Book Brahmin: Zoe Heller

London-born and Oxford-educated, Zoe Heller acquired her M.A. from Columbia University in 1988. After graduate school, she returned to England, where she worked briefly in publishing, then as a journalist, book reviewer and feature writer for various British newspapers. In the 1990s, she moved to New York and began chronicling her experiences as a single woman in the Big Apple. In 2000, she published a darkly comic novel entitled Everything You Know. Although it was savaged by the British press (a sour grapes-induced snubbing and drubbing Heller admits still stings), the book received enthusiastic reviews in the U.S. She followed that with What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal. The Believers, her third novel, was published on March 3 by HarperCollins.

On your nightstand now:

Bouvard and Pecuchet by Flaubert; A Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers; The Lost Leader by Mick Imlah.

Favorite book when you were a child:

Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

Your top five authors:

Sybille Bedford, Jane Austen, Joseph Roth, Leo Tolstoy, Nancy Mitford.
 
Book you've faked reading:

I faked reading quite a lot of Anglo-Saxon poetry when I was at university. Other than that--I'm not prepared to out myself.

Book you're an evangelist for:

A Legacy by Sybille Bedford.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Madame Pamplemousse and Her Incredible Edibles by Rupert Kingfisher. I bought it for my eight-year-old daughter solely on the basis of its charming dust jacket. I haven't read it, but my daughter tells me it's pretty good.
 
Book that changed your life:

I guess everything you read, good and bad, changes you in tiny, incremental ways; the only book I can think of that effected a major and immediate, 'Whoah, Betty!' kind of change was My Secret Life, The Sex Diary of a Victorian Gentleman (author unknown). I found it in my grandparents' bookshelves when I was 10.

Favorite line from a book:

"You have delighted us long enough."--Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, encouraging his daughter, Mary, to stop singing.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Can I be the age I was when I first read them? If so, I'll take Asterix in Britain by Goscinny and Uderzo or The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff.