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You could not get two more different women on one screen. On the left: Dua Lipa, English-Albanian celebrity singer, songwriter, actress. On the right: Helen Garner, Australian writer. They are having a lively conversation of mutual respect, thoughtfulness and curiosity.
When approached for an interview for the singer’s Service95 Book Club, Garner had to ask her grandsons who Dua Lipa was. The boys were suitably gobsmacked. But despite the fact their worlds are poles apart, these two women appear to be getting on really well. They are discussing Garner’s book This House of Grief, her 2014 account of the trial of Robert Farquhar, accused of murder after he drove his three sons into a dam.
Singer Dua Lipa promoting Helen Garner’s This House of Grief on the book club.Credit: Instagram
Celebrity attention to books means attention from many readers around the world, no doubt discovering this Australian author for the first time through Dua Lipa’s book club.
I used to be a bit snooty about celebrity book clubs, though not as snooty as Jonathan Franzen, who notoriously refused to appear on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show after she picked his novel The Corrections as a must-read. (He later apologised). But after seeing the Garner-Lipa interview, and after checking out some other celebrity book clubs, I’ve changed my mind. These women (it’s mostly women) are doing a great job.
Take model Kaia Gerber’s book club, which operates through the website LibraryScience. You won’t see a typical bestseller list here, she says. Instead, she’s highlighting “young voices, debut writers, translations, contemporary classics”. I particularly like the way she’s choosing classics such as Francois Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover or Djuna Barnes’ short stories in I Am Alien to Life – books written in different eras and in different societies which nevertheless resonate with young readers trying to come to terms with life, love and expectations.
Then there’s Dakota Johnson’s Tea Time Book Club, which reaches into very different realms from her role in the film of that bestselling but much reviled title Fifty Shades of Grey.
Reese Witherspoon’s book club features book with women at the centre of the story.Credit: Instagram
A typical pick for her is a book of short stories by Fumio Yamamoto, The Dilemmas of Working Women, first released in 2000 and recently translated from Japanese. This is described as “a spiky, edgy collection” and “a feminist, anti-capitalist modern classic”.
Other celebrity book clubs include Belletrist, run by actress Emma Roberts; and Between Two Books, run by Florence Welch, lead singer of Florence and The Machine. One of her top picks is Opposed Positions by Gwendoline Riley. A review in The Guardian says that its narrator “should be really annoying, but isn’t” and comments that Riley gives us first-person narratives from “people who are a lot like her, being writers and drifters”.
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These people, the review adds, are “young women who don’t quite know what is wrong with them, or whether they want to put it right”. That might also be the attraction of many of these recommended books, varied as they are: they offer a picture of a skewed, unsatisfying life to which young readers, particularly women, can relate.
Reese Witherspoon’s club, Reese’s Book Club, is more evangelical in tone. Every month she picks a book with a woman at the centre of the story, and she says of women “May we write them truer, raise them higher, and read them here.”
The original inspiration for celebrity book clubs, Oprah Winfrey, still delights in books that empower women and has been an extraordinary force in book promotion for decades. One book she chose in 2004 as “an extremely sexy and engrossing read” led to an extra print run of 800,000 copies. A nice windfall for Leo Tolstoy’s estate: the book was Anna Karenina.
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