What’s Kasia Jaronczyk Reading?
What is your escapist read? What do you keep re-reading, perhaps in secret, because you are embarrassed to admit to loving a certain book to friends with a sophisticated literary taste? Every novel is escapist in some way, so I prefer to call them comfort books. We turn to them when we are anxious, depressed, or experiencing a loss. I’d like to share mine, with the hope they will console and restore you before you need to re-engage with brutal reality.
I can categorize my comfort books into three groups: 1 – literary novels, which are completely absorbing and intellectually engaging, 2 – novels, which feature characters who are also writers, either fictional or historical, and 3 – beloved books from my childhood.
Four years ago my life drastically changed – my beloved mother died suddenly and unexpectedly in early March 2020, and the following pandemic significantly shrank the fabric of my life – as a person with an autoimmune disorder I’m still avoiding crowded indoor spaces and have to limit my social life. I found consolation and escape in re-reading the Neapolitan quartet by Elena Ferrante, (My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay; and The Story of the Lost Child), and the three volumes of the living autobiography by Deborah Levy (Things I Don’t Want to Know; The Cost of Living; and Real Estate). I have read all available books by Ferrante and Levy multiple times, but especially love the ones listed here, and each time I become completely engrossed. The Neapolitan novels describe a female friendship starting in childhood until middle age, with all its romantic complications and family and neighbourhood entanglements, against a backdrop of social and economic changes in Naples from the 1950s to early 2000s It’s an incredible, immersive read, with a complex narrative and yet easy to follow, and with characters so real and engaging that I cannot put it down every time I read it. Everything disappears as I become absorbed in Lenu’s inner world and life.
Reading Deborah Levy is like having a riveting, intellectually stimulating conversation with a strong and wise woman, a self-aware, empathetic, and perceptive human being. I want to write and be like her. Interestingly, at one point Deborah Levy contemplates pretending to be Elena Ferrante (who writes under a pseudonym and her identity is unknown), to crash a literary party. Levy also writes about her mother and her own motherhood, the subjects I’m preoccupied with as I’m currently working on a memoir about my mother and our relationship.
When I found a Polish Translation of My Brilliant Friend in a Polish bookstore near Mississauga I wanted to buy it for my mother. She would have loved it. In the middle of that very night my father called me with the devastating news that my mother had died.
My literary addiction is reading books featuring fictional writers and their struggles; I can never get enough. My oldest favourite is called Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. by Debra Weinstein, which I had bought decades ago on a whim from a bookstore discount table. It’s about Annabelle who is obsessed with “what is poetry” and who becomes a mentee of Z. – a celebrity poet and professor with a reputation of “eating her assistants”. It’s a comic novel about poetry, poetry scandals, extramarital affairs, romance and literary thefts. It’s light-hearted with lovable, engaging characters. Another favourite, Writers and Lovers by Lily Kings is about a 30-something year old Casey struggling to finish her novel while grieving for her mother, working, and becoming entangled with two different literary men. The writing is graceful and insightful, and Casey is an endearing character who finds love and creative fulfilment. A very similar novel about two sisters, one of whom is an aspiring playwriter who somewhat thoughtlessly uses her sister’s marriage crisis as a subject of her play is Playing Games by Huma Qureshi.
My new discovery is Mrs. Gaskell and Me (or, in the American edition, The Victorian and the Romantic), by Nell Stevens. This amazing literary novel uses Mrs. Gaskell’s unrequited love for her American friend, Charles Eliot Norton as a foil for the love struggles of Nell, an academic writing a paper about Mrs. Gaskell and her biography of Emily Brontë. This brilliant novel questions the idea of truth in biography, pokes gentle fun at literary scholarship obsessions, writing groups and ingeniously interweaves the two timelines. Nell Stevens’ other two novels, Bleaker House (about an isolated writer working on a novel and finding the writing becoming real) and Briefly, A Delicious Life (about a ghost narrator in love with George Sand) is just as stunning, cleverly inventive and worth repeated readings.
“In addition to offering escapism into their pink-tinged fictional worlds, these books are a time portal to my childhood.”
I read voraciously as a child and the books that I still return to have shaped and guided my nascent identity as a writer. They include Anne of Green Gables and the Emily series by L.M. Montgomery, which were very popular in Poland in the 1980s where I grew up. I love the slow-paced Victorian world of small communities with their gossip, but also neighbourly care, optimism, belief in the goodness of people, and the purple-prose descriptions of nature which formed my own sensitivity to its beauty. In addition to offering escapism into their pink-tinged fictional worlds, these books are a time portal to my childhood. My father borrowed Anne of GG from a church library and read it to me when I was in preschool, before I was able to read it myself. The Emily books are filled with practical writing advice my preteen-self found useful at the time when manuals for writing fiction and creative writing courses didn’t exist in Poland. They were also the first books I bought to read in English during my earliest months in Canada. My old copy of Anne of GG still has Polish translations delicately pencilled in above certain words.
Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer. Her novel Voices in the Air is upcoming from Palimpsest Press in winter 2025. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish- Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her short fiction was short-listed for Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash