Q: I need a good laugh. Can you recommend something as smart, funny and deft as the first Bridget Jones novel?
Anonymous quality controller, 40
A: Emma Jane Unsworth is a novelist whose books include Animals and Adults (Borough Press). She writes:
Smart, funny and deft – my favourite literary cocktail. And let’s face it, we all need a good laugh at the moment. I’d like to start by recommending an author whose work never fails to cheer me up – but that’s not to say it’s mindlessly jolly. Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation is, in my opinion, one of the best comic novels of the past 10 years. If you like it, you should also try her short story collection: Single, Carefree, Mellow. Also brilliant. Standard Deviation is more understated in its lols, but the characters – an odd couple caring for their son, who has Asperger’s – are flawlessly hewn. On a similar tip, check out Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, which is as formally exciting as Bridget Jones, being told in a series of documents – emails, memos, transcripts – and tells the story of a daughter trying to find her missing mother. Seriously, this book has wit for days. I also must say that Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams is Bridget Jones for the 21st century. Read it, if you haven’t already. It mixes the light and dark of female experience in jaw-dropping ways.
On to some nonfiction: treat yourself to Carrie Fisher’s autobiography Wishful Drinking – based on Fisher’s one-woman stage show (aren’t the best comedy narrators standup comedians at heart?) – which tells of her long, sticky life in showbiz. In fact, read anything by Carrie Fisher. And definitely read her semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge if you haven’t already. I feel like I recommend that book every day of my life, but until everyone in the world has read it at least twice, I will not stop.
Now for something a little off-piste. I listened to The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan while on a writing retreat in a motorhome recently. It’s the story of a 15-year-old girl in the care system. She has the gift of the gab. It’s dark as hell, but it made me laugh more than any book I can remember for a long time. Some of the scenarios Fagan paints about what the teenage girls get up to are perfect comedy vignettes with the darkest silhouettes.
Finally, some poetry in the mix. You did say “smart, funny and deft” and those words bring one particular poet to mind, John Cooper Clarke from Salford, near my hometown of Manchester. His voice makes me so happy. Read his delicious poem Chickentown – better yet, find an audio recording of him reading it. He is pure comedy, and then some.
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