For many years I didn't have a favourite author, though there were many old loves and current flirts. Then someone lent me Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café. I remember looking out of the train window – just ordinary fields and trees somewhere between Bristol and Reading, but they seemed extraordinary then – and thinking ‘This is it!’ And it was. It was so good it made my fingertips go numb. That book led me to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which is the most perfect book I can remember reading.
A book about a cat that my father gave to me. I don't remember the title or the author's name, but it had the cat's face on the cover. At the beginning the cat was shoved out of a car and abandoned by the roadside. She suffered all hardship: not only was she hungry and cruelly treated, but she got pregnant and then her kittens died. At the end of the book she died. It was an absolutely devastating read: I didn't just cry, I felt a kind of shocked nausea too. My mother took my father to task over buying such a sad book, and I remember his bewilderment in the kitchen: But how was I to know? I suppose it was the first book with a sad ending I had ever read, and that is why I remember the experience so vividly. Until then I had assumed that bad things that happened in the middle of a story would all be put right at the end. So I was crying not only for the poor cat, but also out of shock at the upheaval in my understanding of the world of books. It wasn't such a safe place as I thought.
My reading.
Word processor, normally. The only time I use a pen is if I get stuck. Then one of my devices to get things going again is to take my novel for a walk, sit on a bench or in a café somewhere, and scribble longhand. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I have never used a typewriter, which is a shame because when I was a girl I longed for one and imagined myself writing fabulous stories on it. Computers are so ugly in comparison. I wish you could buy wooden ones or leather ones.
Villains: Count Fosco in The Woman in White, partly because he is so fantastically villainous, and partly because of his silly name. Anyone with a fondness for villains should read The Thousand and One Nights which has many excellent ones. Madame de Merteuil in Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses is perhaps my favourite villainess. When at the end, the author punishes her for her wickedness by ruining her beauty with smallpox and having her made a social outcast, you can tell his heart is not in it. Secretly he is as thrilled by her as the reader is.
Heroes: Pullman's Lyra, for her humanity and her courage. Simenon's Maigret, for his stillness, particularly in the rain. John Buchan's Hannay, for all the derring-do. Scheherazade, for storytelling in the face of death.
I liked most things about school, yes. Not games and not maths. And not science. And I hated being made to speak in class. In fact I found exams quite liberating because it was two hours in which I was free from the tyranny of being made to speak. But I had friends whom I liked and teachers who taught me well. I have lots of memories from my school years, but what seems curious to me is the year I have forgotten. When I was at primary school I was moved up a year beyond my age for reasons of class size. Then, when I was ten, and the others in my class went up to secondary school, the authorities refused to let me go with them, saying I was too young. The primary school had to keep me for a second final year and, not knowing what to do with me, the teacher made me library monitor. Every day, I used to go down a curving, whitewashed stairwell into the basement to the library that smelled of damp and I can't remember a single other thing about it. My lost year. Obviously I must have spent it reading, but I'm surprised the memory of it has been erased so completely.
I have a full hand of educational qualifications in French, but no qualifications in creative writing. If I could have afforded to do an MA in creative writing, I probably would have done, and maybe if I had my writing would have turned out differently. Not better or worse, just different. It didn't worry me that I couldn't afford to do one: the only mandatory training for a writer is reading. I did attend two Arvon courses, which were great. The benefit was twofold: contact with other apprentice writers, and feedback and encouragement from the published writers who run the courses. Writing The Thirteenth Tale was sometimes slow and often difficult, and the positive comments I'd had from Jim Crace and others kept me going when my confidence might otherwise have failed me. I was a member of various writers' circles and clubs in Harrogate, Leeds and York, and I had regular meetings with my writing friend Owen, where we read work aloud and commented. This was invaluable: he was never slow to tell me when my sentences were getting too long or he was getting bored. Readers of The Thirteenth Tale have a lot to thank him for, and so do I.
First of all, I yearned to be a girl in a book. The melancholy I felt at knowing this could never be was very deep, very real. I wrote a passage about this melancholy for The Thirteenth Tale, where I gave the feeling to Margaret, but it was one of the pieces that fell out in the second draft. It seemed to me that being a writer was the only compensation possible for not being a girl in a book, but this ambition barely had time to be born before I suppressed it. To be a writer, I thought, you had to be extraordinary, and I knew I was ordinary. But desire is like an underground stream: if it can't surface where it wants, it will divert and surface somewhere else. My wish to write novels surfaced as a wish to teach and research literature. By the time I was in my thirties I understood things better: it is books that are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less extraordinary than anyone else. In some ways I wish I had figured this out earlier, but overall I'm not disappointed at the way things have turned out. I consider the years of studying and teaching literature as a very valuable part of my apprenticeship.
1) Jacques Brel, always and for ever. Everything about him moves me: the lyrics, the voice, the passion of the performance. I cannot reconcile myself to the fact that I never saw him perform live. My favourite track changes with the years – at the moment it's 'La Chanson des Vieux Amants', a devastatingly honest and passionate song about grown-up love. (There's also a good cover version on Alison Moyet's The Voice.)
2) Tango. The CD I have is Tango Pasion by The Sexteto Mayor Orchestra. I can't explain why I love it so, because it leaves me lost for words. Unless it is because it leaves me lost for words that I love it.
3) Bob Fosse's Cabaret. It makes my fingertips tingle, then go numb.
4) As Time Goes By by Bryan Ferry. This is his album of cover versions. I've had it for years and I listen to it all the time. The songs are so clever, and his delivery is so smooth and sophisticated that it's hard to choose a single track, but maybe 'You Do Something To Me' (I've always loved the line that goes: 'Do do that voodoo that you do so well', and he does it exquisitely).
5) 'La Dernière Minute'. This is a clever and droll little song at the end of Carla Bruni's CD Quelqu'un m'a Dit. It lasts exactly one minute, and is a contemplation of mortality – just up my street. Plus she has the sweetest voice.
6) (I can't count) 'Delilah' by Tom Jones. An old, old, old favourite.
In chronological order: Chambermaid. Shop assistant (light bulbs and batteries). Shop assistant (newspapers and greetings cards). Bakery assistant (I put the jam into doughnuts. I hate doughnuts.) Assistant in an old people's home. Library assistant. English language tutor. Translator. French language tutor. University lecturer. French language tutor again. Writing suits me better than any other job I have had.
I wouldn't save anything. I would leave the premises in a quiet and orderly fashion, closing doors and windows behind me and I would alert the fire service immediately. I can't help it: my father was a fireman and I have been rigorously drilled in fire safety. But if, say, there was a flood coming and I had a few minutes' notice, I would definitely save my paperweight. It is a stone that my grandfather found at the gravel pit where he worked, and he gave it to me when I was a girl. It is white, almost spherical, and it rattles when you shake it. Everyone who sees it, feels it, hears it, says, 'Don't you want to break it and see what's inside?' I don't.
The most recent holiday was the best. My husband and I have just come back from Athens. It was my first visit, the first of many I am sure. My favourite things were: the view of the city from the top of Lycabettus Hill. The mysterious and moving figures in the Museum of Cycladic Art. The glass windows in the pavements where they meant to dig ventilation shafts for the new metro but found such fabulous antiquities that they had to excavate instead. The artichoke/courgette/dill salad at To Kafenio. The birdsong at 6.00 on a May evening at the Kerameikos.
Nothing embarrassing has ever happened to me, nor will it. My life is replete with grace and poise and this will remain true until the day I die.
For The Thirteenth Tale, I used to write in the mornings, do the housework, the groceries and the garden in the afternoons (it was while I was getting on with these chores that ideas used to come to me for the next day's writing) and in the evenings I taught French. But then, like a precocious first-born, The Thirteenth Tale went out into the world and caused a stir, and now, like a harried mother, I spend a lot of time chasing after her, when really I would prefer to be at home, writing her little brother. I am prone to feeling very nostalgic for the old routine.
I read, obviously. Cooking and eating are joys (as I write this, the sun is shining and I am wondering whether or not the time is right to buy an ice-cream-maker). I am always happy up a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand. And I wish I had more time to spend in the garden – not least because I get good ideas for writing when I'm out there. I like spending time with my friends. (I did warn you. Writers are not special people. When they're not writing they do exactly the same as everyone else.)
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