Foyles - Questions & Answers
What was the starting point for your novel?
It began as a love-letter to my grandparents; they were such a part of my life, so brave and idiosyncratic, so comically foreign yet proudly British, and I wanted to memorialise them. At the same time, I wanted to write about very English preoccupations - class, money, snobbery. I was fascinated by the misery of adolescence, when you are simultaneously romantic and despairing, trying to work out what kind of person to be and convinced that everyone else has the key to life. And what emerged from that was a desire to write about sex from the point of view of a very naive, innocent late-developer who has simply no idea how to handle - sometimes literally - boys.
The descriptions of Marina's family read very much like an insider's account and indeed you have some Austro-Hungarian antecedents, don't you?
Yes; the Hungarian food, the accents, the clothes, the extraordinarily silly-sounding names are all completely familiar to me from my grandparents' world. Although, because I grew up with a pathetically small Hungarian vocabulary, and it's a famously difficult language, research was quite tricky; I can't spell a word.
For a lot of people who lived through World War Two there was a taboo against talking about their experiences, but why were people from central Europe so particularly silent about their past?
I don't know if that's the case; I suspect that most people who escaped the Holocaust, or any genocide, find it impossible to talk about the past. But there was a particular mindset among the Hungarians I knew, if that is indeed what they were (it's complicated; really they were Hungarian Czech TransCarpathian Ruthenians); they believed very strongly in manners, self-control, protecting the young from any mention of pain, sorrow, death. Besides, it's hard to ask a beloved elderly relative anything if she immediately starts crying at the mention of her family.
You have a lot of fun situating Marina as an outsider at her new public school, her anxiety compounded by the general difficulties and embarrassments of growing up. Did you feel sorry for her even while you were putting her in some of the most toe-curling positions?
Yes, enormously; Marina's gauche self-consciousness, her ardent desire for romance, her cluelessness are all familiar to most of us, aren't they? Please tell me that they are. But, for me, one of the joys of writing fiction is putting my characters in positions of extreme awkwardness; I have a very low embarrassment-threshold myself, so clearly derive evil satisfaction from imposing embarrassment on others. And isn't embarrassment one of the main components of adolescence?
A lot of heartbreak could have been avoided had Laura been able to express her feelings for Marina, rather than, for example, 'scouring the emotions out of her postcards'; was it simply the desire not to get in her daughter's way that held her back?
No, I think it's fear. Laura is not like her daughter, or her Hungarian in-laws; she has no home, no husband, no prospects, no glamour, and she knows that, compared to them, she is rather dowdy and, superficially, less interesting. She adores her daughter but fears alienating her with her love, her need, her sadness. And, although she might seem quiet and low-key, it's passion that drives her - her feeling of unrequited love for her child, her sexual frustrations, her desire for a better life.
Marina is quite a complex character, her anxiety causing some significant mental issues, yet you also put her in a great deal of comic situations. How do you get the balance just right?
I hope I do; I think I do, because surely the best bit about surviving the misery of adolescence is that you reach a stage where you can laugh, fairly kindly, at yourself. Fiction about teenage despair and self-pity isn't very interesting to adults, either, is it? But I did want to talk about the real distress, the potentially serious unhappiness, which so many young people suffer from and do not disclose.
Do you think someone with a Hungarian or other foreign background would still be regarded or at least feel themselves to be an outsider at a public school today and suffer some of the same difficulties as Marina?
Absolutely. English public schools are...well...hmm. Let's just say that Marina has quite such a terrible time for a number of reasons; not just being foreign, but being non-posh, non-pretty, non-rich and, most of all, non-male.
The members of the Hungarian family are blissfully unconcerned with what other people think of them and as a result seem much saner and happier than Marina and Laura. Is self consciousness the undoing of we English? Why don't the Hungarians struggle to learn how to be mothers, daughters, grown-ups?
Self-consciousness is definitely more British than Hungarian. I think it's in the eyebrows; the Hungarians I know all had eyebrows like something from Dracula, and it's hard to be inconspicuous with those. And there's the extraordinary accents, the willingness to wave one's hands around and emote in public...I doubt that it's ever been much fun being adolescent in Hungary either, but certainly there's a strength of character, a definiteness, which the Hungarians I knew all shared.
You have been an editor of fiction yourself (for Headline). Does this help with your own writing? How does it affect your relationship with your own editor now, I can't decide if your background would make it easier or harder for you both?!
I think it makes me a more sympathetic editor but a more anxious author. I try hard to keep the two completely separate; in my editing mode I'm entirely focused on my authors, not worrying about my own books - there's no time. The fact that I write too shouldn't stop me doing my job. It just means that I am particularly careful to protect them from the loneliness of writing; I try to keep them informed but manage their expectations, as that's what I find most soothing myself. Whereas, as an author I'm just quite nervy - it's hard to be entirely positive about something good, even something lovely like Tube advertising, when you know how much it costs! It must annoy them terribly. But, more than most authors, I appreciate how hard publishers work to make books succeed, and I think that helps.
Can you tell us anything about your next project?
NO! [faints]