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| 'Feminism is just common sense to me': Maggie O'Farrell at home in Edinburgh. |
Maggie O'Farrell: 'My writing is tougher and much better since I had children'
Interview by Elizabeth Day
Saturday 23 February 2013
Your new novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, is set during the 1976 heatwave. Did you set out to write in a different historical period?
It wasn't deliberate. I was writing a different book entirely and it was going to be a big novel, spanning continents and time. But it was like radio interference – I kept getting this image of a family sitting round the kitchen table, arguing. It was around the time the Icelandic volcano was erupting and people started behaving so oddly. I've always been interested in how extreme weather affects behaviour. I kept thinking: "This reminds me of something" and I realised it was the 1976 heatwave. I was only four but it had a huge effect on the consciousness of the nation, this sense of unity, that everyone was experiencing it, and I think people do behave strangely, especially in the heat.
Have you kept the other novel you began?
Yes. I don't know if it'll come back to life. It's on a shelf of what my husband calls my "Mad Woman Books".
Your husband, William Sutcliffe, is also an author. Do you share your work with him?
When I've finished. I don't let anyone see it until I'm done but Will's always been my first reader, even before we were a couple, so he's a huge influence. He's brutal but you need that.
Has he ever said: "This is perfect. You don't need to change a thing?"
[Laughs] God, no! I'm still waiting for that. He read the first draft of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and said: "It's not bad but you need to rewrite half of it" and that was tricky. We didn't speak for a day or two. He was right. You need someone who's going to tell you if it's not working. You don't want him just to say: "It's fabulous." I'm equally mean about his writing.
Do you plan your plots in advance?
I don't like planning. I know a lot of writers do. William Boyd, whom I admire hugely, is a meticulous planner. Usually I start out with an idea of where I want to go but at some point the characters take on their own lives and start acting in surprising ways.
Do you have a preferred font to write in?
I write in Arial. It used to be Palatino but I write in 14 to 18 point Arial, double-spaced these days.
Your new novel features a main character who grew up without being able to read and is too embarrassed to tell anyone. Where did that come from?
We discovered our son [Saul, aged nine] had dyslexia. It's not something I knew much about so I read loads of stuff to try and understand it. The mother in me did that but the writer in me always asks: "What if?" What if this happened at a time when there weren't all these books or educational psychologists to talk to? It's a lifelong, difficult and complex condition and it must have been awful when nobody understood it. I have a lifelong stammer and that gives you great sensitivity to grammar because there are problem areas and you think: "How can I rearrange sentences so I don't have a problem saying a certain word?" Grammar becomes friend and foe at the same time. I used my son's condition. With permission – I did ask him!
A lot of your work deals with the position of women in societies or families which don't understand them. Would you describe yourself as a feminist?
Oh God, yes. Anyone who doesn't is probably a bit odd. It's common sense to me. It's interesting having boys and girls [as children]. I didn't mind what gender they were but you notice there are different pressures. My daughter [Iris, three] had been to nursery for a couple of terms and she came home saying: "What's a princess?" I did think: "Oh God, here we go."
What do you make of certain critics saying you write "women's fiction"?
It's inevitable. It's sad if something is marketed in such a way that men are not going to pick it up but it's their loss… It's tedious, very restrictive and it's not something I engage with.
You said once your novels have got better since having your children. Do you still think that, now you have a third child, seven-month-old Juno?
Definitely. I take big issue with that Cyril Connolly quote about the pram in the hall. I'm not saying it's not hard, because it's bloody hard, but that difficulty is good. I embrace it. My writing is tougher and better than when I had all day to daydream and faff. A huge amount of the work of being a writer doesn't happen at the desk. With children, you've got this connection to another world.
You contracted encephalitis at eight and were told you'd never walk again. Did being bedridden for the best part of two years make you into a writer?
I've always wanted to write. I don't remember a time without that urge to do it. With the encephalitis I woke up one day with a bad headache, feeling terrible and I gradually lost my motor skills until I ended up in intensive care. I was immobilised for a year and it took another year learning to walk and feed myself again. I remember being alone a lot. It's interesting to spend that amount of time alone at that age. You do retreat into your own world.
Actually, Jimmy Savile visited me [laughs]. It was so surreal. I just remember thinking: "Who is this guy sat beside my bed?" Nothing bad happened – he just gave me a present.
What was it?
A book about how to make Halloween costumes. I still have it.
Your first novel, After You'd Gone, was a critical and commercial success. Did it feel like a success at the time?
I don't think so. But I don't think of things in those terms. The only success or failure that interests me is whether I think the book has worked. You have to shut your mind to that stuff, to maintain the illusion that you're just writing for you.The minute you start thinking about the people who like or don't like you, it's not going to be good because you're second-guessing.
But when you won the Costa novel award in 2010 for The Hand That First Held Mine, that must have felt good?
Yes, it was wonderful and the money was nice. For a fortnight everyone wants to talk to you, then you have to put it away. You can't rest on your laurels. Every book you write, nothing is perfect to you. There are always things you haven't quite captured and it's good for you because you go on to the next one.
THE GUARDIAN
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