Julia Kerninon

Translated by Ruth Diver

Published 5 August 2020

A Tatler’s Best Summer Books of 2020

‘The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,’ Hemingway famously said. Julia Kerninon, one of France’s most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. Her journey through her formative years entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, resulting in a vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a ‘respectable occupation’), peppered with portraits of her disjointed yet loving family. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside café on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a fluid, feminine answer to A Moveable Feast

‘A fiery gem of a book.’ — Christopher Reid, poet and editor of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters and the Selected Letters of Seamus Heaney.

‘The greatest writers are also the greatest readers. Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Jeanette Winterson – they all read, as Woolf put it, “to refresh and exercise [their] own creative powers.” They can’t stop themselves from writing about reading. They have origin stories of how reading and writing became as necessary as breathing. Julia Kerninon’s A Respectable Occupation joins the shelf of these biblioautobiographies; books on how writers crave books, how books beget books, how tricky it is to move from the position of the reader to that of the writer, and stand there feeling you’ve earned the right to call yourself, finally, a writer.’ — Lauren Elkin , from her foreword

80 pages
paperback, 170 x 135 mm
isbn 978-1-9993318-1-8

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