Ann Richardson's Guilty Reading Secret

What book changed your writing forever?

We’re back with another interview in the series!

When Ann Richardson replied to my invitation to appear in this series, she told me it would force her to reveal a guilty secret.

I was intrigued and was even more eager for her to contribute to the series.

May Ann’s reveal of her guilty secret allow us all to be gentler to ourselves this holiday season, and get a bit of rest, rather than chasing our endless to-do lists.

Once you’ve read the piece, I encourage you to share any guilty secrets of your own in the comments below, should you choose.

Ann Richardson

It’s my pleasure to introduce

Ann Richardson

. Ann and I connected immediately over being American born, but residents of other countries (Ann is UK-based). She’s the author of the book, The Granny Who Stands on Her Head, which explores why, at 82, she very much enjoys being an older woman.

On her substack, of the same name, Ann shares, as she puts it, “a little breather —something stimulating, something amusing, perhaps something you never thought about before.” She discusses topics that vary widely, “Annunciations to orgasms,” with an emphasis on having fun with writing and with life.

I’m sure you can see why I was especially eager to hear her guilty secret, inspired by my prompt.

Shall we find out?

My Guilty Secret

I have been harbouring a guilty secret for a very long time. My husband knows, of course, but not many other people. I have decided to come out of the closet here.

It’s very simple – I don’t read. No, that’s not right, I do read, but I don’t read a lot. My nose is not always in a book. And I don’t always finish the books I start, because I get easily bored or annoyed with the writing. It takes a lot for me to become interested in what happens to the characters. And somehow, it doesn’t matter.

Put simply, reading is just not that important to me.

Oh dear. Mark her off as not a serious person. How can she be interesting if she doesn’t know her literature? Indeed, this was the attitude of my family when I was growing up in New York City. Everybody reads. Of course they do.

Perhaps for most people, this would not be such an issue. Don’t worry, you would say to them, I am sure you do loads of other worthwhile activities. And I do.

But a lot of my time over the past fifty years has been spent in writing. At 82, I now write fortnightly on Substack. But over time, I have been hired as a writer in many different capacities: to produce reports for many organisations, including several major Committees of Inquiry, to edit Government reports, to write or to improve research papers.

Not to mention my own books. Eight to twelve of these, depending on your exact definition of a book, on very disparate topics. Some published by top publishers. The last one is about why I like being old.

And many people will say (or at least think), how can you be a writer and not be an eager reader? How could you find your style?

I don’t really know. Perhaps I was born with something of a knack, in the same way that I have no ability to paint or draw and put that down to natural inability. I also went to a good school that gave a lot of attention to students’ writing.

Early reading

I probably never was an avid reader, but I did read – and read all the sorts of things I was supposed to. And yes, I liked quite a few books.

The first ‘serious’ book I read at 12 or so was Little Women. It was what girls of my generation did. But I soon graduated to lots of other books recommended to me. I remember being very moved by Jane Eyre.

And during my teenage years, out of a wish to be a serious person, I read all manner of ‘heavy’ books: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Brave New World and so forth. I’m not quite sure what I got from them, as I read more in a spirit of diligence rather than a real love of reading.

The one writer who may have influenced me for a period was Hemingway. I loved his simple style, his short sentences. And his sentences starting with ‘And’. I wrote some pieces with a semi-Hemingway style and even won a major writing prize at my university based on one such story.

But I really can’t say that any writer influenced my writing style in the long run.

Writing as a living

I had never seen writing for a living as being for me. I had no great urge to write novels. I worked briefly for my university newspaper but didn’t like the pressure of short deadlines. The adrenalin involved inhibited my thinking. Journalism would not be my thing.

What I failed to realise when I was young was that there are many different ways to write as a profession. But I did find out eventually, as I have already shown.

It began after moving to live in London with my English husband in my late twenties. I found a job working as a junior social researcher for the simple reason that it was something I could do part-time with a baby. It was 1969 — long before it was normal for educated women with children to work at all, certainly not with a baby. But I was bored — and my mother had worked as a high-powered professional all my life, so I had a role model. Part-time work seemed the perfect solution.

Social research involves a long period of studying some issue, whether in a library or interviews, followed by a long period of analysis and then writing a report. For many researchers, the latter is an unfortunate requirement that goes with the territory. For me, it was always the fun part.

Finding my voice

I remember with absolute clarity the time when I figured out how I wanted to write. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but it is clear as day to me now. I even remember the room, the desk and the typewriter (we’re talking 1982).

I had been running my first major study as the principal researcher. It was on patient support groups (or ‘self-help groups’) and it had lasted for three years — a very long time for one project. I was very tired of the subject. I knew what I wanted to say and started to churn it out.

And then I stopped to question how I could get through the writing process without being completely bored. I found the answer by writing in a light style with a visible sense of humour. This was definitely not the way you were supposed to write research reports. They were supposed to be serious, academic, often jargon-filled and slightly difficult to comprehend.

No one was supervising me, so I thought what the hell — why not? While making serious analytic points, my report was readable, jargon-free and clear. And it involved a gentle sense of humour from time to time. It kept me alert enough to write the whole report relatively quickly.

And through the process, I learned a very, very important lesson:

If you write readable prose, people will read it.

My report was duly submitted to the person who had commissioned it at the Department of Health. She must have passed it up through the food chain there, because the next thing that happened is almost unheard of in the world of social research.

I had a phone call. The caller introduced himself and said he was from the Department of Health. He said he found my report very interesting and would I be willing to come talk to him soon? I said yes, of course. Before signing off, he added ‘By the way, I am a Deputy Secretary’.

You won’t know what that means. I didn’t myself at the time and had to ask someone. But it meant that he was the penultimate senior civil servant in the whole Department. As I said to colleagues at the time, ‘Just one under God’.

Research reports often — indeed, normally — lie on the commissioner’s desk gathering dust. Talking to a senior official is very rare. I went soon after to his very spacious office and we talked about how the Government could help the kind of groups I had studied. Months later, my ideas even found their way into a Government programme for local communities.

There was a certain amount of luck involved — the Government had been seeking to do something visible in this area before my report reached the relevant desk. Nonetheless, it tells you something.

And I had found my voice.

PS. I still don’t read very much.

---

Where to find Ann and read more

Ann Richardson publishes

The Granny Who Stands on her Head

once a fortnight. Paid subscriptions support Shelter from the Storm, a charity for the homeless in London.

You can see her actually stand on her head in the video at the bottom of this post, and you can check out her books over here.