It has been six years since you released your first novel. Why has there been such a long break between books?
I was still working full time as a lecturer for the first few years after Past Imperfect was published, and I also popped out a third child and a PhD. Oh, and I did a teaching degree. So it was hard to find time to write in that mix! A lot of mental gestation happens in the back of my mind while I’m doing school projects, cooking fish fingers, trying to get my head around chunks of film theory or having a bath. But the actual writing takes time.
Tell us where the idea for Thirty Second World came from? Were you influenced by The Devil Wears Prada?
The idea came to me before I read The Devil Wears Prada, so while I enjoyed that novel I had a few out-loud groans – partly out of recognition, because the fashion magazine world portrayed in it was painfully familiar at times, but also because someone had got there before me and written that similar world into fiction form.
Is your book an accurate portrayal of life in the South African film industry, or have you exaggerated the working environment?
The only thing I regret about the portrayal of the film industry in this novel is that it isn’t extreme enough! (Nah, I’m only joking. Sort of.)
That said, the clichéd disclaimer “some of my best friends are filmmakers” is quite true, and I love them dearly.
Do you base the characters in your book on people you have met whilst working in the film industry?
I had imagined this might be an opportunity for some vengeful and vitriolic writing about some of the characters I met in that world, but I ended up being far too nice. Really. Of course a big undercurrent of the novel is that one must be careful of taking anything, including ghastly-seeming people, at face value. I met, and worked with or under, several Alisons during the years I spent in the film industry, and writing Thirty Second World became, unexpectedly, an attempt to put myself in the shoes of people like her, who might seem unlikeable. Even the dreadful Maxine gets allocated some good lines and insightful comments, which was frankly quite charitable since no such lines were forthcoming from her real-life equivalents! The more I tried to imagine the backstories and lives of the characters I was writing about, even the horrible ones, the more I found I couldn’t help considering their vulnerabilities and fragilities. It must be motherhood or just middle age!
Is Alison partly autobiographical?
Yes, in the sense that I have worked in film production and have tried to juggle working life and motherhood for many years. That feeling of trying to control a hessian bag full of spitting, fighting cats… But I was never a mother while I worked in the film industry – that always struck me as a really undesirable and in fact impossible combination, though I know some amazing women who do manage it. Of course Beth was equally autobiographical – the inexperienced newcomer to the industry who really just isn’t “hard” enough. And I always felt more at home in the art department than in production, even though production was what I did most of. If I were being flippant, I’d say that all the women characters are autobiographical, and so are the men!
Lee-Anne is an incredibly judgemental and unlikable childminder. She is rude towards Al, and yet she adores Ant (Al’s partner) a man who is not a good father. Is this just Lee-Anne’s character, or is she the voice for society, who often judge mothers who work?
Isn’t she dreadful? I’m not quite sure where she came from – certainly not from my experience of childminders! Perhaps it was in part a fear of being judged and found wanting as a working mother, because I do think that society can be quite hard on women who are already trying to juggle work and parenting, especially those who “choose” to keep working even when they have young children. And it can be really galling that the same rules just don’t apply to men. And in all this, I’m acutely conscious that Alison’s situation is enormously privileged, and that the vast majority of women in South Africa are single mothers who work unimaginably hard just to keep themselves and their children alive.
Both Al’s and Beth’s relationships suffer due to their work. Al is exhausted, snappy, and fears she’s an absent mother. Beth struggles with loving her career, but the growing distance it creates with Dan. Do you believe that a woman can have it all – a happy marriage/relationship, a family, and a successful career – or is this a myth?
A lot of the time “having it all” is actually just “doing it all”. Trying to manage all those aspects of one’s life simultaneously is a huge and ongoing challenge. Just when you think you’ve managed to get all the pieces to fit, someone gets sick or breaks an arm or feels miserable and needs attention or has a complicated project about photosynthesis due the next day… And it’s not about balancing things, because that is definitely wishful thinking. I’ve always thought of motherhood, and especially working motherhood, as a process of triage: if you’ve got a sore toe and your brother’s left leg is only hanging on by a thread, I’m afraid your toe’s going to have to wait. To shift to another metaphor, I wrote an article a few years ago where I compared managing the various compartments of my life to crop rotation – sometimes certain fields have to lie fallow for a bit while you tend to others, for instance my fiction writing field while I was busy with baby-making and a PhD. But I’m also very mindful of the fact that it’s a privilege to be able to choose whether or not you want to be a working mother.
Which writers inspire you?
This is my least favourite question to answer, because there are so many and I know I’m going to leave out some of the crucial ones!
The older I get, the more intolerant I become towards anything “fantasy” or sci-fi. I prefer my fantasy firmly rooted in reality. I’ve always loved the nineteenth century classics – the Brontës are enduring, eternal favourites – but I also hugely enjoy contemporary writers, particularly those with a comic bent. I’ve just finished reading Mark Haddon’s hilarious and poignant A Spot of Bother, and am now reading Mutton by the wonderful India Knight, who I want to be my friend! I’m waiting impatiently for the next Mavis Cheek and Barbara Trapido novels to come out. Barbara Trapido has always been one of my favourite authors, so to have her saying such positive things about Thirty Second World was absolutely thrilling. Kingsley Amis’s side-splittingly funny Lucky Jim remains one of my all-time favourites, Marian Keyes is a chick lit genius (and no, that is not an oxymoron to any disparaging chick lit haters among you), Lynne Truss is very clever and makes me laugh out loud, and Caitlin Moran is deliciously rude and so relentlessly funny that it can be quite physically painful! The older I get the more I value laughter – and I appreciate just how hard it is to write lightly about heavy things. On the other hand, I also love writers like Milan Kundera or Manju Kapur, who take me to unfamiliar places and put me in the skin of their characters. I just wish I had more time to read!
Where do you write? Do you have a set time for writing, or do you write when inspiration strikes you?
I make notes, all the time. At the dinner table, in the loo at a party, during a PTA meeting, on the beach… Sometimes I write on pieces of serviettes (or loo paper at a push!) or the back of envelopes, but increasingly I’m putting notes straight into the calendar function in my phone, which makes for a very bizarre-looking series of appointments! But the hard labour of actually writing in any flowing or meaningful sense tends to happen on my bed, once I’ve dropped all the children at school. Once I’ve got into The Zone, I barely look up from my laptop until I have to fetch them at the end of the school day – no tea breaks or pee breaks or lunch. One thing about having children is that you realise how extremely luxurious uninterrupted working time is – it’s the big secret of the working world.
Is it quite an emotional journey allowing your book to be edited?
I expected it to be much harder to hand the manuscript over for editing, but I’ve had the privilege of working with Jane Bowman for both of my books and it has been an extremely positive and affirming process.
And lastly, what would you like readers to take away from Thirty Second World?
Don’t confuse doing it all with having it all. Don’t be too hard on yourself or on other people. Don’t forget to laugh.
Find out more about Thirty Second World.
Photograph by Robert van der Vliet