Lucy Caldwell: ‘Even your text messages fizz after reading James Joyce’

The author on the power of folktales, being inspired by Ulysses – and the book that every woman should read My earliest reading memory The summer my middle sister was born, my mum and I would walk to the shops at Cherryvalley, in east Belfast, to do her messages, and she’d buy me the latest issue of Storyteller, illustrated tales from around the world. It came with a cassette tape of actors reading the stories, a ding to tell you when to turn the page. My favourite was a Japanese folktale called The Goblin Rat.

I was only just two, but I listened to it, entranced and terrified, until I could recite it by heart. My favourite book growing up Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series. I first read them aged 10 – I’ve read the title book every midwinter since, and read them last year with my own then-10-year-old son.

They tell a haunting story of the age-old battle between the forces of dark and light, weaving in Arthurian legend, shot through with an adult melancholy that makes them as compelling now as then.

I spent every spare minute that week writing mine – the intoxicating feeling of tuning in to another world, until that world becomes more real than your own. The book I came back to I’ve always loved Dubliners by James Joyce, but first read Ulysses in paroxysms of undergraduate anxiety about not “getting” the references.