Did The Great Gatsby change your life?
- and other questions
Bradford Literature Festival is my favourite festival (Clare here!). It's immense - massive enough to have its own road signs - but at the same time it makes Bradford into a friendly literature village, where everyone knows everyone, including some of the biggest brightest stars in literature. Plus they have the best Green Room with the best buffet, and a free-to-passholders restaurant with the greatest curry and jugs of lassi.
The first time I worked at the festival, I sat in that restaurant filling my face and chatting to a lovely friendly woman. Eventually, I asked her name, and what she was doing at the festival – to my mortification she turned out to be the festival founder and director, Syima Aslam. Hundreds of events across the city, and an education and outreach programme running throughout the year - but she still has the time and grace to chat.
All of which is to say, that when they invite me to run discussion panels, I always agree. And that has meant taking on some fairly unexpected subjects - crime novels, the archaeology of death, men and friendship …. Scary, yes - but I've loved immersing myself in new subjects, in books and genres I would never normally take the time to engage deeply with, swapping ideas with writers I would never otherwise meet.
This year is a little bit different. On Friday, I'll be delivering a presentation on The Great Gatsby, and next Wednesday, on Wuthering Heights. And I will certainly be publishing those speeches here. (I'll also be running a lunchtime session on haunted literature - with a focus on Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House - but more of that in another Substack).
But first, I need you to help me write them.
For the first time, I’m not starting from scratch - I’m not short of knowledge, or things to say. Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights both run like bedrock through my life. But these aren't just any presentation. I'm going to be talking several hundred secondary school children, aged 11 to 16 - most of whom won't have read either book.
I don't plan to talk to them about alliteration, or onomatopoeia, or the use of symbolism. They can get all of that from wiki, or Clifton Notes. Instead, I'm going to talk to them about my relationship with the books: how Gatsby has walked with me like a kind, sad brother who would have understood what I was thinking, even when I didn't understand it myself; how Wuthering Heights brought me to live on the edge of the Haworth Moors.
But I'm just one person. And I'd love to take a crowd of you into that big scary room with me.
So - I’d be deeply grateful to hear about your experiences of reading these books - starting with Great Gatsby. Did you read it? Did you love it? What impact did it have on you? Does it still resonate with you? Do any of the lines, or the images, emerge in your mind when you think of it?
Don't feel that you have to write anything grand or superbly creative. Just a few words, about your relationship with Jay Gatsby, or Nick, or Daisy and Tom and Jordan, or the Wilsons, or those big white houses like wedding cakes, or West Egg, or the green light at the end of the dock or …. you get me. To know if the book has walked with you too, or not, and why.
It would be enough. More than enough. Thank you.
Both these books made me realise that I did not understand the World, that ‘normal; storytelling affected me differently to other people. I did not find a piece of literature I truly connected to until I was not forced to read it either, which says more about me I realise than I knew at the time.
It's a million years since I read it but Gatsby really hooked me. I think I read it just after A levels and felt an overwhelming sorrow for Jay. He was surrounded by people who were given to lying and he was still in love with Daisy who had not waited for him but married the cheating Tom instead. I think I was slightly obsessed with the Fitzgeralds and their oversized furniture - part of my interest in people who embraced the surreal.