Book person

Reading all the time with little bits of life in between

Not ten minutes into arriving and settling on a wide, comfy cream-coloured couch in Paige Nick’s home, she has already jumped up and fetched a book and put it in my hands to take home.

If I was a drug addict, Paige would be my pusher.

I can’t remember how we became more friendly than I generally allow myself to become with other South African writers, but I can see why it happened. As the editor of the Cape Times books pages I always ducked the easy chumminess between writers – which could feel false – and the writerly appetite for the inside edge on others’ business. The habit stuck.

But with Paige it was different. I sense no ‘graspiness’, no manufactured matey-ness. What ambition she has is contained within the bounds of what she can achieve off her own bat, not what others can do for her.

It’s not surprising to me that the books Paige Nick has written are stacked haphazardly and without fanfare beside and on top of other authors on her bookshelves. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

She and I are not good friends and yet, just before lockdown, she drove past my home to deliver a little pile of books to see me through. I have never left her company without books in my hand. Perhaps the real and only reason things are easy with Paige is because we are both book people of a certain kind: we don’t just read; we live inside books slightly more than we live inside life.

Now, on this sunny Friday, for the first time in a long time, we are seeing one another IRL and I am using the publication of her new novel Book People as the excuse to ask her things. She is, after all, also the head honcho and myn konyn of the The Good Book Appreciation Society and I have always been intrigued by people who run big, fat social media groups for the love of it. Because you need rhinoceros skin for that shit.

Interviewing Paige is not particularly easy.