Madeline Miller: ‘A woman’s life gets to be just as epic as a man’s’

‘I loved the psychological realism … the relationships between the mothers and daughters were so beautifully drawn, so razor sharp … [Tan] isn’t afraid to show us the complexity of their difficulty, their trauma, but also this warmth and this real understanding and empathy for their life.’

‘The way [Thompson] wrote the scenes, the humour she brought in, the psychology, the acuity, the incredibly wonderful encapsulating of whole long scenes in just a few lines of back and forth, was so exciting to me … It felt like a masterclass in adaptation.’

‘When I started reading it, it was that wonderful feeling when you think “oh my gosh, I’m gonna love this book” … It’s a story about found family – the idea that even if we don’t have family, there are families out there in the world where we can really be ourselves. And I think that part of the story really spoke to me.’

‘You can’t just have unrelenting misery. That doesn’t really reflect human experience. Even in incredibly hard times, there’s always the wryness, the absurdity, the fun. So I love the richness of the tapestry that [Ephron] weaves in, and I try to bring that into my own work, even though I’m not the queen of zingers like Nora.’

‘This book was an absolute revelation to me when I was in high school … I was blown away by the scope of it – the generations, the family drama, the family relationships, the love, the epic nature of people’s experiences was really gripping. I felt immersed in these families and in these people’s lives.’