Reading Den

Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight, a two-time New York Times editors’ choice, and Virtue, which was shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature award. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Harper’s, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Guardian, Bookforum and elsewhere. Raised in south London, she graduated from Cambridge in 2007, subsequently spent ten years in New York, and now lives in Boulder, Colorado. 

What’s the best writing advice you ever received?

Before I took psychedelics for the first time, my friend Sheila said, “If things get weird, just think about love.” It wasn’t writing advice, it wasn’t even life advice–it was just drugs advice–but it serves as all three. As for how it applies to the first of that trio, I do think it’s useful to be oriented towards loving your characters (not the same as making them, horror, “likeable”!), and most of all, loving that pleasure of building sentences, shaping scenes, following some logic of truth as it reveals itself. I know writers are only meant to lament how hard writing is, but can’t we also allow ourselves to love it?

How have you found the writing community in Colorado–and beyond?

Well, I’m delighted that Reading Den exists! I cherish my writer friends here, but I also cherish my writer friends in other cities and countries. Email is a beautiful thing.

What have you loved about moving to Colorado?

I lived in New York for ten years, before that London, and I’d only ever been able to value nature in a totally dispassionate way. I could only see it through the lens of art. I’d be like: oh cool, that rock looks like a Richard Serra, or, the desert varnish in this canyon looks like a Jackson Pollock. Which is backwards, I know.

I moved to Colorado five years ago, and it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve felt appreciation for nature in a more biological way, that deep animal communion. I think of the internet parlance of anti-internet sentiment – that injunction to “touch grass” – and how lucky I am, now, to be able to walk out my door and up the hill and touch, not just grass, but rocks and trees too. Also the air smells really good, sunlight hits better at five thousand feet, and people aren’t embarrassed about being happy!

What has been on your reading list lately?

I’m wading through Anthony Powell after reading Perry Anderson’s magnificent book on him and Proust. Also just read Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection which had me shrieking and asking myself the hyperbolic question, have I actually ever read anything so funny? When three different women recommend the same book/writer, it’s time to read it/them, as was the case with Gwendoline Riley, Helen Garner and, most recently, Susie Boyt and her Loved and Missed. Very dear, tender, thoroughly lived-in. And very English, too. I’m also reading Leonard Thompson’s history of South Africa, because I want to think more clearly about precedents of apartheid and divestment, for obvious reasons. (Speaking of which, Daniel Denvir’s podcast, The Dig has been invaluable these last six months.) When I was sick recently, I listened to Persuasion on audiobook and realized Jane Austen continues to do nothing for me. George Eliot, on the other hand–I reread Middlemarch a couple of months ago, and, oh my. Brought me to my knees.

What will you read to us at Reading Den?

I don’t know! Game day decision. I’ll probably read something from my third novel, the one I’ve been “finishing” for about nineteen months.

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