#traceyknapp

Um…edibles? I generally tend to see reality as something to escape from. Now more than ever. So, the usual: binge-baking, binge-watching, binge-cringing at the political antics of the motherfuckers who’ve spent the last four years running the democratic experiment into the ground.

What are 3 books you always recommend to people?

Here are three I’ve recommended to friends recently: Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo—the subtitle pretty much sums it up: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. I read it several years ago and it just blew me away—the lives of those people and the sympathy with which she renders them. Nonfiction, but it reads like a novel. I’ve never forgotten it. Lately I’m recommending the one I’m reading now, Martha Gellhorn’s The Face of War. She’s a beautiful writer who possibly had her work overshadowed somewhat by being married to Hemingway for a time. She gives you such a sense of what it’s like for people in wartime, from the Spanish Civil War through WWII and Vietnam and a few other places—without any sense of pity, just clear-sighted observation. In “The War in Finland,” she writes, “The way people stay half-sane in war, I imagine, is to suspend a large part of their reasoning minds, lose most of their sensitivity, laugh when they get the smallest chance, and go a bit, but increasingly, crazy.” Third—Is it cheating to say I’m listening to this one? I love being read to—I became obsessed with Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Every night I disappear into the sixteenth century’s burnings, beheadings, and bling. I’m on the last one, The Mirror & the Light, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to recover from being ejected back into my own time. I’m thinking I’ll just start over with the first book, and by the time I’m through the second round, the listing ship of state will have hopefully been righted.

Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?

It’s hard to answer this without naming every book I’ve read, every movie I’ve seen, every piece of art I’ve looked at and every kind of music I’ve listened to. I’m influenced by everything and everyone, but mostly I don’t consciously remember that stuff; it’s like my brain is doing its thing deep down in its little neural workshop and one day something surfaces. With this book, it often felt more as though I was channeling a messed-up, passionate and somehow bratty spirit who had a lot to say. I don’t know where she got it all from.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?