What’s On Jessica Stanley’s Bookshelves?

London-based Australian author Jessica Stanley’s second novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, opens with all the beats of a classic romantic comedy – a meet-cute, a grand gesture, instant attraction – but what follows is a book about the next bit, the day to day reality of just living. But Jessica writes it with grace and wit and compassion, finding the romance in what comes next when two people decide to be together. This week, Michael sits down with Jessica for a conversation about life, love, and the importance of what’s on your bookshelf. Reading list: A Great Hope, Jessica Stanley, 2022 Consider Yourself Kissed, Jessica Stanley, 2025 You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store. Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram Guest: Jessica Stanley Transcript: Last time I was lucky enough to visit the heaven on earth that is the Strand bookshop in New York City, amongst the much vaunted 18 miles of books, I came across a line of merch – tote bags, tea-towels, coffee cups and bucket hats – emblazoned with a quote from American filmmaker John Waters. It simply read “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!” Delightful. In all the conversations about romance and modern dating, about searching for a connection – be it love or friendship or sex – too little is made of the books that people read. I’m going to be completely honest: if I visit your house, I am 100% having a furtive perve at what’s on your bookshelves. Everything I want and need to know can be answered if I see the pile on your bedside table, the most thumbed, most loved books in your collection. Forget dating apps, if you want a connection, provide a recommended reading list. My partner – who is brilliant and wonderful and an excellent reader with impeccable tastes – lied to me on our first date about loving an author she knew I was excited about. I was utterly convinced and completely charmed. London-based Australian author Jessica Stanley’s second novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, opens with all the beats of a classic romantic comedy – a meet cute, grand gesture, human connection – but she’s too smart a writer and too curious a thinker about the nature of human relationships to leave it there. Instead she’s written a book about the next bit. After Coralie and Adam’s white hot courtship, what does the next decade look like? Children and renovations and jobs; extended families and friends; disappointments and corrosions and compromises; the slog of the day to day reality of just living. But she writes it with grace and wit and compassion, finding the romance in the what comes next when two people decide to be together. If I saw this book on someone’s bookshelf I’d know they were someone I wanted to talk to, and I have no doubt that it would be fun, lively and bracingly honest. Great qualities in a book, even better qualities in a person. I’m Michael Williams and this is Read This, a show about the books we love and the stories behind them. MICHAEL: Um, where I want to start is an element of the meat cube in your book, which is the swapping of apartments and the looking at other people's bookshelves. And I want to know when you visit someone's house for the first time, how nosy are you on the question of what's on their bookshelves? JESSICA: Well, I'm interested, but as with most things, I am observing, but I'm not judging. So I'm interested to see what people are reading. But by the time I've made it into someone's home, I'm probably intimate with them anyway. So I am certainly not judging, and also I find a lot of people in their 30s — I am not in my 30s. I am 43 — but a lot of people in their 30s have moved around so much anyway that maybe they would think their shelves weren't really reflective of them. So to be judged on them would be upsetting. Whereas I'm one of those people who…I started amassing my books when I went to the Lifeline Book Fair in Canberra and I've taken them from every house to every house my entire life. MICHAEL: Would someone know a lot about you from your bookshelves? JESSICA: I think so. One thing that I've done since I was really young — I probably wouldn't do it now — is that my books have always been separated into women authors and then male authors. And I always put the women authors in a special place and the male authors I put, you know, in a secondary location outside the bathroom or something like that. MICHAEL: Are there books on a shelf that would disqualify a person for you? JESSICA: I think I would feel frightened and concerned if someone had a Top Gear book. MICHAEL: Oh yeah, good. Yeah, no, no. Out the door. JESSICA: Um, but apart from that sort of thing, no. Because who knows someone might have a book because they're reviewing it or writing a nasty essay about it. Um, yeah, I just, I couldn't be sure. MICHAEL: Are there books for you that you would insist that someone read if you wanted them to understand you? JESSICA: Well, in Consider Yourself Kissed, I have Adam say to Coralie that he loves the Don Watson book about Paul Keating, and that makes sense for him because he is a political journalist, and Coralie notices that the spine of that book is corduroy. It's been read so — MICHAEL: I love that description when I came across it on the page, I was like, I'd never heard it before. And a corduroy spine denoting a much loved book really tickled me. JESSICA: And that's funny because I made my husband read that book when we first met, as well as watch The Castle. And what's the murderer? Oh, Chopper. MICHAEL: Oh, there you go, Chopper, The Castle, and Memoirs of a Bleeding Heart. JESSICA: Yep. MICHAEL: That's a good cultural three, was that the Australia that you needed him to understand? JESSICA: That's exactly it. MICHAEL: Did he have equivalent titles he felt that you needed to understand? JESSICA: Gosh, I feel really bad. Well, if you did, I'm not across the- MICHAEL: You're very literate already though. I imagine your love of Alan Hollinghurst, for example, would mean that a particular strata of London society you had a pretty good understanding of. JESSICA: Yes, but that wasn't my husband's strata of society. Um what is Northern Irish? Because he is Northern Irish. He is very insistent that I regularly watch a meme, which is a guy from Northern Ireland saying, this is a wonder day, a wonder date, because it's sunny. MICHAEL: There you go. That's a good thing to understand about that kind of Northern Irish energy. So tell me about love and romance on the page. How crucial is it to your reading history? How much is it something that you relish? And how actively did you decide to subvert those beats when writing Consider Yourself Kissed? JESSICA: It's strange because when I began writing this book, I had just published a previous book that hadn't gone very well. This is A Great Hope, which came out in 2022. It had been reviewed really nicely, but hadn't made any sort of splash. And people who knew me really liked it, but no one else seemed to notice it. And I couldn't even come over to launch it because of the strange timing. But I had got to a stage where I thought, “Okay, writing a book isn't gonna change my life.” And then I thought, ‘Well, am I even gonna try again?” And I really felt as if there was only one reason to try and write another book and that was for the love of actually writing. And I had also come to a point in my life where care and love feel like everything to me, um, not just personally, in the political environment. It feels like the most natural and intuitive response to what's going on more generally, which I would characterise as being quite hateful. And so even though in the past, most of my most favourite books have been about families, I wanted to combine that with a classic love story, someone meeting someone and that feeling of falling in love, but then to also follow that love for the next 10 years when things started to get hard and one of the books that I modelled it on apart from The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst was American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld where she follows a fictionalised Laura Bush as incredibly, wildly she falls in love with a fictionalised George W. Bush and I think you maybe follow them for 20 years and for some reason she really gets you to care about these two people. And so I thought, “How can I watch two people fall in love and convey that to the reader, but also help people in a time when it's pretty hard to concentrate on long form content of any kind and especially fiction maybe, how can get them to fall in with the experience of reading about them?’ MICHAEL: One of the things I love so much about this book is its approach to time. It's as much a book about the passing of time as it is about love. That actually, when we hit what we think of as kind of rom-com, tends to be a kind of constrained and kind of almost instrumental way of telling a story. The point at which you get together and you fall in love, that's the end of the interesting bit, and what comes afterwards is just the kind of day-to-day of life. Was it always going to be that kind of sweeping decade long view? JESSICA: Yeah, so I go around with a lot of material in my mind, things that I think are funny or interesting, funny things that people have said. And I sort of wait until I can come up with a structure or sort of line my buckets up in a row to toss the content into, you know, like someone feeding the penguins at the zoo. And this 10-year structure came to me right after the joint 40th birthday party I had with my husband. I had moved to London when I was 29 and I already knew him then but we got married pretty quickly afterwards and so by the time we were at our joint 40th we had had three children and we had spent 10 years together as a married couple and if I could have seen when I was 29, if I can have seen this lovely party, my amazing husband, my lovely children, our friends, my friends' children, all hanging out together and celebrating us, I wouldn't have believed my luck. It was incredible and amazing. But the actual emotional experience of having spent that 10 years, having reached the age of 40 and been married for so long, I really felt run over by a truck. And the time, especially my experience of time was incredible, where days when you're on your own with a baby can feel 20 years long and then something lovely is happening to you and it just washes by and is almost a dream afterwards. And so obviously when I was covering the 10 years in the book I was trying to mimic that sense of time by zooming in on some very special deep emotional moments and then zooming out and showing how time just runs away from you. When we return, Jessica shares how being an outsider helped her shape her main character, Coralie, and why she only ever reads exactly what she wants to. We’ll be right back. [Advertisement] MICHAEL: Your protagonist, Coralie — for her as for yourself in being an outsider that thing about starting your life over again in another place and having roots elsewhere — how important to you was it that Coralie was also an outsider in the community that she was building? JESSICA: Well, a lot of my favourite books feature an outsider to a community, and I think it's the best standpoint to analyse anything from. And of course, my favourite book of all time, is The Line of Beauty by Alan Holinghurst and Nick is the ultimate outsider. He embeds himself with a family that is completely different to his own. And he just notices every single thing about them. And that's sort of what I wanted to do with Coralie because I am obsessed with being from Australia. It's a major part of who I am and I moved to London for love, not necessarily to be in London. And since then I've come to really love and appreciate it but I've also been noticing what's strange and funny about it and I wanted to write the book so I could put everything that I'd noticed into a book. MICHAEL: One of the things about that, which I think you capture so beautifully, is the way in which any family or any community is an accretion of different traditions and different value sets. And an Australian amongst a bunch of Londoners, it does seem an important counterweight to certain expectations around class, around who's connected to who and how, that that Australian-ness does seem to be a key element in the book. Have you had early readers in the UK? Do they warm to Coralie's Australian-ness? Do they recognise it? JESSICA: It's funny because when I went around to bookshops, you know, before books come out, you get taken around to try and interest booksellers in what you're selling. And I was too shy to do the kind of pitch, the intro. And when my publicist started off with, “It's about an Australian in London…” I internally cringed. I thought, these people are not gonna care. And that has been my personal experience of living in the UK for such a long time, is that when people hear you're from Australia or when people hear an Australian voice they zone out. So I was anxious about how the book would be received, especially if the Australianess was foregrounded, but everyone has responded really beautifully although it's interesting to me that no one has responded about her being Australian I think they have just responded to her as a person which is the most you can hope for. MICHAEL: I think so. I mean, the other thing you have going for you is that telling the story of the UK during that particular decade is one of massive kind of social change, social anxiety, political turmoil. Did you always know that Adam was going to be in the political media sphere? Was that a useful tool for making everything from Brexit to COVID to Boris Johnson a key element of the story. JESSICA: Yes, that was the only way I could think of to bring it in, in a way that was natural. Because when I moved over, maybe because I come from a colonial mindset, I had this vast reserve of knowledge about British politics that I was keen to show off. And making Adam a political journalist seemed like the best and most natural way to shoehorn it into a book. And I also just had spent so much time, I think — it's hard to explain to people who weren't there the way Brexit gripped the UK because we really didn't know from one minute to the next if we would have a government, if we'd have a prime minister or even if we would have the ability to import toilet paper or the chemicals for clean drinking water and so watching the news at 10 o'clock became almost a matter of life and death and so I thought making Adam, a political journalist, could really vivify that for the readers. MICHAEL: It also carries with it that thing of external pressures on a marriage and on a relationship because that's his professional sphere. It's very clear that at any moment, as you're reading it, you have this kind of anxiety, you understand the pressure they're under, you understand how close at times to the edge Coralie is feeling. And you know if you have a passing acquaintance with UK politics that just around the corner is going to be something else that means that Adam is not going to present in their marriage again. JESSICA: Yeah, exactly. And I think that the news environment, whether we are really following news in depth, or whether it just comes to us through our feeds or in snippets, it does have the ability to change our entire state. And, I have had the experience of being at home, having a lovely time with my children, then glancing at my phone, and suddenly my life is ruined, or at least my day. Because of some horrible political thing that's happened to me. And I felt that rather than that being something secret or private that happens to everyone in their house every day, why not bring that out through Coralie’s experience and make it something that we can talk about and notice in ourselves. The way that politics can really have a real world impact on people that it's being done to, because I think politics is something that some people do. And mostly it's something that we have done to us and I really wanted to show that from the perspective of someone having politics done to them. MICHAEL: You said before that your starting point wasn't really so much the traditional rom-com, but it's interesting how quickly that shift between a meet-cute, a grand romantic gesture, a kind of rescue child from a pond, all those beats that are so familiar to us from pop culture. There is something about the long aftermath of that that feels relatively unwritten about. JESSICA: I agree. Maybe I'm just blanking, but I don't feel as though there are many in-depth domestic strife novels where two people are good, conscientious, thoughtful people who don't have some kind of dramatic issue in their relationship. They're just two people struggling to do their best. And that's really what I wanted to show if I could. MICHAEL: Yeah, there's no false drama in there. There's no ginned up, okay, this person's suddenly done this massive act of betrayal or whatever. It's just, it's kind of hard to get on with life and work and a creative life or a kind of independent imaginative life and parenting and all that other stuff. How important to you is the conception of yourself as a writer? Have you always thought ultimately you would write books? JESSICA: Actually, when I was young, reading was such a huge part of my life, and I really clearly remember when we lived in Parkville, my parents would take me to the library all the time. But there was a night when the North Carlton Library stayed open late, and so I would go in my pyjamas and dressing gown and get my books for the week. And it was just an absolutely mandatory part of life to escape into a book. It was almost like a life support system. And in my house, books were venerated, and authors were as important as gods. And so I just didn't consider that I could take my kind of love of reading and my love of writing and actually turn that into a book. So I spent so long kind of trying to earn money on the basis of it by being a copywriter and that sort of stuff. And I didn't start writing until I was about 30 and my first book didn't come out until I was 40. And so that's a lot of life where I haven't conceptualised myself as a writer and so now when I'm filling in the card, when I come into Australia to say what I do, I write “novelist” and that makes me very happy. But no, I wasn't one of those people who thought yes that will be me someday and I take a lot of inspiration from people who came to it very late and make it their life. Penelope Fitzgerald, who didn't start writing until she was about 60, Anita Brookner, people like that. So there are role models that I could look to. MICHAEL: It's funny, many of those examples, many of those role models of writers who come to it later are women. That women's lives, by and large, don't allow for the kind of space needed to give over to creative practice. And so again and again, you'll hear in these interviews women who need to make that choice later rather than earlier. JESSICA: Absolutely. And I have had to grow as a person to be able to communicate to people who love me that four hours a day minimum needs to be put aside for me to be perfectly alone. And a lot of women can't do that for a long time, whether for personal reasons or just how their life is set up and so everyone who is struggling to do that I really, I really feel for them and I was that person for a long time so I get it. MICHAEL: Much like the rhythms in Consider Yourself Kissed, there is something too about time and being able to kind of, you know, I quite like the conception of not really starting to write until you're 30, not having a first book till you're 40, is if you can write and write for pleasure and hone your craft and work out the stories you wanna tell and the things you wanna capture, not having that sense of being in a hurry, I think can only be a good thing maybe. JESSICA: Yeah, I agree. I think so. MICHAEL: I think for me part of the important part of it was that sense of being an active reader from an early age. Like, that reading was very important to me, but it wasn't just a passive experience that to read something was to add something to the world. Part of that is how is “reader” a job? I'm not sure. I hope it is. JESSICA: For me, reading was pure freedom and so I would go into the library, get my 10 or 20 books, and I would deal with the words as they came into my body and became emotions and images. And even now I tend to read in a way that is extremely agentic. So I never feel as if there's a book I must read, I only read what I want. And when words are coming into me, I can let them wash over me. It is just the area of my life where I feel totally on solid ground. I'm totally able to experience what the book is giving. It's something I don't have anywhere else in my life, but it makes me feel strong and happy. Jessica Stanley’s new novel, Consider Yourself Kissed, is available at all good bookstores now. [Advertisement] Before we go – one last value judgement about what's on your bookshelves if I come into your house. I am not a fan of the colour-coded bookshelves. I know it’s pretty. I know it’s ornamental. But for me there is a deliciousness to random happenstance when it comes to how you arrange your bookshelves. Maybe by author, maybe by when you bought them. But I like to stand and browse endlessly not to see that this one is green, that one’s blue. But that’s just me, your mileage may vary. You can find this book and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store. That’s it for this week’s show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it – and rate and review us. Share your favourite episode, write about us on your blog. Spread the word however you can. Next week on Read This I’m chatting with New York Times bestselling author Kevin Wilson about his brand new novel Run for the Hills and Kevin reveals why he wanted to become a writer: KEVIN: I loved reading so much. And I think it's just like anything. If you love something enough, like your, your experience of it, you love it so much that you want to see if it's possible to make something not to be better than or as good as, but to just feel it touch up against the things that inspired you. Read This is a Schwartz Media production made possible by the generous support of the ARA Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zoltan Fecso. Thanks for listening. See you next week. Embed Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whats-on-jessica-stanleys-bookshelves/id1691035626?i=1000706710103&itscg=30200Woff: Michael sits down with Jessica for a conversation about life, love, and the importance of what’s on your bookshelf.Author: Read ThisApple News: {"edition_hold":false,"featureable":true,"node_changed":1746679665,"publish_date":1746554100,"sections":["5f599232-5ebf-41dd-fce3-05ae04eb7551","b55c3d85-fa8b-4a8c-b076-3a3b8330011e"],"status":true}Host: Michael WilliamsGuests: Jessica Stanley