At the end of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, she assembles a “survival kit”: what can support feminists who are trying to live fully and freely, as themselves and in community? Into her kit go feelings, time, humour, bodies – but first of all, books: “you need to take them with you; make them with you,” she writes.
I would put Ahmed’s book into my survival kit, not least because it has other marvellous books tucked into it, including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, bell hooks’ Feminist Theory, and Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter. In writing After Sappho, I was experimenting with the shapes that feminist lives might take; what would a loose circle of turn-of-the-century women in Europe need to read, I wondered, in order to write their own lives? (Two things I learned from Sara Ahmed on this count: cherish the collective, and smuggle in more books than are officially allotted.)
