Journalist and broadcaster Ramona Koval presented the Book Show on ABC Radio National from 2006 to 2011. It was the world’s only daily radio program devoted to books, writing and publishing. Koval launched By the Book: A Reader’s Guide to Life, in November. Here she talks about how reading shaped her life, her relationship with her mother and with the world.

ABBW: The voice in By the Book was so personable and friendly. Was it hard to get those first words down on the page that could give you that intimacy?

RK: I went home and looked at the bookshelf and I thought, “Why are these books here?” Given the fact that for the last 25 years I had all these books coming in to my office and I was interviewing people from all walks of life, I thought, “What is it about these books that I’ve brought home? Some categories here are really odd. What are the books about polar exploration for? What about the books about Germany or middle Europe or Hungary or Poland? What are all these languages I’ve tried to learn? And what are all these classics I’ve brought home?”

Then I tried to remember learning to read. And I remembered my mother on the couch and how my vision of her now is of her on the couch. Partly, I think that’s because she was sick and she hadn’t told us. She died when she was 49 of leukaemia and complications after that and I wondered, “How much of her reading on the couch and getting into that space was part of dealing with that?” But who’s to know? So, the vision of her on the couch was what really got me started.

Also, I think if you’re trying to draw people in to something you have to use your voice. It’s a conversation. And I suppose that’s the broadcaster in me, a natural inclination to be intimate.

ABBW: You say in By the Book that the mobile library, Little Golden Books at 25 cents each and your mother’s example all fuelled your childhood reading and, ultimately, your lifelong career. Tell me more.

RK: I remember the moment when I learnt how to read the letter “I”. In By the Book I talk about how I thought it was an “L” and about how I could have been humiliated by that misunderstanding. But I was mostly amazed that this little letter could be the “me-ness” of things — the you and me and I and you — and that brings out the idea that there are other lives that you are learning about. So that’s how it happened.

ABBW: You had that comforting moment in the mobile lending library where you realised it was the right shape and size for you and that it gave you security in reading and great confidence.

RK: That’s right. It wasn’t overwhelming and had just enough books to make you begin with a selection. It was an important place.

ABBW: You asked your father to tell you the story of the golden bird again and again. Was it the story itself or the fact that your father was telling it that was important?

RK: I think it was the story because I wasn’t very close to my father and there were a few moments in my childhood that I remember and that was one … He hasn’t been a very important presence in my life apart from his absence.

Maybe I liked the story because he was paying me attention when he was telling it to me. It was an odd story to tell a child but, as I say in By the Book, it had its uses.

ABBW: The subtitle to your book is “A reader’s guide to life”. It can be hit and miss with reading, can’t it, when it comes to guiding your life?

RK: I’ve always used books in some way to guide my life, to say, “All right look, this is a book about polar exploration — so, how do you function in a landscape that doesn’t provide anything for you but has plenty of ways to kill you. How do you manage that?” Even that silly old Home Management book that has got absolutely everything in it about everything — from candle making to disinterment to patterns for children’s clothes or toys — I’m always thinking, “If all the electricity goes out and we need to start making candles or socks, how will we do that?”

It’s partly an anxiety about making sure that, for anything life throws at you, you will have a book you can go to and you can function. It is an ironic title.

I think in By the Book I write about how many times, if I’d really read carefully the books that I was reading, I might not have made the decisions I did! So, can reading be a guide to life? Perhaps in retrospect it can be, because you never really believe anything is going to happen to you like that.

ABBW: Your mother gave you books and didn’t really talk to you about them and some of them were quite radical. In terms of reading, how has your relationships with your two daughters differed from this?

RK: Yes. It is different. Maybe it’s a reaction to what my own mother did but, you know, kids are kids. My mother was buying my clothes until I was about 17, so I must have been quite malleable. It didn’t matter to me whether I was wearing the latest thing or not. I knew we were poor so I didn’t insist on pocket money or anything like that. So when she went to town once a season and came back because I needed a dress …

ABBW: “Went to town once a season” — is that what used to happen? Really?

RK: That’s right! Once a season, say in summer or winter, when I needed clothes because I was growing, I’d come home from school and there’d be a package from Myer or some other shop and inside was my new dress or my new jeans and that was what I wore. So I didn’t resist her guidance too much. She left books about and I picked them up. She never said, “You have to read this” but it was there and she’d been reading it and, mainly because I wanted to see why she’d been on the couch for all of those hours, I’d open it up and say, “Well this is the world where she was … you’d  meet her in the book in a way.”

My older daughter was naturally inquisitive and academic and she used to read things that I’d say were good books. She was interested in literature so she wasn’t really someone who needed a prod.

My younger daughter, who is now a criminal lawyer, had this big resistance to anything that I suggested she read. She wanted to read the Baby-sitters Club books and Sweet Valley High and I would say to her, “There’s so much that’s good to read, why are you reading this?” And she’d say, “Because it’s what I want to read.”

Then she got interested in politics and she started reading really fat political biographies about Nelson Mandela and JFK. So I think people will read what they’re interested in and discover reading because it will be the door, the little rabbit hole through which they nourish their interests. So I don’t have any worries about her now. I laughed with her, though, when I said, “I’m going to write about Sweet Valley High,” and I noticed that they’d sold absolutely squillions of books — so obviously she’d tapped into the zeitgeist of the times!

ABBW: As Holocaust survivors your mother and father showed amazing resilience. Their narrative connected with you at different times to shape your narrative. Tell me more about this.

RK: Well, they didn’t talk much about their lives so I really had to fill in the gaps myself.

ABBW: In By the Book you say that reading Isaac Bashevis Singer stories also helped to fill in some information.

RK: These stories would’ve taken me back to that time before the war in the sorts of villages where my parents were from. As Holocaust Survivors they were so damaged and they weren’t story-tellers and they weren’t able to tell you things. It was partly because they didn’t want to talk, but they didn’t talk, you know, that [the Holocaust] was the only story they could tell; so what could they tell?

The only time my mother would talk about her childhood was when she was baking. Things took a while to rise, so we could ask her questions then and she’d tell us stories about when she was a little girl or we’d ask “who taught you a particular recipe” or “did you watch your mother doing that” or “what did your grandmother do”. There was a moment of reverie in the kitchen. Those were the times when you could get a little bit of an idea — just occasionally things would be said.

I wrote a novel called Samovar in the mid-nineties about a woman who is having a conversation with the ghost of her dead mother and most of that story was biographical — well, as much as it can be when you don’t really know what the story is. The conversation put into the dead mother’s mouth was completely out of my own head because I’d never had those conversations with my mother. I made an attempt to join the dots.

When you know it’s going to be painful for somebody [to talk] you don’t really press the bruise. There are lots of things I would have liked to ask her. But as Colette says — and I quote Colette in By the Book — even when she was an old lady she was still writing about her mother. Colette had written about the powerful influence of her mother all her life but felt she hadn’t exhausted it.

ABBW: At one stage as a child you had a sense that you caused your parents’ unhappiness. Do you think reading can ameliorate guilt?

RK: Yes. All kids have that sense that if things aren’t right it must be because they’ve done something. When you start to read about other unhappy families there’s an omniscient narrator that can tell you a certain character has flaws and this character is behaving in a way that is disapproved of by the text. So your child’s-eye view is incorporated into the view of the narrator, who says to you, “You know, you may not be wrong about this. You could be in that situation where you’re actually an innocent, and it’s these people, these big people who are behaving in a way that has really got nothing to do with what you’re doing or saying or thinking. They’re quite independent to that.”

For me, reading was quite an eye-opener — that these worlds could be like this and your experience could be part of the bigger experience. Well, how else are you going to know if you’re in an isolated family and there are no cousins and no uncles and aunts and no grandparents? We were in little tiny islands, and there were other families like ours because my parents were friends with them, thankfully, or they had friends who came over on the same boat to Australia, but they weren’t talking much either because they were a whole damaged generation.

When I was at university, it was amazing because there were a lot of kids like me who were from those kinds of families and I never asked them about who their parents were or what it was like for them growing up. When you go to university you’re trying to forget everything about your family; so we didn’t come from any families, we were independent grown-ups! It was only later reading people like Lily Brett or Arnold Zable, or some of those who were a bit older than me, that I discovered things were happening in their families, too, but nobody spoke about it. It was before consciousness-raising groups and before Oprah.

ABBW: They didn’t speak about a lot of things did they?

RK: It was a very repressive time in Australia. My mother had all kinds of adventures before coming to Australia while she was in Paris and she was married to my father. But she was unhappy. Also, she spent nine years before she got pregnant with us — so she was infertile for a long time and I think, post-war, a lot of people were. I think she had this idea that her parents were dead, she was unhappily married, so what was there in life but to take pleasure where you could? So she’s reading all of these banned books and she’s reading all of these feminist books and quietly stewing.

ABBW: It seems in reading there’s an irrepressible hope. Even people who have been through the horrors of the Holocaust are still willing to read books to say the world can change.

RK: She was influenced by Alvin Toffler and all of the shape-makers and waste-makers and all of the sociology of that time, looking at The Third Wave, looking at what might happen in the future. She was interested in the future and she was interested in the changing roles for women. When my father left, we knew she had leukaemia, but she was hopeful. She didn’t really talk about her illness much to us, but she was still hopeful that she would begin to live again. She died that year. She died in October of that year. He left at Christmas the year before and I remember in January she was saying, “Well, okay.” She’d bought her little property years and years before with the compensation money she got as a Holocaust survivor. Just that year, it had just been paid off so that she began to get a trickle of rent from this place just as he left. So that was her very small income and then her illness just overtook her and she went. So it was sad, and I still feel sad for her because she was always just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Born in the wrong place, born at the wrong time and nothing was fair. And we’re just lucky we’re here and not in Haiti. Who’s to say we’re not going to be born in Haiti or in Mongolia or somewhere, you know?

ABBW: Along with By the Book, have you got three or four books that you’d recommend to people who read this interview?

RK: People are always coming up to me and asking, “What should I read?” And I have to say to them, “Well what do you like? What did you last love?” I do that because I wouldn’t want to disappoint. I mean, sometimes I pick up a book and it’s not me and I know it’s a good book, and someone else loves it, but I just I can’t get into it and I don’t like the voice or I don’t like the filigree nature of it, or I’m just impatient that week and I can’t bear it. But if I was somewhere else and I had more time, or if I hadn’t just read a book exactly like it, I might pick it up and say, “This is my favourite book.”

ABBW: You are friends with some of the greatest writers in the world.

RK: Well I’ve met some terrific people …

ABBW: I’m very jealous that you know Eliot Weinberger. I think he is a magnificent writer and a great person.

RK: He is. And I was just talking about him when you came in!

ABBW:  Really?

RK: I think he’s fantastic and I love him. He sees things and has a wonderful way of summarising them. Have you read his essays? Aren’t they brilliant?

ABBW: They are brilliant.

RK: As well as the one about the Icelandic sagas and dreams there’s this other little one about Iceland, about this place where there are limited choices. There’s one pop star, you can only have the salmon or the reindeer, there’s one kind of ice cream. It’s just such a simple society compared to America. But he says he’s completely unimaginative and he just writes what he finds.

ABBW: He’s the best synthesiser of strange and interesting facts, isn’t he?

RK: Exactly. But he’s also a poet; the way he puts his essays together and knows about poetry. He was Octavio Paz’s translator when he was 19. When he was 14 Eliot taught himself how to translate from Spanish by reading what Octavio Paz wrote. At one point he sent him a translation and Paz said, “Oh you must be my translator, come and visit me. And this 19-year-old kid turns up and he gave him the job! For years he used to do this double act of going around with Octavio Paz on stage and translating for him.

ABBW: Have you got any other favourites you’ve interviewed?

RK: Just sometimes when you interview someone you think they’re the real thing. There are others you interview and think, “Well you’re a good middle-order batsman. Or you’re doing a workmanlike job or an artisanal job.” But sometimes you meet people and you say, “You have the soul of a writer. You have a way of understanding the world which is original.” You don’t meet those people all that often. There’s a Scottish writer called A. L. Kennedy, Alison Kennedy, do you know her?

ABBW: I’ve read her books but I’ve never heard her speak but she must be wonderful because her books are layered …

RK: And complex and disturbing. And she’s like that, she’s lovely. I met her in Edinburgh. There’s also the Israeli writer Etgar Keret: What an imagination!

ABBW: I know!

RK: So sweet and bitter and revelatory …

Like, what if there was a zip under the tongue of your friend or your lover or something and you could turn them inside out and then a completely different person would pop out? Or in another story there’s a young man who has an army buddy who turned into the most wonderful girl he was in love with. During the day he would be the army buddy but at night he would be this wonderful girl.

ABBW: You interviewed Edward De Waal the potter and author who wrote The Hare with Amber Eyes, didn’t you?

RK: It’s a marvellous story, isn’t it? I mean, stories like that don’t come along all the time.

ABBW: In By the Book you recount how Jeanette Winterson’s adoptive mother found her books hidden under the mattress and burned them in the yard. Have you ever burned a book?

RK: No. I’m not a book burner. And I don’t think banning books is a good idea. But talking about good books is a good idea and encouraging people to read things that you think are good for them, and that they will enjoy, is good. If you ban things you never find out what people are capable of thinking and seeing and doing — and that’s part of the story of that human being. I know there is hate speech and there are hateful books, and I know you always have to argue from the most heinous, terrible thing, but I still don’t believe in banning books. Some of the people who talk about institutions say that if the institutions of a particular place are working properly — like the courts and the police and the education system and schools and hospitals — then people get attached to a society that works well, and they’re not going to be attracted to the fringes in the way that they might be if everything else was in ruins. Possibly it’s like that with writing and reading and cultural things, too. If you offer people things that are enriching they might go less for things that are degrading.

ABBW: Your book is a beautiful artefact isn’t it? It’s just stunning.

RK: Every time I see it I think it’s just beautiful. Look at all these end pages with the bees and the space here you can put your name in.

ABBW: Do you think books like this, produced with such care, are a dying breed?

RK: I hope not. I was really surprised at how beautiful it was, and that it was a hardback. I hope people will give it to each other this Christmas, because it is so lovely.

I still think it’s a beautiful thing to hold a book in your hand, and to know where you are up to in it. There have been so many times I’ve downloaded books on a Kindle or an iPad, and I’ve been thinking, “Oh, these are all the free books. Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice — I should really read that again — and all the good ones I haven’t read. They’re all there, and I’ve never opened them. I forget about them. Even things I’ve paid for. And I might just look at the [small] bit of these e-books I need to look at. But you don’t have them singing at you from your shelf saying, “Oh, you bought me, you read me now.”

ABBW: “Stop neglecting me!”

RK: That’s right.

ABBW: I found your story about the books covered in wax eerie and evocative. If you did crack those books open, what would you most hope was inside them?

RK: I would hope for poetry.

ABBW: Any particular poet?

RK: No, I don’t know. They’re quite old. Poetry’s like a coded language, isn’t it? And I think there might be simple lines and depth charges. But what are the chances of that? I mean, my artist friend must have got them from odd shops and places that were just selling old books for a dollar or a dollar a box. I think the wax books are where this image of the bees comes from on the cover of By the Book but also the image of the bee that goes from place to place.

ABBW: Alighting on flowers and cross-pollinating …

RK: And making honey — which is completely different from anything that was in those flowers. But [with reading] it’s making your own honey for yourself in a way, or to give to others like …Well, I suppose the bees don’t eat their own honey do they? What do they eat? How does it work? I should actually Google it!

I know with bees you have to dress up and you have to smoke them, and it’s a complex thing, and they can sting you, but the honey is so important.

When I was in Central Australia, I went gathering with some indigenous women. The men were off shooting kangaroos out of cars and the women took me digging for honey ants. It took about three hours to dig this hole under this particular tree and you had to look for these indicator ants. If they’re under the tree then they’re actually going into the hive, and the hive is underground. You dig maybe two metres down, and the women were digging and digging, these old ladies, and you’d get these levels of striated holes right out of the ground and on the very top of the holes — this was all in the dark — they would be in the dark. The women got a stick and they’d run the stick over the underside of the little cave and all these ants would fall down into their hands, and these ants have these tiny bodies with these abdomens full of honey, and you only get a cupful for about three hours digging.

So you hold the ant in your hand like that, alive, and you bite off its abdomen and there’s an acrid, formic acid taste and then your mouth fills up with honey, and that’s the honey ant. But you know you don’t have much of it, because it’s a lot of effort, but everyone loves it.

ABBW: How would you describe your relationship to Judaism and spirituality now?

RK: Well I’m attached to the culture. I’m attached to the best of it because it might connect me with a history. I’m attached to Yiddish, the language, and it is one of the languages I’ve tried to learn, and I like to hear people speak it. One of my daughters — the one with three children — is married to an Orthodox Jewish boy and my other daughter is married to an Aboriginal-Asian-Anglo young man. As Judaism is all matrilineal, all the grandchildren are Jewish and my Aboriginal son-in-law has been learning Hebrew and he bones up on all the questions. So we have an Orthodox part of the family and my grandchildren from my Aboriginal son-in-law they go to a Yiddish-speaking kindergarten which is secular because my daughter, his wife, is not really religious at all. The other kids go to an Orthodox kindergarten. Anyway it’s all sort of mixed up. But the basic thing is that I have a kosher home because I believe that everyone should be able to eat together and I wouldn’t like my grandchildren to not be able to eat at their grandmother’s place because it wasn’t kosher enough! So I found myself later in life at the kosher butcher’s queuing up. But my relationship with God is, well, I wouldn’t say it’s absent but I would say it’s attenuated.

Read the review of By the Book: A Reader’s Guide to Life.