My earliest reading memory
I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …” The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted.

My favourite book growing up
One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I hated the girls’ grammar school I went to, and in revenge filled my break times with historical novels by Jean Plaidy. These flooded the oppressive grey world of the school with their glorious drama, pregnancies and deformities and adulteries, messengers eating their own shoe leather because they brought bad news.

The writer who changed my mind
When I moved myself to the comprehensive school, we studied the Liverpool poets and Stan Barstow. Then a new teacher read us An Horatian Ode by Andrew Marvell, on the execution of Charles I. You can’t tell what side he’s on … New possibilities of subtlety in writing opened up.

The book that made me want to be a writer
All the books I loved, from the beginning, made me want to try. Storytelling was the most powerful magic I knew: it got expressed first in the games I played out with my friends. Written down though, words were puny for such a long time. Encountering the intricacy of Henry James’s fiction – What Maisie Knew first – stirred up that longing intensely, to make something intricate and alive on the page. But it defeated the longing at the same time – because who could match this?

The author I came back to
Vladimir Nabokov was too slippery, I couldn’t get hold of him; Speak, Memory was my way in eventually. When I knew what he made of his own life, I began to understand his ironies, his account of America.

The book I reread
When I first read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina I was Kitty’s age, then I longed to be gorgeously amorous like Anna, then I was worn down with domesticity and children like Dolly. Now I’m closer to the old countess at the end of the book, growing irrelevant in the margins.

The author I could never read again
Well, probably Jean Plaidy …

The book I discovered later in life
For a long time I thought that I wouldn’t like Anita Brookner; I’d got the idea, for some foolish reason, that she was perfumed and ladylike. Then I opened Latecomers and knew from the first sentence how wrong that was. When you discover a new author their work stretches out before you, an undiscovered continent.

The book I am currently reading
I’m a fan of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and I’ve just finished his short novel Reticence. A man with his baby son in a pushchair visits a coastal town desolate with absence. It’s a little skit and a mockery really, a crime drama with no crime apart from a dead cat, and yet its repetitions are deliciously hypnotic, the moon and the sea and the empty house …

My comfort read
At first in the pandemic I reread my old children’s books, which is embarrassing but was stabilising at the time. Comfortable books, though, aren’t always comforting; uneasy books are better in uneasy times.

• The Party by Tessa Hadley is published by Vintage (£9.99). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.