Diana Henry is a much-loved and multi-award-winning food writer and columnist. Here are her three favourite holiday reads.
A Thousand Acres by Jane SmileyÂ
I started reading this in a holiday cottage in the west of Ireland and didn’t get up for three days (except to eat). It’s that good. Set on a farm in Iowa – the novel opens with the line ‘At sixty miles per hour you could pass our farm in a minute’ – it’s grounded in the land. Farming is seen as an almost moral choice. The question ‘What is a farmer?’ is discussed. ‘A farmer is a man who feeds the world, with a duty to buy more land and expand.’ The ageing father and farmer, Larry, wants to wind things up, pass on the farm to his daughters and have an easier life. How this is resolved – one daughter doesn’t want to take on the farm and is cut out of any inheritance – follows the King Lear story. Larry, a curmudgeonly and deeply traditional man, ends up pitting the daughters against one another, bringing out the worst in them. The deal he strikes – that two of the daughters look after him in exchange for getting the farm – is never fulfilled and he ends up going on late night drives while drunk, buying furniture he can’t afford and raging at his daughters.
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother by Rachel Cusk
If you’re a mother yourself, Cusk’s memoir of becoming a mother and how she balances that with trying to fulfill her creative ambitions – is an uncomfortable read. She is brutally honest about the ambivalence she feels, the boredom, the resentment. I recognized everything she experiences while not being able to admit that I felt the same, at least some of the time. Motherhood is lonely, exhausting and erases your sense of self. The book caused a stir when it came out in 2001 as it smashed the notion of contented motherhood. That mother and baby groups are inane, that lack of sleep makes you mad, that you are defeated by the simplest things such as making a phone call, Cusk shows us what a profound change having a baby brings. She is at war with herself, being a writer and being a mother seem to be mutually exclusive.  Don’t think it’s an unrelentingly miserable read, though, the book is darkly comic and even comforting (you’re not alone’). The most honest book about motherhood, I’m grateful she said it as it is. The second volume of memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation, published in 2012, is just as good and just as brutal.Â
Lunar Park by Brett Easton EllisÂ
While the author is famous for American Psycho and Less Than Zero, this is my favourite of Ellis’s novels. It’s about an author called Brett Easton Ellis, his drug and drink problem, his early fame and general debauchery. The book does narrate Ellis’s life but it’s a mock memoir, well, you don’t know what’s real, what is the result of some drug-provoked delusion, or what is simply made-up and written by Ellis in his study. He repeatedly tells us that ‘every word is true.’ He plays with you from the start. In the same way that some people thought Bateman carried out the crimes in American Psycho, and others thought it was an elaborate fantasy, here you question whether Ellis might have experienced some of the delusions on a bad trip. He is haunted by the memory of his dead father and tries to fix the relationship he has with his son. He becomes increasingly mad. He is convinced a toy bird owned by his daughter can urinate and could carry out attacks on his family.  He features real people who are a known part of his life – Jay McInerney and David Duchovny, for example – and invents others. It’s comic horror. The good-looking young novelist has become fat, hooked on heroin and is drinking two quarts of vodka every day.  It’s a sad book at root, about family, the father-son relationship, addiction and the American suburbs.
Diana Henry’s latest book is Around the Table: 52 Essays on Food & Life
