Christa Päffgen was born in Cologne in 1938 to parents of Spanish and Yugoslavian descent and only became known as Nico in her late teens, when she had begun modelling and the fashion photographer Herbert Tobias suggested the name. She went on to find fame via a bit part in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and, later, in Andy Warhol’s Factory and as the frontwoman of the Velvet Underground – much to the chagrin of their existing singer Lou Reed – before becoming a solo artist. Her singing style was once described rather beautifully as sounding like “a body falling through a window”. And she has so often been viewed in relation to the men in her life: “Andy Warhol’s original factory girl” or “Lou Reed’s muse” are two examples. Her life ended at the age of forty-nine when she suffered a brain haemorrhage while in Ibiza with her only child, a son named Ari. Ari’s father was the film star Alain Delon, but the young man had grown up largely with his paternal grandparents, only bonding with Nico as an adult by taking heroin with her.
Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt is in her kitchen in Brooklyn – a high-ceilinged room with walls painted a deep navy and a few glass ornaments in bright reds and greens placed on shelves near the ceiling.
Her bestselling books, from 2003’s What I Loved, to 2014’s Booker-long listed The Blazing World, may have given her the reputation of being an intimidatingly intellectual 21st-century Virginia Woolf, but she is brilliant at putting me at ease. She leans forward to hear me better and when, at one point, her dishwasher beeps, she leaps up to open it so that steam pours out.
Her latest collection of essays, entitled Mothers, Fathers, and Others, showcases a wonderfully relaxed erudition. Blending family memoir and feminist philosophy, its subjects include misogyny, motherhood and what we inherit from our parents — including her own at times difficult relationship with her professor father.
“I was seeking my father’s approval and I think it’s good in many ways that I didn’t receive it,” she tells me. Why? “Well, I think it toughens you up and it’s no good to want to be patted on the head by the patriarchy.”
(c) Spencer Ostrander
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s third novel, told the story of a long marriage, first from the perspective of a complacent husband and then from the perspective of his less complacent wife. It was also chosen by Barack Obama as his best book of the year in 2015. Groff has said the attention this brought her made it difficult for her to write another novel, but there was another problem: “I wanted to get as far away from Trump’s America as possible.”
Her fourth and latest novel, Matrix, offers another perspective from the female experience but is far removed from the present day. The setting is a 12th-century convent, which Groff describes as a “flawed female utopia”. The real-life medieval poet Marie de France — about whom so much is unknown — is Groff’s heroine. What is known about Marie de France is that she wrote a translation of Aesop’s fables and, more importantly, a collection of Breton lais, or romances, which celebrated courtly love.
Manifesto by Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo came to popular attention when her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker Prize in 2019. She was of course joint winner alongside Margaret Atwood (for The Testaments) but Atwood had won the prize before (for The Blind Assassin, 2000) whereas Evaristo – somewhat staggeringly – was the first black woman and also the first black British person to win the prize in its 50 year history. As she points out in this lively and important memoir, although her life changed overnight, she was far from an overnight success.
Her story up until this point is worth reading not just because it is an entertaining account of a noteworthy life, but because she is unfailingly generous in delineating how she became herself. I have read few memoirs where the author demonstrates so explicitly how they arrived at their current success. This kind of self-actualisation is always hard-won and Evaristo had – as she points out – no privilege to draw on in her ascent to become a successful, happy and recognised woman of letters.
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
On 3rd September 1952, Mahmood Mattan—a 28-year-old British Somali seaman—became the last person to be hanged in Wales. His alleged crime was murdering a local shopkeeper, Lily Volpert, but he was convicted with scant evidence. In 1998, 46 years after his execution, his conviction was quashed by three Appeal Court judges and the family awarded substantial compensation. Lily Volpert’s murder remains unsolved.
Nadifa Mohamed’s fictional account of this real-life miscarriage of justice has quite rightly been longlisted for the Booker Prize. A British novelist who was born in Somalia, Mohamed is the author of two previous novels, including the award-winning Black Mamba Boy. She tackles this largely forgotten story with skill and empathy.
In Mohamed’s version, the victim becomes Violet Volacki, who lives with her sister Diana and niece Grace on the premises of the family shop.
Elif Shafak
Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, is a story she has been wanting to write for a long time, she tells me from a book-lined room in her house in London.
It focuses on two lovers – Kostas and Defne – from different sides of the divide in 70s war-torn Cyprus, and flashes forward to the life of the couple’s teenage daughter in London in the late 2010s.
It is also, improbably but effectively, partly narrated by a fig tree. This device enabled the Turkish-British novelist to broach the subject of the Cypriot conflict.
“I couldn’t dare to write about it because it’s such an emotionally charged subject,” she says. “It was only when I found the voice of the fig tree that I felt free to rise above, a little bit, these conflicting nationalisms and tell the story.”
The tree in question is in a tavern in Cyprus frequented by Kostas, a Greek Christian, and Defne, a Turkish Muslim.
