Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Top Doll: a reading list

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s Top Doll is an experimental, polyvocal verse novel inspired by the life of reclusive American multimillionaire Huguette Clarke who died in New York age 104. Clarke was a hermit who spent her life surrounded by her vast collection of dolls. In this highly unreliable, semi-fictional diminutive epic, the dolls tell all. Theirs is a tale that takes us from their lavish Park Avenue home back in time to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan via the addictive hedonism of 1930s queer LA. Here, McCarthy Woolf talks us through some of the books that inspired and informed her T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted novel.

When I read Huguette Clarke’s obituary I was hooked. Imagine living for almost all the 20th Century, but barely stepping foot outdoors. Who was this woman and more importantly, who were her dolls? Dolls embody our desires, they live in miniature worlds that allow us to exercise complete control over a narrative that may be very different from our reality. They are passive, compliant, escapist and inert; but paradoxically intensely alive, at least in the realm of the imagination. We tell them our secrets, our dreams. Antique porcelain dolls are highly collectable, and as archetypes they embody white fragility, entitlement and, with that, notions of race and class hierarchies. There’s something hysterical, absurd and yet oddly endearing about Dolly, a china doll who is the book’s protagonist and ends up in rehab after one bender too many in Barbieville’s discotheque. Her counterpart is The General, an African American rag doll dating back to the American Civil War, who has lived a long and colourful life, is plagued by various slobbering, farting dogs, and is writing his somewhat grandiose memoirs. I wanted to lean in to a sense of the ridiculous, tonally, through heightened registers, satire and contradictory POVs, and yet also to bear witness in telling the story of America from multiple characters who reflect and critique its realities as a colonial settler nation and capitalist behemoth. One review termed it ‘unhinged’: that felt about right.

The Vivien Greene Dolls’ House Collection by Vivien Greene, Margaret Towner & Nick Nicholson
I acquired this book many years ago and never quite knew why, other than I found its ornate domestic interiors inexplicably compelling. Vivien Greene was Graham Greene’s wife and widow. She was a Catholic, who provoked his religious conversion and endured his marital infidelity, which came to light dramatically when their family home in Clapham was destroyed in the Blitz, an event which Greene gives account of in his semi-autobiographical novel The End of the Affair. I also used this book as a visual template, and cherry blossom powder, the magical substance to which the dolls become quite partial, was something I saw in one of the tableaux. There’s something very poignant about the attention to detail, in how Greene creates a seemingly perfect world that was asymmetric to her own; how the dolls’ house is often slightly skew-whiff, with wallpapers that have huge flowers, or oversized cats lazing in baskets. These distortions in scale mirror the emotions in Top Doll which are often disproportionate and silly.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass
Douglass’s account of how he transcended both individual and institutional violence to gain his freedom is unflinching. As an autobiography it’s emblematic to the struggle for abolition and liberation. There are moments that remain chilling in their contemporary relevance. In Top Doll, The General’s memoirs are highly stylised, floral and satirically embellished, and nothing like Douglass’s clear, succinct prose. But in both, the power of literacy, as a means by which to bear witness and to effect change in the world, is talismanic.

Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart by William Boyd
This fictional diary sprawls across the 20th century, taking its author from a life of glamorous, wealthy entitlement in the roaring twenties to a far leaner, more isolated maturity. It’s hilarious and every event, whether it’s meeting Picasso or watching his career as a published author dwindle, feels excruciatingly real – perhaps because Logan always errs on the side of being a total bitch. Andy Warhol’s real-life diaries are equally, if not more, candid, at least in their assessment of his friends and acquaintances.

The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion by Kei Miller
Miller’s poems explore the tensions between Western and indigenous knowledge systems and the skews of the colonial paradigm. In academic terms we might think of the dialectic; in Jamaica it’s called ‘reasoning’, where folk, often but not exclusively men, sit up late into the night to argue the toss and put the world to rights. It takes me back to my father’s living room, where he always kept an open house for this very purpose. In Top Doll, Miss Ting is a rag doll who gives tea leaf and tarot readings, wines to Shabba Ranks and speaks in the Jamaican patois I heard at home

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück
Does God exist, and is he, she or it immanent, transcendent, or both? That’s the big, knotty question, and it’s the flowers, horizon, wind and seasons who respond directly to the poet/speaker’s frequent and melancholic enquiries. These uncompromising, ascetic and sublimely numinous persona poems gave me permission to let the dolls speak their own minds, to the reader and to each other.

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
Orlando shapeshifts across time, place and gender identities. It’s surprisingly funny and a book where anything seems possible. The often idiotic protagonist is reincarnated repeatedly and their deepest relationship is with an oak tree. The novel opens with a teenage Orlando attacking a withered and decapitated Moor’s head with their sword in the attic of the family residence, a scene which is notably absent from the film starring Tilda Swinton. I rewrote a chapter for a radio drama from the perspective of the disembodied head and it’s these kinds of reversals that interest me.

Olio by Tyeimba Jess
The sonnet sequence is reconfigured and deployed by various characters from the African American blues and vaudeville tradition. It’s a formal masterwork that brings a rare, poetic insight into a neglected history that takes us from the Civil War era to the First World War.

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier
Long Soldier takes the US to task for its genocidal origins via a series of intertextual and poetic interventions. Her poem ‘38’ relates the story of the Dakota 38 and the largest mass execution in US history, which Abraham Lincoln authorised in 1862, in the same week he became a political ‘hero’ when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. How this bitter irony unfolds in the narrative is genius and its significance in terms of what metaphor is and can be is mindblowing. It brings new meaning to the phrase poetic justice.