Novelist Patrick McGrath on Writing, Setting, and Psychology

Patrick McGrath

Novelist Patrick McGrath on Writing, Setting, and Psychology

Patrick McGrath is a convivial sort. Pushing hair from his eyes with a smile, he'll have you seated, snug, and sipping tea on the couch before you've had a chance to say hello.

By Ryan D. Matthews, Contributor

Ryan D. Matthews is a writer and editor in New York. 

Jun 10, 2013, 02:15 PM EDTUpdated Aug 10, 2013, 05:12 AM 

Patrick McGrath is a convivial sort. Pushing hair from his eyes with a smile, he'll have you seated, snug, and sipping tea on the couch before you've had a chance to say hello. He's a man who loves a joke and laughs easily; it's difficult to imagine him underdressed. One does, however, imagine sightseeing with Patrick to be a chore. Point out a placid canoe-filled expanse of lakefront brimming with delightful lily pads, and he is as likely to point out an excellent place to dump a pallid and bloated body. 

My mother by Patrick McGrath

 

My Mother

By Patrick McGrath

April 13, 2008

My mother's first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it. This was about a year before my father left us. His name was Fred Weir. In those days he could be generous, amusing, an expansive man — my brother, Walt, plays the role at times — but there were signs, perceptible to me if not to others, when an explosion was imminent. Then the sudden loss of temper, the storming from the room, the slamming door at the end of the hall and the appalled silence afterward. But I could deflect all this. I would play the fool, or be the baby, distract him from the mounting wave of boredom and frustration he must have felt at being trapped within the suffocating domestic atmosphere my mother liked to foster. Later, when she began writing books, she fostered no atmosphere at all other than genteel squalor and heavy drinking and gloom. But by then my father was long gone. 

Daphe du Maurier / Mistress of menace

REREADING

Mistress of menace

Daphne du Maurier has often been dismissed as a writer of popular romances, yet her work is infused with hidden violence. To mark the centenary of her birth this month, Patrick McGrath relishes the dark side of her short stories

Patrick McGrath
Saturday 5 May 2007 00.02 BST

A

pparently Daphne du Maurier hated Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of her story "The Birds". She was baffled as to why the great director had distorted it as he had. The difference between the story and the film is striking, though less in the depiction of the birds' inexplicably aggressive behaviour than in the characters who confront it, and where it all happens. At the centre of du Maurier's narrative is a part-time farm worker called Nat Hocken, and in the story his struggle to protect his family from the birds is set against a wild Cornish coastline where gales sweep across stark hills and fields and isolated farmhouses. The combination of bleak landscape and rustic characters lends an appropriately elemental tone to the tale, and this is missing from Hitchcock's version, with its placid northern California setting and the urbane city folk he casts as his protagonists. This may explain the author's dislike of the film.