^{Picture: Clayton Cubitt}

In our First Writes Q&A, we throw some questions about ‘firsts’ at debut authors. Next to tackle the challenge is Chelsea G Summers, author of A Certain Hunger, a darkly humorous and gory tale of food critic Dorothy Daniels and her appetite for food, life and killing men.

What’s the first book you remember reading as a child? Anne Likes Red. It went something like, ‘Anne likes red. Red! Red! Red! Red hat! Red dress! Red shoes! Anne likes red!’ Highly formative, this book shaped the style of both my prose and my clothing.

What was the book you read that made you decide to be a writer? When I was in my teens, I went through a big American modernist phase, and I gobbled up everything Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter and the Fitzgeralds wrote. I basically did that adolescent thing where you hook yourself up to an intravenous flow of reading, and I immersed myself in a widening pool of modernist nonsense. No single book galvanised my will to write; instead, it was spelunking in the mosh pit of modernism.

What’s your favourite first line in a book? ‘When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,’ Papa would say, ‘she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotised with longing.’ With this sentence, Katherine Dunn tells you everything you need to know about Geek Love. It’s going to be a wild, confusing, enchanting and repellent ride that will pull you with one hand as it pushes you away with the other. 

Which debut publication had the most profound effect on you? John Lanchester’s The Debt To Pleasure. Everything about it is perfection and my writing cannot do it justice. My writing goes to bed at night and wishes it could be The Debt To Pleasure. I can’t really say more about the book or about my experience reading it because, like swimming at night, it’s best to dive in utterly blind.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a writing day? Hydrate. Then I drink a large mug of coffee whilst simultaneously doing The New York Times Spelling Bee and watching YouTube videos. When I can, I like writing in the afternoon through to the evening, then having some kind of dinner and editing in the morning.

What’s the first thing you do when you’ve stopped writing for the day? I love television. There, I said it. I love to watch TV, preferably hour-long dramedies.

In a parallel universe where you’re the tyrant leader of a dystopian civilisation, what’s the first book you’d burn? I loathe the works of James Fenimore Cooper with a white-hot flaming passion, but I’d probably burn The Fountainhead because it appears on the best-books lists of the worst sorts of people. 

What’s the first piece of advice you’d offer to an aspiring novelist? Finish the bitch. You don’t know what you have until you’ve completed a draft. You don’t know what you’re working with. And you don’t want to reject yourself before you give someone else the opportunity to accept your work. Finish the bitch. Finish the bitch. Finish it.

A Certain Hunger is out now published by Faber.