Readers Place

Margaret Forster interview/review

1. You have said that you worked through the school library reading each book in alphabetical order. Did you do this as a means of escape?

In the house I was brought up in there wasn’t really a great deal of room for books. I was born in 1938 and you didn’t have paperback books in the 1940’s so the only access to books was the library. Discovering the library was incredible, I could hardly believe that you could really take these books out and it didn’t cost anything. People talk about escapism as though it’s something nasty but escapism is wonderful!

1. Which were your favourite authors then, and have they changed over the years?

I started with Jane Austen and I didn’t really make a lot of her. I found them a bit dead. It wasn’t really till I got to the Brontes that I found what I was looking for, especially Emily Bronte. I absolutely adored Wuthering Heights and fell in love with Heathcliff as most girls do. And Dickens, I loved Dickens, all of Dickens really. Those are the ones that stand out but later on, much later, it was contemporary fiction that I came to like best and that’s what I like now. I especially like first novels.

1. You published your first novel in 1964. How has publishing changed since then?

Well perhaps the cult of the author has gone too far but on the other hand I can see the problems for the publishers. I’m very familiar with books and when I go into a bookshop, one of the big chain bookshops, I get vertigo because there are so many books there. How do you choose? Publishers are not charities, they are there to sell books…The things you do are lovely, I mean the bookshop events, literary festivals and signing sessions and everyone’s lovely but at the end of it you just get so depressed because you think this is just one big ego trip. I think I was lucky because all the authors that started off in the 1960’s, we got in before it was difficult for publishers. It’s very, very tough now for young writers starting off.

1. How have things changed for women over the generations, who has the best deal out of it? Your mother, your grandmother? What do you think about the choice between family and career?

It’s all about opportunity, women of my grandmother’s day had no opportunity and I don’t want to hear this drivel about how they’ve got it all now, and it makes life much more difficult. It doesn’t! It gives you choices. Choices are hard, but it gives you the choice and the opportunity to choose and that’s important. I don’t like the way that critics of the present say that the domestic part isn’t important. Nowadays you’re not doing as my mother, let alone my grandmother did, trailing out to freezing wash-houses, boiling water before you can start, using mangles and dolly tubs…it was terrible, back-breaking hard work. Now very few women, however hard their life, go through that kind of physical hard labour. Compared to that the mental anguish of choosing between careers and motherhood is nothing…

1. You had your first novel published when you were 25. You had three children and no help. How did you manage it?

The first novel was published in January and the first child was born in March and from then onwards I was always writing with children and people say how did you do it without help with the children or the housework? Looking back it was hard and I did it because I loved it. It was never easy when the children were in bed to start writing but I had a system whereby my husband looked after them from 6 to 9 three evenings a weeks and as time wore on I switched to writing when they were at nursery school for 2 hours and of course it was hard and now in glorious late middle age when I have all the hours of the day in which to write it’s wonderful.

Interview with Margaret Forster on 15 March 2003 discussing Diary of an Ordinary Woman

“I got a letter from the person to whom it’s dedicated, saying that her mother was 98 and she’d kept a diary since she was 13. Up to the point where I go to see the lady that’s exactly how it happened, but then the women’s granddaughter got very upset and said that her grandmother had promised her the diaries…”

With characteristic determination, Margaret Forster decided to go ahead anyway. Not with the original diaries, but with the idea of an ‘ordinary woman’ whose private jottings offered an alternative chronicle of a century’s history. The result is fiction; yet, as the Guardian said, ‘it is true’

“Ordinariness does fascinate me”, Forster confesses, “It fascinates a lot of people. You’re going on a train and you’re passing all those dreary backyards, mile after mile, and you can’t help looking at them and thinking, ‘what lives, what’s going on there?’ I write because I like doing it. If it was hard work and miserable and I had to force myself then I wouldn’t do it. I write in the morning, I walk in the afternoon and I read in the evening. It’s a very easy, lovely life.”