‘I wasn’t posh and I wasn’t confident, and I was really hideous’

Originally published in the GUARDIAN

Nothing makes a writer bridle more than a journalist suggesting their fiction is autobiographical, though of course it often is. The great mistake is to assume that nothing has been adapted, twisted, changed, and, in the changing, become fiction. And so Charlotte Mendelson's three novels, full of close, competitive families; of fierce love and troubled filial loyalty; of lesbian yearnings both acted upon and ignored; of being Jewish in Britain, reveal both a great deal and not very much about their writer. Mendelson comes from a close, academic Jewish family, is one half of a lesbian literary couple, and is suffering an attack of stage fright about her most recent book.

When We Were Bad, one of very few novels written from the viewpoint of British Jews, revolves around a London family whose lives are turned upside down when the eldest son abandons his fiancee for an older woman on what is supposed to be his wedding day.

"It's Jews behaving badly," Mendelson says, all too aware that she will be accused of "letting down the side". "But you know, everyone behaves badly. They're just behaving like normal people."

She is talking very fast, partly because that's the way she talks, partly from nerves. Quite apart from the subject matter, the publisher in her - she is an editor at Headline Review - is only too aware of the risks involved in having a journalist and a photographer in her comfortably battered living room. "I can't hide every trace of my entire life, but if I had more space I would have," she says, ruefully.

She cannot hide a generous, bracing intelligence; a kind of forward-looking aliveness, and, strikingly because it is so unusual, the glow of someone who finds themselves where they were meant to be. And although she has stipulated that she will not talk about the two children she has with the journalist and novelist Joanna Briscoe, she cannot hide, under the wartime poster that says "Keep Calm and Carry On", the prints of a Frida Kahlo self-portrait and Jane Bown's Eve Arnold, the piles of children's toys, the boxed set of the Tales of Peter Rabbit. "They have private lives too."

One way of describing Mendelson's books would be to say that they are about the private lives of children. Love in Idleness, her first, is about a girl's first months alone in the big city, separating herself from her mother, establishing her individuality. Daughters of Jerusalem, her second, begins with a child's-eye view and, like all three novels, explores the clash Mendelson believes exists in all families, however outwardly functional: between people's inner lives, and what their family thinks and expects of them; how that clash shapes the adults they become. She believes passionately, if slightly schematically, that the key to character is family, specifically birth order; she has a fantasy that all workplaces should have parents' evenings, so people can see exactly why their colleagues behave the way they do.

Her own background is cockney mixed with mittel-European Jewry (her maternal grandparents were "Hungarian-speaking-Czech, Ruthenian for about 10 minutes, Carpathian mountain-y, impossible to describe") who left Prague in 1939, in the nick of time. She was born in 1972 in west London, in a flat on the Queensway, but when she was two and her sister a baby they moved to a house in a cobbled passage next to St John's College, Oxford, where her father taught public international law. "He's good on wobbly boundaries." Oxford gave her her voice - "it's kind of embarrassing. I sound like a pre-pubescent Etonian," and it is true, you notice the vowels first, but what lingers is the timbre: a dark undertow, a complicated aftertaste.

Oxford was "incredibly retro. We really did spend our first 20 years in navy corduroy, mixing interesting paints out of broken bits of brick and feeling very fashionable if we listened to the Beatles." It was a good place to grow up, "full of lots of other brainy weirdos", but hermetic and stifling too - a fact she mocks in Daughters of Jerusalem. The novel is about an Oxford academic father, his late-blooming wife and two daughters, one, Eve, clever and law-abiding and hopelessly uncomfortable in her own skin, the other, Phoebe, beautiful, charismatic and rebellious. So rebellious that there sometimes seems a kind of wish-fulfilment at work in Mendelson's characterisation, an evocation of who she would have liked to have been, for a little while at least.

Mendelson was an archetypal swot - a word she uses now as a term of approbation - and never more than "low-key troublesome ... slightly insurrectionary"; always, at heart, like the elder daughter she is, looking for approval - even now, the fact that her father likes When We Were Bad more than her other novels makes her light up with pleasure. As a teenager she fought an obviously misplaced sense of inadequacy, cried if she scored less than 80%, deliberately picked the most self-punishing option every time: she took up the French horn because it has a reputation for being the hardest instrument to play (her teacher gave up on her and taught her the Charleston instead); Greek A-level because it was harder than Latin; Ancient and Modern History at Oxford, even though she knows now, with great regret, that what would have suited her best was English literature at somewhere like Leeds. Instead "I can act out Athenian naval battle manoeuvres. But, I mean, who needs that?"

And she was not the first or last to find it difficult being a woman at that university. "Being a woman was impossible, because it felt like either you had to be decorative or you had to be an invisible superbrain - not invisible; a sort of un-female superbrain. I wasn't posh, and I wasn't confident, and I was really hideous." She gestures to her hair when I express disbelief. "It was like a pompom for most of my adolescence. It took me a long time to discover that gravity would work for me. And I was really unhappy. I thought it would be lying under trees reading Keats. And it was me in a library reading book 17 on Merovingian archaeology and thinking, 'This is just hell.'"

She wanted to be a writer, "but sadly accepted I wasn't going to be. It was like wanting to be a rock star, or an astronaut - one of those dreams that people have that never become flesh. And again, I think it's a female thing ... it makes me sad how many nice middle-aged women say, 'Oh, I'd love to write but I don't dare. Just dare! If you were a 21-year-old man you'd dare."

Like Anna in Love in Idleness, she eschewed a year off in favour of escaping a small town for London, immediately, to do work experience at a publishers' - having, for all the world like a 50s deb, learned to touch-type first. This was followed by more work experience and a move to Jonathan Cape, where she copy-edited, and lived, jammily, in Bloomsbury, where her father had a flat. But she found herself frustrated, and, for the first couple of years, "there was a lot of going sadly home alone". She considered an escape to law school, applied, deferred, then, the next October, suddenly realised she had forgotten to go. Because, by that time, she had begun to meet people. "I got a life, is basically what happened."

The poet and critic Craig Raine had been a tutor at her college, and one day she was regaling him with a tale about "this boyfriend I'd had, in sort of graphic, ghastly detail. And I gave him some kind of good rude name. And Craig said, 'Why don't you write about it?' And I said 'Oh, I don't know, I don't know,' and he said, 'Well, I'm editing this thing called New Writing with Carmen Callil, and I'm only one of the editors, so I can't promise you it will go in, but why don't you just try to write a story about it and we'll see?' Weeks went by, and the deadline was about two days away, and Craig rang me and said, 'Where is it?' And I said, 'I'm sorry, I know this is my great opportunity, but I can't. I'm scared. I know it will be rubbish.' And he said, 'Stop being such an idiot.' So I tried, and it got in! And that was my moment. Craig is one of my big Oscar thank-yous."

At Cape she had found herself in "this amazing office with a view of the Thames and the MI6 building," and a door she could close. "So I started writing in my lunch breaks, working off the frustrations of the working day. Literally I had an hour - I didn't do it at all in the evenings and weekends - that would have been a disaster; I'd have immediately wanted to go shopping." The papers called her a rising star before it was even published.

Love in Idleness, published when Mendelson was 29, ends with Anna, half-unmoored by loneliness and inappropriate crushes, beginning to get back on an even keel by exploring the attractions of women. It comes up in the novels a lot, this switch from heterosexual to lesbian, the speed at which it happens occasionally hard to believe, but it was what happened to Mendelson. "It was boyfriends up to" - an uncharacteristic pause - "22 or 23. Not a whiff of lesbianism. Not even a thought. But I'm very all or nothing. It was all that, and now it's all this. There was about a 10-minute cross-over period of uncertainty, but it was really not that bad." A slight laugh. "I'm every mother's nightmare, basically, because you think you've got a nice heterosexual daughter, and then suddenly, 'Oh my God.'"

She met Briscoe - to whom this switch also happened - at a party in 1997, and they talked non-stop for three hours. "She's been a lesbian for longer. And she wasn't my first girlfriend, which was quite interesting, because I don't think I could have ... settled ... with the first man or woman I went out with." Briscoe, a freelance journalist as well as a novelist, writes at home, in a study down the hall, an arrangement that was initially unconducive to working but that they are now used to. I don't ask the obvious question, but she brings it up: "the first thing people always say is 'Are you competitive?' It's fascinating how many people assume you should be." She insists they aren't and I wonder whether the gap in their ages makes a difference - Briscoe is 10 years older.

"I think it probably does actually. I think she's more emotionally mature than me, in some ways. And also she's a journalist and I'm a publisher, so it's not total disgusting overlap. And also we're writing in the same sort of area, but we're not writing the same - I mean, if we were both trying to write chick lit it probably would be more difficult."

The advantage is that unlike a writer and a banker, say, they fully understand each others' working travails; they go walking on Hampstead Heath - which is just up the road - and talk it out. "One will say: 'I don't know how to get this character to do this. Or, why do you think that would happen? 'And then the other one says, 'Well, why don't you do this?' It's fantastically useful, actually." They are both starved for time, what with jobs and novels and children (guilt about imperfect mothering looms large in When We Were Bad, while Briscoe has written about it in journalism). Fiction happens for Mendelson in the spaces between other things. On Tuesday night, for an hour, say, or on Thursdays, when she doesn't go into work. "The frustrating thing is the amount of time I waste trying to get back up to speed. I do find that completely maddening. But I do not have the sort of life where I can get up at five and write for two hours, which would be so marvellous. It's what every one else seems to do when you read about their writing life. And I just can't do that. I just do what I can."

I wonder if she writes what she wants to read, and I have in mind love stories in which a girl gets her girl, or realises that girls may be a freeing possibility, but she answers, "the whole English Jewish writing thing is quite a big issue for me. English Jews read - if they want a sort of reflection of themselves - they read [Jonathan Safran Foer's] Everything is Illuminated. Or they read the latest Philip Roth. We tend to think of Jews - particularly kind of glamorous Jews, as American Jews. There aren't really, but I didn't want to write a book just for Jews, and I wouldn't read books ..." She trails off.

When We Were Bad is set, deliberately, before 9/11. "I wanted it not to be a book about that specifically. I wanted it to be about English Jews and a fucked-up family. I think [9/11] complicates things in a way that would have made it a worse book." She can't change the fact that it will complicate the book's reception, however, because an already marked reluctance to pop heads over parapets has been exacerbated since then; because she thinks people increasingly assume that British Jews have views about the Middle East they don't actually have (such as agreeing with the Israeli government and its treatment of the Palestinians); because casual anti-Semitic assumptions have risen. But she is giving it a try.

The striking thing is that to a non-Jewish reader it is not Jews who seem a major aspect of When We Were Bad, but lightly managed farce, narrative tension, emotional turmoil, and an idea that has come up before in her novels, and is obviously informed by the way she has lived her life so far: that it takes deliberate choice, usually a sexual choice, an affair of the heart, to break free of expectation and become fully oneself. "Do you think? That's interesting. I do think that choosing a life that makes you happy takes bravery. It takes a lot of courage if you're a person who cares at all."