How Madeleine Thien Organizes Her Bookshelves, Among Other Things

A Questionnaire With the Author of Simple Recipes

Madeleine Thien’s new story collection, Simple Recipes is available now from W.W. Norton.

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What part of your writing routine do you think would surprise your readers?
Since I turned fifty, I have written most things by hand.

Initially this was because of an illness whose origins were mysterious; typing caused incredible pain, to the point where I could not use my left hand. I feared that I might not be able to write or meet the demands of my various jobs. Strangely, however, I could handwrite. Thus, over the past few years I have written every short story and essay and, most recently, a new novel, by hand. Meanwhile, I’m learning how to manage the pain because sometimes the keyboard is unavoidable.

I was determined to write novels that no one expected me to write, least of all myself.

But handwriting has proven to be a salve in so many ways. I am writing differently. It is a relief to be away from screens for many hours of the day and, at the same time, to feel less separated from the world, to be attuned to paper, pen, and the rhythm of the line being written. I feel like there is more space for the people in my novels to breathe.

What’s one book you wish you had read when you were young?
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I wonder what I would have felt when I was young and so much seemed bewildering and marvellous and vast, and I feared that I would not make it to adulthood. I wonder how, as a girl of fourteen, I might have understood the states of mind and the conditions described in the novel. This book has been a touchstone for me.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received?
Almost 30 years ago, someone in publishing showed me a proposed cover for one of my books. The image was of a beautiful Empress in brocade robes. When I said the design had absolutely no relation, none at all, to my novel, the person agreed. “But this is a great cover,” they said. “You should write a novel to go with this cover.”

I was very young then, in my mid-twenties, and even though the words bothered me, I laughed it off. Nevertheless, it stayed with me as a kind of heartache around commodification and as a reality check. I was determined to write novels that no one expected me to write, least of all myself. Books that could not be easily categorised, and must find their own path. That self-knowledge stayed with me and lit a fire.

How do you organize your bookshelves?
By the approximate year when the writer was born, and mixing all the books together, philosophy, history, art, fiction, poetry, English and French and translations. The bookshelf becomes a collective record of the times, ways of seeing, forms that flourished during particular eras, and also questions that persist across centuries.

What’s a book you recommend to other writers?
Adania Shibli’s Touch, translated by Paula Haydar. I want to put Adania Shibli’s books in everyone’s hands. I think she is the great writer and artist of our times. I’ve just finished reading her new novel, Delusion, translated by Kathrine Halls, forthcoming in 2027 from Knopf. It is rare to read a book that is essential today, this very instant, and that you also know will be read generations from now. It is one of the most shattering, exacting and profound novels I have ever read.

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Simple Recipes by Madeleine Thien is available from W. W. Norton and Company.