Claire Kilroy: ‘My moral compass has turned 180 degrees on Lolita’

My earliest reading memory
Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty when I was about eight or nine, sitting in the back of my mother’s parked Mini one hot summer’s day, my legs burning on the red vinyl seat, and bawling because they were putting the bearing rein on Ginger. I learned two things: empathy for living creatures and the power of the first-person narrator.

My favourite book as a child
Marvin K Mooney Will You Please Go Now! by Dr Seuss . I used to play it like a game, sliding up and down the various crazy contraptions with Marvin. It never got old. But I did.

The book that changed me as a teenager
There were a few but I’ll say James Joyce’s Ulysses because it was so connected to my sense of self worth. Ireland felt like a hopeless place when I was growing up. Our geography book taught us that we were the sick man of Europe. My generation, like all the generations before me, was raised for export. We were cheap labour, of little worth. But we could write. We were artists. Art may have been all we had, but what a thing to have.

The writer who changed my mind
I’m not a black and white person, I don’t adopt fixed positions, so I’m not sure I have a mind to be changed so much as illuminated. Beloved by Toni Morrison is incredible. It dramatises – literally – the psychic violence and intergenerational trauma that can be wreaked upon a people.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t remember ever not wanting to be a writer but I do remember a person I knew publishing a book and saying to me, “If I can do this, anyone can.” And I thought, “Well, that’s true … ”

The book I reread
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I first read it at 16 and cannot overstate the impact the prose had on me. That beginning! That middle! That end! I have read it five or six times now and it charts the 180-degree turn my moral compass has performed. At 16, I was cheering on the love story. Now, I read it as the slow assassination of a child.

The authors I could never read again
I dutifully read too many of those entrants to the Great American Novel competition – I’m thinking of Philip Roth and John Updike in particular. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed or even particularly admired them when I was younger but my position has definitely hardened against them. They hoovered up all the attention. Everyone was reading Milan Kundera in the 90s and saying he was amazeballs. His depiction of women creeped me out, and not in a Martin Amis way where the point is that this guy is a creep.

The book I discovered later in life
AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. I didn’t read it as a child. However, I read it to my own child thinking it was going to be a cute story about forest animals but wow, yeah, I had to choke out that last page.

The book I am currently reading
Liars by Sarah Manguso. Manguso presents a multitude of clipped, precise observations of a toxic marriage, not complete scenes or set pieces in themselves but literary pointillism, so that when you step back and behold the whole picture … Jesus, Semtex in a book jacket.

My comfort read
The Collected Poems of WB Yeats. Again, connected to the idealism of youth and the discovery of this path that saved me from emigration or book-keeping or whatever girls like me were supposed to do, but now his words are even more of a comfort. How terrifyingly easy it is to lose your self in middle age. I recite a few lines to calm myself at times of stress and distress: “Love fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead, and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

• Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy is published in paperback by Faber (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.