It was my pleasure to meet with Linda Grant and hear her talk in Fowey backalong ( as us sez down y'ere) and I am very grateful that Linda has taken some time off from her next novel to do dovegrey reader asks...
As you will see Linda said something that really resonated with me during her Fowey talk and which has opened up new and even more vivid understandings for me about her latest novel We Had it So Good. One of those books that is really good value, a great read that has stayed, shifted my focus and has added to my thinking at every level.
Linda, very simply...why this book, why now?
I don't begin with an idea for a novel, but there are certain thoughts which have often been in my mind for several years which come together, coalesce as plausibly something which might become a novel. It;'s usually a flash-bang while I'm filling the kettle. That's a novel! I'd been quite preoccupied in a more political sense since the day after 9/11, when I was fifty, with the thought that here we were, a generation which in Britain at least, had enjoyed unparalleled prosperity and peace, free from being clouted round the head by the forces of history, as our parents had been. I felt certain, that day, that London would be next. I expected a major bombing within the next month or two. In fact it took another six years and was far smaller in scale than the attack on America. Yet still I kept thinking about my charmed generation, our great good fortune and when it would come to an end.
In 2005, a rather distinguished looking man in a very good suit came over to me at a party and said he thought we'd been at the same university at the same time. We had indeed, and better than that, I remembered him when he told me that he and a group of other students, living in a commune out in the country, had started up a hippie wholefood brown rice brown sugar brown milk soya bean joss patchouli oil emporium called Alligator. I probably shopped there every day, everything really was brown, apart from the the milk. So what do you do now? I asked him. Advertising. I had to know how the guy with hair down to his waist had turned into the family man with the one and a half million pound house in North London. What was the arc of his life which had led there? I came to understand that the person who seemed at 20 to be the essence of his self, as we do at 20 when we are at our thinnest, prettiest and have the most energy and the most sex, is really just the briefest of highwater marks. We are more like ourselves as children than we are as young adults.
So these thoughts which had been playing around in my mind for years turned one day into 'I could write a novel about that.'
Linda, during your talk at Fowey you made a very interesting comment about there being only one generation who had changed the world, I wonder if you could elaborate and explain a little more about that?
One of the ugliest characteristics of my generation was our tendency to dismiss our parents - they way they dressed, their conservatism, their allegiance to materialism and comfort. Believing as many of us did, that we wwre the generation put on earth to be young forever and to change the world, we regarded our parents as the obstacles in the ay of progress: 'Oh mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don't criticise what you can't understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/The old ways are rapidly changing/Please get out of way if you can't lend a hand/Because the times they are a changing.'
I played this over and over again on the the family gramophone in the living room, looking up at my mother and father and repeating the words to them with patronising menace. What I never did was ask my parents anything about themselves. In fact when they did let slip any information, (such as my father's stay of several days with Houdini in New York in the 20s) i was bored to tears with these dusty old reminiscences.
But of course if any revolution was made, it was by those who suffered the Depression and defeated fascism. That was the world we inherited from them, the extraordinary peace and stability which was their bequest and which I don't think we ever really appreciated.
Can you tell us band of nosey parkers about your writing day/life and your process, how you knuckle down to it, pen/computer etc, does the place need to be immaculate, easily distracted etc and please expand on your life as a writer if you wish to.
I have an office which is lined with books, a desk with a desktop computer on it, shelves with tax files and floor covered in mess. I very rarely go in there. Instead, for about ten years now, I have written on a laptop on the dining table in the living room. This is because it's a nicer room and is not a mess. I feel those book-lined walls pressing in one me, issuing taunts and curses. I start writing as soon as possible after I get up, because, I'm quite convinced, that is the time we are closest to our unconscious, to the dream state. I am not superstitious but I do have a sequence of routine which I don't like to be disturbed: get up, have a cup of tea, shower, get dressed, have breakfast, read the newspaper online. Finally I make my one-a-day cappuccino using the fancy machine in the kitchen, and this is the signal to start.
I work usually for two or three hours. Anything I write after that will not be very good, and even that writing is done in no longer than 20 minute bursts. Save to Dropbox, print out, sit down and read through it, making notes and a lot of crossings out, feel depressed, do a bit of housework until lunchtime then brood. If possible, I go for a walk in the afternoon, because it is only while walking that plotting is worked out. I believe this is because we walk at he same natural rhythm as we think, but whatever the case, it is a kind of waking dream, which is why I frequently ignore people I know when I'm doing this. I would not like to tell you how I dress to write, all I'll say is that it doesn't really involve brushing my hair.
Who must we read ...
Like many people I have been honing my list of Desert Island Discs for several decades, but my choice of book remains remarkably consistent. It's Dickens' Bleak House which is, in my opinion is the greatest nineteenth century novel and possibly the greatest Modernist novel. I re-read a month ago, and was awestruck by its range, its control of language, its comedy and above all its ideas. I will sit on Carmen Callil's face myself if she does not stop talking nonsense about Philip Roth. he is a misogynist, I don't disagree with that, but American Pastoral, another novel I have read multiple times, stands beside Bleak House for its scope and daring and humanity. I would also like to mention here the Sadlers wells books by Lorna Hill, first published in the Fifties, and the novels I loved as a child. I re-read them a few years ago and saw what it was I liked so much for they are about girls and boys who want to be artists - ballerinas and conductors. They grow up in the country but see London as the place where dreams and ambitions can be fulfilled. I think the first five are the best though there are twelve in all. I still believe in Veronica and Sebastian and the flat in St John's Wood with the restaurant on the ground floor.
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