Catherine O'Flynn (What Was Lost) tells why she would like separate sittings at dinner with her favorite authors ... In this month's 1-On-One!

Is it possible to be a good writer without being a good reader?

I’m not sure what a good reader is. Is it someone who has read the canon of serious literature? Is it someone who just reads a lot? Either way, I don’t think it’s essential to being a writer. Reading helps but I’m sure it also hinders and inhibits and incites imitation. People who haven’t been fortunate enough to access many books during their lives can still write great work. More important than reading, I suppose, is the ability to see and notice.

Have you ever belonged to a reading group?

Only once, and it didn’t go too well. It was a well established group and after the one meeting I attended it disbanded. I try not to feel responsible for this, I don’t think I committed any egregious errors – I didn’t take too many biscuits, I didn’t laugh out of turn – but the sense remains that I did somehow singlehandedly bring about the demise of well functioning group. Since then, I’ve considered it in the best interests of reading groups if I stay away.

What advice do you have for reading group members when it comes to selecting books for discussion?

I suppose the same advice I have for myself which is to be brave and try not to always read books recommended to you, or in the big promotions, or on billboards. If only once a year pick an author completely unknown to you, who hasn’t had the good luck of a big marketing spend behind their book, and try and discover one of the many treasures that get lost every week in bookstores. I’m rubbish at following this advice.

What books are you reading now or do you plan to read?

I’m just finishing Simon Armitage’s musical memoir Gig which I’ve enjoyed greatly. The next book I have waiting and really want to read is Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

If you were stuck on a deserted island and could only bring one book with you to read, what would it be and why?

I’d take David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest – it’s length, multiple narratives and humour would hopefully sustain me until the monkeys turned on me. After that, the sheer heft of it would be useful in fending them off.

If you could have dinner with three writers (dead or alive) who would they be and why?

Maybe George Orwell, James Ellroy and Patricia Highsmith. I love all of them, but I worry that there could be squabbles, which I don’t really like at table. Could I have three separate sittings?

Have you ever read anything you're too embarrassed to admit (except in this interview)?

I think I’d admit to them all – perhaps I’m shameless. I used to buy second hand books based on how tasteless the covers were. The best one was Backstage with The Osmonds. The photo captions are great: Donny dreams of his future love….could it be you? or ‘I like to tease girls’ says Jay the Joker. He’s a laugh-a-minute that Jay.

Favorite book when you were a child?

I’m not sure I had a favourite, but the Usborne Detective Guide Clues and Suspects stayed by my side for many years. It’s a manual for children who want to be private eyes, and it dispenses invaluable advice on how to follow strange men down dark streets at night. It was the inspiration for How to be a Detective, the book that Kate follows religiously in my novel.

Favorite character in literature and why?

I have a great fondness for Rudy Waltz, Kurt Vonnegut’s narrator in Deadeye Dick. Vonnegut advised writers to make awful things happen to their characters, and I think poor Rudy bears the brunt of this. As a teenager he accidentally shoots and kills a pregnant woman, and this along with his dangerous nincompoop of a father’s friendship with Hitler and the accidental detonation of a neutron bomb in his hometown, all serve to reinforce Rudy’s belief that "it is too easy, when alive, to make perfectly terrible mistakes." Rudy views the world around him with understated horror and is probably best described in his own words as "no good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary."

Book that changed your life?

It’s an unlikely book perhaps, but Bill Drummond’s memoir 45 had a big impact on me. It wasn’t so much the detail of what he wrote (though that was great), it was more the glimpse I got of his life – eating porridge in the morning and looking out over the fields, sitting in his local library, wandering around the streets – there was just a sense of freedom there. It helped my partner and me have the courage to give up our jobs and move to Spain, which is where I wrote the novel, which I suppose changed my life.