Safe Spaces: An Exclusive Guest Post From Francesca May, Author of Wild and Wicked Things

I have wanted to be a bookseller ever since I found out my home branch of Waterstones existed. It’s beautiful and looks exactly how a book shop should look: it’s got a spiral staircase with a mezzanine, walls lined with shelves, and is both bright and open and filled with nooks and crannies to get lost in. Even thirteen-year-old me knew that this was a very special place. 

When I applied for the job, new vacancies were rarely been posted. My branch was, and is still, known for keeping its staff. Now that I’ve been there six and a half years, I know why: it feels, in some ways, like home. It’s not perfect, of course—after all retail rarely is—but it is mine.  

I know I’m very lucky, but my positive experience has taught me that book shops feel like a safe space for more people than just me. They feel, for a lot of customers, a little bit like home. Any book lover will agree with the regular refrain: “Ah, the smell of a book shop. You can’t beat it!”  

My theory, though, is it isn’t just about the comforting presence of the books: it’s also about the people who live and breathe them, and offer them to those who need them. It’s about the booksellers. 

The autumn I began working for Waterstones, I started with another temp. Although we had different backgrounds, we enjoyed working together a lot. We watched wildly different sorts of films and shows, read different books, had different hobbies…but it didn’t matter because we both shared that same bookish passion. And this is important because books, I think, do more than just make you “smart.” They can make you empathetic, open-minded, and bridge gaps between people. 

When my colleague very sadly passed away, his death hit me hard because it wasn’t just losing a colleague. It was losing a friend. Some days I took comfort in the scrawl of his handwriting on a Recommends cards, and others I was heartened by a new delivery of a favoured book (he was particularly partial to Elizabeth Strout).  

Around this time, I began to write the novel that was to become Wild and Wicked Things, a gothic, stormy book filled with mortality and morality, with themes of belonging and found family. It was a queer narrative that felt very close to my heart. 

But there was more to it than just being a queer book of self-discovery; the themes of belonging and found family, I soon realised, were things that my time bookselling has always made me feel. Bookselling is an occupation, but it can be so much more than that. It is a passion, and I think the people who champion books every day, who learn to grow and change to reflect the wants and needs of their customers, are the people who contribute to book shops as safe spaces, just like my colleague did.  

So, I talk about him, regularly share his favourite books with pride, and thank bookselling, and my friend, every day for helping me to be empathetic and open-minded too.