Sarah Jessica Parker Describes Her Year as a Booker Prize Judge

Three years ago, Sarah Jessica Parker posted a plea on the Booker Prize’s Instagram page. She wanted to judge the prestigious award. “Oh let me try!!!!” she said.

Now, the actor and publisher has done just that. On Monday night in London, Parker pushed herself out of her seat to get a clear view as David Szalay, the author of the winning novel “Flesh,” rushed onstage to collect the Booker Prize.

Parker said she and her fellow judges had chosen the novel, a rags-to-riches tale of a taciturn Hungarian teenager who rises to heights of British society, after a five-hour-plus meeting in London. “Flesh” was “singular, exciting, propulsive, emotional,” she said, sounding almost gleeful.

Winning the Booker Prize is a life-changing experience for an author. Sales blow up. Demands for interviews pour in. But Parker, who oversees a literary imprint at Zando, said that being a judge was just as life-changing. The process altered her reading habits, she said, made her question how she judged fiction and gave her the confidence to argue for novels she loved.

Now that it’s over, she’ll be able once again take part in movie nights, theater trips and family dinners with her husband, Matthew Broderick, and their children. And the five judges have formed a book group so they could keep reading together, Parker said.

But she is sad, too. “I was looking up Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of loss, and they’re denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance,” she added. “I can’t figure out where I am, but I’m not at acceptance, I can tell you that much.”

It was the “experience of a lifetime,” Parker said repeatedly during four interviews this past year tracking her time judging the award. Here are edited excerpts from the interviews. — Alex Marshall

The first books arrive

We were in rural Ireland for a Christmas holiday and I was on my way to SuperValu, our local market, when I saw a friend going the other way, and knew in the back of their car was this box from Booker with the first 16 titles.

I rushed back and opened the box with my husband and I couldn’t believe some of the authors. These were familiar names. For a reader as greedy as I am, it felt like winning the lottery.

Immediately, I started reading. I know exactly where I was sitting. I remember my family leaving, coming back, leaving, coming back. Days might have passed!

“Flesh” was in there. “The Land in Winter,” that was too. I remember reaching out to Gaby, the Booker Prize’s organizer, and saying, “Have you read ‘The Land in Winter’ yet? This book is really special. It’s so atmospheric and it has a kind of elegance to it.”

Family takes a back seat

My husband and children knew what this meant. No one tried to compete with the Booker. Anytime after dinner, when there was a discussion about what movie to watch, no one asked me. Everybody knew what I would be doing. My husband soon stopped asking if I wanted to see this play or that musical or this show Off Broadway.

I was able to be there for the necessary, but if I was at a volleyball game, I sure as hell had a book on my lap, which I was also very nervous about doing because I didn’t want anyone to see what I was reading.

I was hypervigilant about that. I took all the covers off.

Reading habits change

I mainly read in this room in our New York home that I call my office, but it’s more like a depository: Everything goes into that room, including conversations, and there’s chairs but everybody sits on the floor.

My family would walk by — I’d keep the door open as it was too lonely to close — and probably by March they would hear this sound: my finger on the page, moving through paragraphs. My fingers started guiding me. It was really unplanned. I don’t know where that came from.

It was lonely, which gave me some insight into what it must be to be a writer, which I always assumed was a solitary affair. And because we were reading in such volume and there was such an intensity to the reading, I couldn’t listen to any music that I normally would: Nothing that might provoke singing along. So I started listening to music that I didn’t know at all: Tibetan music, Ukrainian music, Nigerian music, Kenyan music, old ’60s Cuban music. And it was really cool and exciting and changed the entire tone of the room. It created a buoyancy around the whole thing.

Giving each book a “traffic light rating”

I never understood a spreadsheet before judging the Booker, and I never cared to learn, but we used them so much.

About 24 to 48 hours before deliberations, we’d send in traffic light ratings for each book we’d read. Red was for books we felt shouldn’t move forward, amber was for books we believed worthy of discussion, and green for books that we felt were immediately deserving.

And the first time I did that this, I was absolutely terrified. I spent enormous amounts of time trying to understand my own criteria.

I was quite generous with the greens.

At our first meeting, I was so scared about talking about books with the other judges. These were Booker winners, long- or shortlisted authors, or people like Chris Power — professionals who spend their time critiquing, thinking and writing about books.

But we discussed David Szalay’s “Flesh,” and after that first conversation I felt so much more comfortable. It wasn’t intimidating. I didn’t feel like I was defending my thesis. The theoretical, like many things in life, is much more scary than opening your mouth, and if someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

“And Just Like That …” intrudes

There was a month when I think we had to read, like, 34 books and the math wasn’t, as they say, mathing.

It was particularly busy time because I was doing press for “And Just Like That …” so I’d have a book on my lap during these press junkets, and it was bananas because there was no way I was going to read between one interviewer standing up to leave and someone new walking in. The gap was maybe eight seconds!

So I didn’t get any reading done for four or five days, and I was really panicked because the last thing I wanted to do was rush books. So I just didn’t sleep.

Learning when to quit, sort of

For me as a reader, the idea of not finishing a book, I just really, really struggle with. But with the Booker, you sort of have to adopt a brutality, because if you’re on Page 110 and you’re waiting for the book to rise ….

Occasionally when I would be reading something, I would reach out to Roddy [Doyle, the judging panel chairman] and say, “Have you touched on this book yet? Here are my feelings about it, but it’s possible I’m spot-on wrong.” And he would write back on WhatsApp and say, “You’re not, I just put that book down, too.”

But I ended up picking everything back up, because I was so afraid: What if we got into a discussion, and Kiley [Reid] or one of the other judges felt really strongly that it was exciting, and I hadn’t read the entire book? I wouldn’t be able to talk about it!

It scared me too much not to complete.

Losing out on favorites

Our second meeting was on Zoom. I pushed for two books by debut authors and neither made the list.

I felt, in retrospect, I wasn’t prepared as I could have been.

What became really important for me was to remember the ways in which my fellow jurors looked at books and the things they might object to. In some instances, they were factually spot on: Dates are wrong, regions are wrong, politics in a time and a place are not accurately portrayed. My argument would then be, is that purposeful?

But that discussion wasn’t an indictment. No one was attacking me and saying, “You’re wrong.” They were just disagreeing for reasons that were as valid to them as mine were that the books were beautiful. It was really good for me.

The agony of the longlist

Creating the longlist was absolute agony. AG-ON-Y! I can’t tell you how many times I looked around that table and saw people with their heads in their hands.

One hundred and fifty-three books and we had to choose 13. It’s just … impossible.

We met at 10:30 a.m. in a room in Fortnum & Mason in London and finished at 5 p.m. It was the final two books that were difficult. We had one list and were 3-2 in favor of the books I wanted. Then someone needed to use the bathroom. We took a quick five-minute break and something in me said, “This list is going to change,” and a juror came back and said, “I’ve changed my mind.”

Oh my God, no! I knew it. We should have locked everybody down: “No bathroom breaks! Nobody touch any liquids!”

There’s so many books that I’m heartbroken are not on the list, but there’s nothing you can do. You’ve made your best arguments, you’ve thrown yourself in front of the court.

Rereading the nominees

On July 14, we finished the longlist deliberation. Then on July 15, I went to Ireland where I was going to meet my family and thought, “Oh, I have a little break from the Booker. I’m going to read a book outside of this chapter of my life.”

Taking time to slow down

I never reread books. The only books I’ve ever reread are “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” and that’s because I first read them so young.

But now, I would be on the side of rereading because doing it to choose the shortlist was a huge lesson. I had such a different experience with these books. Sometimes it was as if someone finally took me out of a dark room. I was like, “Oh! I’m discovering new things.”

I think that’s because when we were reading the first time, the volume was so intense, we needed to read so rapidly. But with the shortlisting, we actually had time. I slowed down. I made notes. I thought about things I didn’t recognize the first time, like form, or structure, or even words, these wonderful and surprising choices.

A surprise birth

Literally like three days before the shortlist deliberations, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ,̀ my fellow juror, had a baby! So the next group of jurors really should know it’s a full term.

A “sense of grief” after shortlisting

Before the shortlist meeting, we were all feeling this joyful anxiety. Everybody was talking in advance in our WhatsApp group — “Counting down! Can’t wait!” — trying to get some information from each other, but also not really wanting any because it’s a cliffhanger.

We were doing the shortlist meeting on Zoom and I was in New York in my office, sitting there waiting. And I had my stack ready — the six books I wanted to choose — but I moved it out of the lens because I didn’t want to set the table for a conversation that shouldn’t yet be had.

And it was five hours, but it was so wonderful. Books came, they went, they were there, they weren’t. You’d think a book would have this robust support and then you found people talking about it differently than they had before.

It was so hard to lose books. And we all lost books. There was a real sense of grief. But then Roddy said, “This is it. These are the six books. Are we sure?”And I felt really good. I looked at them and thought, “I think we’ve done our job.”

This is the kind of writing we should be celebrating, and these are the kinds of authors we should be announcing to the world.

Fangirling the authors

There was a party after we announced the shortlist and it was great: I got to meet Benjamin Wood, Ben Markovits and Andrew Miller. I don’t know that I would have been bold enough to just walk up to them and introduce myself, but luckily their agents found me.

I thought I might not have this occasion again, so I wanted to tell them just what these books meant to us. With Ben Markovits, I was quoting some of his lines back to him, which was so juvenile of me. Later on, I said to myself, “I cannot believe you said to him, ‘You remember?’” Who wouldn’t someone remember a line that they had written!

Becoming a more demanding reader

When we finished the shortlist, I started reading other books again that day, because I had so many manuscripts for my imprint that were urgent because the books were going to auction.

I found I’m far harder on books now. I expect more, and I know it can be achieved because I’ve just read 153 books and a lot of them were great.

I think that’s good for me, because I have such a sentimental streak about writers. I have so much admiration for them.

Choosing a winner

We met on Saturday. And before, I was feeling incredibly excited. I had no certainty about where we might land. There hadn’t been a lot of texting between us judges and I wondered if that was because the others were experiencing what I was: one day thinking you’d arrived at a winner, and moments later talking yourself out of that book.

We talked for over five hours. The first part was just discussing the virtues of each book again: Why was this book here? What did we discover rereading them? Nothing negative allowed.

Then, we put them in order until Roddy said, “We have a winner.” And I was like, “Oh! We do?” For some reason, in all my pondering, I had never thought of him saying those words.

And we sat for a second, then thought, “Gosh, we’re really proud of this.”

Still doing “that thing with my finger”

I’m already reading again. I’ve just read “This Is Where the Serpent Lives,” coming out next year. And I finished the new Patrick Radden Keefe book. But the other day, my husband, daughter and I, we were on a train visiting colleges and I felt them exchange looks because I was doing that thing with my finger where I move it along the page to read fast. And I realized, “Oh my God, I don’t have to do this anymore. I don’t have to read like that. I can actually slow down.”