Authors Electric

What questions do you wish you had asked long-ago loved ones? I don't know how perceptive my questions or illuminating their responses would have been, I would have liked to find out. Having been a journalist for many years, I learned that interviewing is a demanding but unreliable art that requires repetition as well as unabashed perception. Tougher yet if it's of someone close.  I interviewed my paternal grandfather over a week's time when he visited my home in Los Angeles at age 92. I wrote a family memoir based upon that. I wish I had asked him so many more follow-up questions before he flew off to Italy where he passed away several years later.  Nowadays I query my fictional characters to add to their dossier, and still there are unanswered questions. No matter the homework, characters remain as much a mystery as real people. If we're lucky, one way or another, we develop a sense of what's true for a character and what's not. I've always been fond of fa...

Motherhood by Sheila Heti The bookshop is small but well-stocked. It occupies a narrow windowless space like most places in this part of Amsterdam. At the far end of the shop sits Sheila Heti, waiting to talk about her latest novel, Motherhood . We join the crowd. We are four women in a sea of female faces. Three of us are mothers; one is not. I am one of the few women in the room past the child-bearing age. Whether a woman is still sexually productive seems relevant when Motherhood is about an unnamed protagonist wrestling with the decision to have a child. Heti and her protagonist share many of the same characteristics. Both are writers, around 40 years old, living in Toronto. Both have mothers who put their work ahead of child-rearing. Many reviewers have assumed that Motherhood is a very public accounting of Heti’s private decision. But that wasn’t Heti’s goal. Her interest is in language and how we choose to speak about the choices we make....

Atticus, The Sunday Times, 21.10.18 Flicking through The Sunday Times this week, my eye was caught by this snide little piece in the media gossip column, Atticus (pic, right): Amusing, yes, especially for Sir David Hare.   It’s not his fault that the public don’t know Woolf’s work well enough to distinguish which words she genuinely wrote and which are the ones that he, adapting a novel about Woolf for the screen, makes her say. How hilarious that Hare’s clever line is now attributed to the author herself! And how naïve of the academic, bless them, to confuse a fictional film with a biopic! I mean, who does that?   No one, obvs.  Except the countless people on the internet who now attribute Hare’s line to Woolf. QED. Richmond - a fate worse than death, as Virginia Woolf (above, Getty Images) didn't say.  Does anyone else hear a great clunk of irony in Atticus’s stonkingly patronising attitude to the academic? She or he is the...