Val McDermid on her childhood love of libraries

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  Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is Desert Island Discs Postcards,

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  a collection of funny and heartwarming moments from some of our many castaways.

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  Today's castaway is the Scottish writer Val McDermid who spoke to Kirsty Young about her childhood love of libraries back in 2013.

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  I just worked my way round the fiction shelves and although you could take four books out at a time,

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  two of them had to be non-fiction.

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  As heaven for a friend, you should just have unmitigated pleasure.

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  So I was reading really anything I could get my hands on and the library did become my second home.

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  Growing up in Fife you've said that you felt different from other people.

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  Can you articulate that feeling?

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  I felt like an outsider.

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  I didn't feel that my concerns were the same as the concerns of my contemporaries.

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  I grew up in and I went to a school that was very strongly academic but Fife was in many ways quite a parochial,

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  quite a closed world and generally speaking in Fife

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  if you were bright you went to Edinburgh or St Andrews University and

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  if you weren't quite so bright you went to Dundee or Stirling and then you came back to Fife probably 85-90% of the people who taught me were from Fife and I wanted something beyond those horizons but I just assumed that was

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  because the one thing I really wanted was to be a writer.

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  Because in the 1960s and fife there were no lesbians.

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  They didn't exist.

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  It wasn't even a word that crossed people's horizon really.

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  So I had no way of realising what my sexuality was and what that meant for me.

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