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. From The Times, 2003 My greatest fear is too great to confess. But one of my fears is of going blind. I remember reading that Robert Louis Stevenson had some kind of eye complaint when he was in the South of France and had to get his wife to write things down for him. I wouldn’t be able to get through the day without being able to read.

I no longer … worry about the future. It has been agonisingly hard, but I think I’ve learnt how to live in the present.

When I’m annoyed I… don’t speak at all. I am a very vocal person, so instead of the sound of fury, I go completely silent, and it can last all day.

I cope with disappointment … badly sometimes. We live half the time in the Lake District, and the weather the past three summers has been terrible. That makes me bitter and twisted. I have to keep reminding myself how lucky we are to have this green and pleasant country.

My favourite programme on television is … Clocking Off, a drama series set convincingly in a factory. Such a relief to have no murders, police chases and all the gory stuff that fills other slots.

The person I hate most is … one of the nicer effects of growing old is that I don’t seem to hate any more. I quite dislike Clare Short, though.

The person I most admire is … Cherie Blair. The media mauling she has suffered has obscured how brilliant she is, to have achieved what she has, and to have combined her professional life and her family life so successfully.

When I put my feet up I … read. I have just finished Graham Swift’s The Light of Day. I’ve loved his stuff from the beginning, but I think that I read this book too quickly. You have to have patience and move slowly through it. Part of the pleasure of a novel is its unravelling, but half the impact is lost in The Light of Day because you know what happens from the beginning. It is one note.

From my parents I learnt … always to accept responsibility for my own actions and never to pass the buck.

I regret … my first novel, mercifully long since out of print. When I came down from Oxford I wrote a novel that I hoped was going to be in the footsteps of Dickens, the sort of fiction I liked. It was rejected by an agent, although I was told that I had promise, etc. I took that as meaning hopeless, so wrote something totally different. It was a sulky reaction, supposed to be in the manner of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, laconic, fast, meant to be funny, about a girl at Oxford. I went on to write Georgie Girl, and that was better, but it wasn’t what I wanted to write. It took me eight more novels and ten years to get myself on the road that I should have been on all along.

If I could change one law, it would be … the one that makes it a crime to assist someone to die -someone, that is, of sound mind who is being forced to live a life of no quality, or someone old who has had enough. I am not afraid of death, but of the process of dying. I’ve seen enough of it to know that it can be torture.

I have no … unfinished business, except what all writers feel: that “the” book is yet to come.

I detest… all songs, pop or otherwise. I don’t like any music; it is just noise. I prefer total silence.

I get upset about … noise: everywhere, especially in our road, where new pipes are being laid. And there is hardly a shop or restaurant one can walk into without being assaulted by it.

Embarrassing moments?… I’ve had far too many to list. At Somerville everyone had the right sort of name, Waugh and so on. When I was asked if I was related to E.M. Forster I said that I was his granddaughter. I had read his Passage to India, but knew nothing about him. The person I said it to gave me a funny look. I didn’t know then that Forster was gay.

I have no advice to pass on. Each person has to make their own way.