really good recommendations, hard to follow. But one book that I love with bisexual representation is Another Country by James Baldwin. So it kind of, it's an amazing novel that I read for the first time when I was a teenager and instantly became one of my favourite books of all time. And it follows, jazz drummer Rufus Scott who is involved with like different relationships and ends up committing suicide by jumping off George Washington Bridge, and then after that the novel becomes very kind of multi-layered and goes and looks at his different friends and family and acquaintances as well as the different kind of romances he's had with men and women and tries to like kind of untangle what happened really. And it's, you know, James Baldwin is so renowned and he's renowned for a reason, and this book is part of that. It's just incredibly well crafted and every single character just like leaps off the page. So I really love it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Gorgeous and also so happy that we managed to squeeze in a bit of James Baldwin just before we finish the podcast. We've got so many brilliant suggestions. Thank you. Thank you all so much for joining us.
All:
Thank you for having us.
Rhianna Dhillon:
If you'd like to send us a question, please visit our Instagram page @PenguinBooks and subscribe to our broadcast channel for the chance to participate in the show, or you can email your question to us directly at penguinpodcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk. And along with our lovely colleagues' recommendations today, the Penguin website is an absolute treasure trove of reading lists to get you going. So, if you're interested in LGBTQ+ fiction or poetry or history, but you're wondering where to start with such a huge canon of work, there are all sorts of articles and suggestions on there to help you find the perfect book. We've linked to some of them in the show notes. Thank you so much to my guests, Charlie Porter, Ruby Fatimilehin, and Zeljka Marosevic, and to everyone who's been in touch over the last few episodes. See you in a fortnight where we'll be setting up the deck chairs for a very lively chat about the best summer reads. I can't wait. I'll see you then, and thanks for listening.