Tell us about your new novel, Wife
Wife is the darkest, queerest novel I’ve ever written. It’s about how love can become a disaster: the story of Zoe, a young shy academic who meets, then moves in, with the older, glamorous Penny. Their relationship, from the outside, looks perfect, even enviable: after all, everyone wants a wife. But there are already rumbles of distant thunder, early seeds of destruction.
There’s nothing more fascinating than other people’s marriages, particularly when they start to go wrong. In Wife, I wanted to explore that inevitable fall, and the messy question of who decides who has sinned. It’s about motherhood, dysfunctional families, desire and how hard it can be to save oneself; power, affairs, and secrets. Of course.
You’ve written five previous novels. Do you have a favourite?
Several, for different reasons; Daughters of Jerusalem still has my heart, but Wife, I think – hope – might be my best.
Novel-writing as a cover for nosiness. Discuss
Absolutely correct hypothesis. I write novels because I am desperate to know the inner lives of other people: who’s in love with the wrong person, who wants to kill their adult siblings, and all the things they try to hide. It’s so frustrating not to be able to go up and ask; so, instead, I make up characters whose inner worlds I can know in detail. Then I surround them with family and relationships who absolutely mustn’t know the truth, and increase the pressure and the desperation, until something has to break.
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You were the New Yorker’s gardening correspondent. Tell us about your love of gardening, and your book Rhapsody in Green
I’m helplessly addicted to gardening: not flowers but things you can eat. I’m never happier than when discussing manure, or covered in seawater, or mud, or berries. In fact, it was only when I was writing Rhapsody in Green, and then for the New Yorker, that I finally realised how connected this is to my childhood summers in east Cork, at Ballymaloe before it was so famous. For a town child, picking blackberries from lanes full of fuchsia and cowpats, “helping” with the vegetables, collecting eggs, playing in rock pools and hay barns, and riding inappropriately massive horses, was paradise, and gave me a lifelong habit of noticing nature, in short-sighted close-up. It also gave me a hunger for brown bread and carrageen pudding.
You edited other writers’ work for 20 years. Did it inform your own work?
When I was young and pretentious, I thought writing a lovely sentence was enough. But reading thousands of manuscripts taught me, unexpectedly, that the writer’s job is to entertain: to make the reader care so passionately about what’s going to happen to one’s characters that they miss their stop on the train. It’s easy to be self-indulgent, to think that if you can string together beautiful words, that should be enough. But the truth is that you can write as lyrically as you like, be brilliantly funny, dark, erotic, profound, but unless the reader also cares, they won’t read on.
You’ve described the joy of writing as when something ‘comes into perfect verbal focus’. Tell us more
Writing is hard: not manual-labour or nursing hard, but it makes you dredge up darkness and then offer it to the world. Only a lunatic would do it. I constantly face self-doubt and anxiety about how my novel-in-progress is going, but it’s a privilege, too: to spend my days inventing stories about dysfunctional families and secrets and lies. And the joy, for me, is working on the perfect way to describe, say, the taste of walnuts, or the feeling of desire ... better yet, when I find a way of being funny about pain and loss.
You’ve described Iris Murdoch as your hero. What makes her special?
Iris Murdoch was the first writer I read who understood how messy love can be: the wrong person, the wrong time, how far we’ll go for it and how excitingly destructive it can be. Her prose is funny, so intelligent, complicated and honest; she’s brilliant on the natural world, the lies in a marriage, parental love, lust, swimming, dogs ... all the good stuff.
What projects are you working on?
I’m trying to construct my next novel; never fun but, luckily, it’s involving trips to Ireland.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
“You can’t edit a blank page” – which I think means that you have to write something, anything. It doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish, because then you can improve it.
Who do you admire the most?
My father, and my maternal grandmother: both of whom had the grit to escape tragedy and poverty and become the cleverest, kindest, most civilised and generous yet silliest people I’ve ever met.
You are supreme ruler for a day. What law do you pass or abolish?
Finally someone asks. Elaborate plastic floral displays in restaurants are ABOLISHED, as are all the many words I hate, including “veggies” and “platter”.
What is your favourite quotation?
“You aren’t happy? Yes you are: this, here, now, is what happiness is”: John Diamond
A book to make me laugh?
The four funniest books I know are Flann O’Brien’s The Best of Myles, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters and Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.
A book that might move me to tears?
See above.
