Readers Place

Imogen Parker interview/review

Author Interview from www.deborahmoggach.com

Her childhood

Both my parents were writers – my father wrote naval history, biographies and children’s books; my mother wrote and illustrated children’s books. I had three sisters, and we grew up to the sound of typewriters tapping in the veranda, where our parents sat side-by-side, working. I wasn’t a particularly writerly child, however. I preferred playing with cars and animals. I didn’t like girly things and my hero was William Brown.

Her Early Writing Career

I went to Bristol University, got married and, in the mid-1970s went to live in Pakistan for two years. After an English upbringing this was incredibly liberating and it was here that I started writing – both articles for Pakistani newspapers and my first novel, You Must be Sisters. This was a coming-of-age, autobiographical novel as was my next, Close to Home, which was the story of a young mother with small children (by this time I had returned to London and had a son and daughter).

Her work

I then left my own life behind and started creating people in my head. Some of my novels started out as my own TV scripts. I began writing screenplays in the mid-eighties and like moving back and forth between the interior world of the novel and the action-driven life of drama. I wrote a thriller about the movie business called The Stand-In which I’m scripting as a Hollywood movie and have just finished adapting Pride and Prejudice as a film for Working Title. I’ve also adapted Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate for the BBC and won a Writers Guild Award for my adaptation of Anne Fine’s Goggle-Eyes. The most recent novel I’ve written and adapted is Final Demand, a story of cheque fraud, retribution, and reptile breeding.

Deborah on her bestselling novel, Tulip Fever

Art, illusion, doomed love and a tulip bulb are the themes of my only historical novel, Tulip Fever. This was inspired by my love of 17th century Dutch painting – in particular, a painting I bought at an auction, a sub-Vermeer interior of a woman getting ready to go out, her servants poised with necklace and glass of wine. I love the stilled drama of paintings by TerBorch and De Hooch, and wanted to step into those rooms. This novel was an extraordinary adventure to write and was bought by Dreamworks.

On her latest Novel, These Foolish Things

These Foolish Things came about because I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all. The population is ageing – for the first time the over 50s outnumber the rest of us – and it’s getting older. Where are we all going to live? Care homes are closing, pensions are dwindling, and life expectancy is rising. Then I had a brainwave. We live in a global age – the internet, cheap travel, satellite TV…when it comes to good and services it hardly matters where we live. “Geography is history.” Our healthcare is sourced from the developing countries; how about turning the tables and outsourcing the elderly? How about setting up retirement homes in developing countries where it’s sunny and labour is cheap? So I created an Indian whiz-kid called Sonny who sets up a retirement home in Bangalore and fills it with Brits.

Interests

My children have long since grown up and I live near Hampstead Heath, where I swim in the ponds. I also love biking around London, looking through people’s windows and imagining all the other lives I could have led.