Authors Electric

I “found” Diana Athill rather late in my reading life, and I have V.S. Naipaul to thank for it. A week after Naipaul’s death, Athill wrote an essay about being Naipaul's editor. She described  admiring Naipaul’s work but disliking the man , and there was such certitude in her storytelling voice that I was immediately hooked.  I hunted down Stet . Part historical overview of British publishing, part break-room office gossip, it was riveting. Athill had been a well-regarded British editor for fifty years, and her own literary career took off after her retirement; this book was published when she was 83 years old. When I read Stet ,  Diana Athill was already a hundred years old, yet meteoric in the British literary scene. She became my hero; this rare, ageless female writer, one who discusses literary nuances and sexual romps with great pleasure. Athill’s editorial training is evident in every crisp, well-crafted sentence.  When she announces her inabil...

Recently (20th Dec) the author and editor Diana Athill was interviewed on the Today programme for her 100 th birthday. Happy birthday! One of the things Ms Athill mentioned in her interview was her first memory, which was of falling into a puddle and being hauled out again. It set me musing on my own earliest memories. I can think of several, and because we moved house two weeks after my 4 th birthday I can accurately date them as being three or even two years old at the time. Most of those images involved getting into trouble with Mother. And most often came out of trying to keep up with two elder brothers (then aged seven and nine) who did not want their tiny little sister to tag along in the first place. Memory 1/ Throwing a monumental hissy fit because I could see my brothers building a snowman in the garden. I clearly recall standing in my cot and shaking the bars, whilst my mother stood at the sink washing up. (I was sick often and the kitchen was heated overnight ...

A few weeks ago, on a hot Sunday afternoon in July, I went to a talk by the writer and publisher Diana Athill, now in her middle nineties. Like so many people, I'd read her semi-biography: SOMEWHERE TOWARDS THE END (I must now get hold of her short stories which I gather are amazing). She is a fantastic person, and so beautiful - really beautiful (I've filched this image of her from the flyer, but it's not air-brushed - she really does look like that).           She came on stage with a little assistance from her biographer, Ronald Hayman, sweeping up the aisle in a violet-turquoise gown, and proceeded to talk, without any backing notes, for about three quarters of an hour (I couldn't do that), after which she dealt very competently with questions which had to be conveyed to her by her agent because she's a bit deaf.           One of the things she talked about was of how she had pared down he...

Perfect December weather - I love it - freezing temperatures, spectacular sunsets, strangely wonderful skies, and darkness at four, twinkled by all the Christmas lights in my north London suburb. But the other, symbolic aspect of win ter can also be old age and dying. My husband, David, had a mini-stroke four weeks ago, and was (happily) whipped into hospital and operated on within a few days. During his convalescence, the partner of a very close friend died, so my attention, this month, has been somewhat focussed on a combination of death and dying, along with the irrelevance of constructing some kind of Christmas. The tree is our first ever fake one. It came from Tesco, and contained IKEA-like instructions for setting it up, which were, unexpectedly, a perfect distraction from what was going on in our lives. We built it. We covered it with our decades-old baubles. Forget the plastic tree - the baubles look fantastic. All that was missing were the dropped needles and that wonde...

Dorothy L Sayers Fabulous and dead "Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.” Dorothy L Sayers.   When ill health forced me to give up teaching some years ago, I used my convalescence to catch up on reading. This was 2000 and bookshops were awash with chick-lit. (Jane Austen and vampires hadn’t yet been discovered by the marketing men.) As I was forty-seven, with only a limited interest in shopping, shoes and handbags, I struggled to find commercial fiction that reflected my taste or even my life. Few novels featured women of my age centre stage. Romantic heroines over forty simply didn’t exist. Mature women appeared only as somebody’s mother or somebody’s wife and they never had sex (unless it was for comic effect.)   LINDA GILLARD Fabulous and 50-something So I gave up looking and decided to write a book for myself, the sort of thing I wanted to read, but couldn’t find: a thinki...