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BORN TO WRITE

Is there a writing gene, or do we learn from our environment? What’s it like to have several relatives in the same trade? On the other hand, what’s it like to be the only writer in your family? In the wake of veteran novelist Anita Desai’s daughter, Kiran, scooping the Booker, Brigid McConville asks five writers to assess the nature vs nurture debate. .

Relative obscurity

I must declare an interest. I am in the unusual position of having introduced my father to my agent, who then became his agent too. My father went on to publish half a dozen novels; I haven’t published a single one (non-fiction remains my bread and butter). My father thinks this is rather funny. I tell him it would be even funnier if writing had made him rich and famous, with a fat literary legacy for his daughter.

But let’s face it, writing – especially fiction writing – is not a sensible occupation. It’s often lonely, always insecure and chronically low paid. Nonetheless, there are many families like mine, who seem driven to produce lively but little sold books, generation after generation, without (so far) emerging into the limelight.

Occasionally, from more famous families, rumours surface of dreadful Oedipal rivalries; tales of breathtaking bitchiness between Waugh senior and junior; of appalling snubs by one Amis to another, of eminent novelists who haven’t spoken for years despite being sisters.

A far sweeter story made it to the front pages last autumn when Kiran Desai won the Booker Prize and spoke of her mother Anita’s love and support. She told The Independent how Anita would read drafts of The Inheritance of Loss: ‘She was the only person who could understand it and what I was trying to say.’

There was immediate attention focused on the literary family connections: ‘Desai inherits literary success’ blared one headline; ‘Her mother will be proud of her,’ said head Booker judge Hermione Lee. Yet according to The Independent, Anita (herself a three-time Booker short-listed nominee) had advised her daughter, ‘Never be a writer, it’s such a difficult profession.’

Kiran did not do what her mother said, but what her mother did. Which begs the question, are some people born to write, inheriting a particular kind of writer’s brain, or are they simply following in the family footsteps? Whether genetic or learned, nature or nurture, what’s it like to have a daughter or son, sister or brother, father or mother who is also a writer?

Alternatively, what’s it like being the only writer in the family? (Spare a thought for Mollie Keane who reputedly wrote in the lavatory to escape the derision of her horsey family, especially during the hunting season).

All in the family

Anne Fine and Deborah Moggach come from writing families. Pat Barker and Barbara Trapido do not. All of them have daughters who write.

‘My father wrote 120 books, including many naval histories and popular biographies,’ says Moggach. ‘My mother wrote about 40 children’s books, and illustrated them too. My parents used to sit side by side with their typewriters, and my sisters and I watched as the heap of pages thickened.’

"It’s very difficult to do things for which you have no blueprint. Painting and music were the languages of my childhood."

Moggach learned some vital lessons from observing her industrious parents. ‘It taught me that writing is both mysterious and very ordinary,’ she says. Ordinary because ‘I would read things [in my mother’s books] that were familiar to me, or see a drawing of my horse.’ Mysterious, because once when Moggach was 12, her father asked her to read one of his manuscripts and to tell him if the ending worked. That was ‘the most heady thing’ she remembers, ‘to learn that writing is permeable... and that you yourself can change it.’

By contrast, Barbara Trapido says that, as far as she knows, she is the only fiction writer in her family. Yet ‘my family is a creative one,’ she says. ‘It’s very difficult to do things for which you have no blueprint. Painting and music were the languages of my childhood. My mother came from a line of painters and architects. She was at art school in Berlin and she played the piano beautifully. Her cousin was a well-established painter, while her father was a Bauhaus architect and her mother had shocked her family by setting up a wonderful hat shop in the early 1900s.’

Far from the Desai model of support and sharing, Trapido’s father was less than encouraging. ‘I once gave him the final draft of my first novel to read,’ she says. ‘He gave it back to me and all he said was, “I found four spelling mistakes.”’ Trapido doesn’t seem to need family approbation. ‘My husband doesn’t read my novels either,’ she says. ‘They send him straight to sleep.’

So what about her own two children? As a child, her son, Joseph, ‘wrote and illustrated all the time.’ In adult life, he is a visual artist. Does she fear she may have put him off writing, her novels being a hard act to follow? Trapido is not the type to ‘play Madame Author,’ as she puts it, yet she is alive to the fact that struggles for identity and recognition can be deadly in families. ‘It’s very easy to kill other people’s creativity, or to kill anything in family life,’ she says. ‘Don’t you think the children of eminent people are sometimes rather crushed? The politics of family life is as important as the genetic issue. It did concern me, when they were younger, that I could be putting my children off writing.’

Yet being ‘rather crushed’ is not a Trapido trait. ‘I suppose we’re all quite bolshy types in my family,’ she says. ‘We think it’s a bit suspect to do the same as each other. Some people do what their families do, some don’t. I think both my children have chosen not to do what I do.’ Indeed, both of her children have found their own ways to be creative. As well as her artist son, Barbara has a daughter, Anna Trapido who is a food journalist with a Pan African cookbook to her name.

Like her own son, Trapido says she wrote and illustrated all the time as a child, making books which she bound and gave to her mother, and to friends. But decades passed before she started writing novels. ‘I was goaded into writing by a friend who said, “you give away all your talent, telling stories at dinner parties!”’

In her late 30s she was ‘needled’ into writing a story for a competition, and found her way ‘very quickly back to a kind of playing which I had stopped doing when I grew up: talking to pretend people, acting out being pretend people. I found writing dialogue so compelling I couldn’t stop. I used to write completely in my head – an audio novel – which when I wrote it down I could play with and change, like music. It gave me intense pleasure.’

That first attempt got ‘stuffed into a drawer,’ but Trapido later sent it off to one publisher who said no, then another who said, ‘Yes please, who are you?’ She was 39.

Trapido thinks talent is partly genetically transmitted, but that many other factors are also involved. In her case, for instance, being an outsider, and especially having to speak another language in childhood, may have helped turn her into a writer, since she switched from speaking German at home to having to speak English when she started school. She speculates that some such accidental dislocation in childhood can make you a little unsure of who you are. `Your sense of yourself is so tied up in language; you learn ventriloquism in order to fit in. You’re quite fluid and flow into different characters. It gives you an assumption you can be other people, anybody else.’
She also feels that birth order can be very important: ‘My elder sister is sensible and responsible,’ she explains, ‘so I’m allowed to be doodley and daydreamy.’

Together, distinct

Like Trapido, Pat Barker says ‘there were no writers in my family. I grew up in an almost completely book-free environment. My grandfather was borderline illiterate. We had some old Arthur Mee encyclopaedias at home with their covers coming off, but few other books. My great recourse was the public library and I devoured books from there.’

Barker says she has ‘no idea’ where her writing talent comes from. ‘I don’t know who my father is. My grandmother was a woman of great intelligence, but that meant she learned quickly and so was taken out of school early, by the age of 12. Nobody in my original family has ever read a word I’ve written. It’s not a great problem. In some ways it was a liberation. I could cut off the writing side of me from the rest of my life.’

‘My children would not have dreamed of reading my books when they were young,’ she continues. ‘My son John had a go at reading one when he was at university, but he said it felt like reading my diary so he stopped. They always knew that writing was my job; they were used to seeing drafts around the house, and they knew not to touch them. But I didn’t talk about [being a writer]; I stopped it impinging on their lives. But I did read a lot of children’s books to them.’

Recently, Barker’s daughter, Anna Ralph, has opted for her mother’s trade, following successful stints in both PR and journalism. Her first novel, The Floating Island, will be published by Random House in March. Both mother and daughter have enjoyed sharing their experiences as writers.

‘We’ll have a discussion, for instance, about how important it is for writers to have their own voice,’ says Barker. ‘It is a very useful relationship for us as writers. A lot of ideas get thrown around. And it’s very nice to have someone there on email so you can say, “Oh my god, it’s bloody awful, I’ve only done 30 pages!”’

Yet for a long time, says Barker, her daughter didn’t own up to wanting to write novels: ‘She did once say to me that she felt that particular position was filled.’

Barker wryly remembers that when she won the Booker, Anna was working in a local bookshop and a TV crew turned up to film stacks of The Ghost Road as part of the Booker news item. ‘Someone told them that Anna was my daughter. She was given a new top to wear and a necklace, and she had to go on TV. She was so determined not to gush about me that she ended up praising Salman Rushdie to the skies.’

Anna herself concurs. ‘I grew up thinking that I couldn’t be a novelist, that that job was taken. I skirted around it for years: I organised literary festivals and events, became a copy writer and then a journalist. I decided I wanted to write, but not fiction. I thought, “I can’t do that – mum’s doing that.”’ She tried her hand at children’s books, then non-fiction, then chick lit ‘which wasn’t me at all. I was trying to write for the market, but when I let go of that, my own voice came out. It’s all about having the courage to believe your own voice is worthwhile. We talk about it all the time. Mum encourages me to be myself in my work. I’ve been fortunate to have another writer to say, “Stick with your voice, that’s who you are.”’

Like the Desais, says Ralph, mother and daughter are ‘very close. We have shared a lot of our experiences. She is my writing pal.’

She first became aware of her mother’s success in 1995 with Barker’s Booker win. ‘I was working in Waterstone’s and the book was flying off the shelves,’ says Ralph. ‘I hadn’t read her work until then – it felt too personal, like reading her diaries. I would hear her voice, my mother’s voice, and couldn’t lose myself in the characters. Regeneration was the first book I read and I was utterly absorbed and completely knocked out by it. I couldn’t read anything else for six months. By then it was not my mother’s voice, it was her writer’s voice, and I was able to read her books for what they are.’

Ralph says she would ‘hate to think being a writer was solely genetic. The mystery is taken away then. Both my parents are avid readers and have passed on a love of words and stories. If I hadn’t had that I wonder if I would have written.’

As it is, writing fiction now absorbs her completely. ‘There’s nothing quite like the feeling when it’s going well and the characters are part of your world, alive and fluid,’ she says, discussing her work process. ‘It’s very special, but it doesn’t happen every day. It is my fix, those moments. I’m always hearing characters in my head, and if I don’t get them out onto the page it gets a bit crowded. I’m not comfortable if I’m not writing.’

Secret life of an author

Anne Fine is in accord with Trapido and Barker when it comes to playing down her success as an author within the family. ‘I kept what I did secret from my two daughters,’ she says. ‘Their dad is a professor and also well known in his field. I feel a child needs two prestigious parents like a hole in the head. So many children are intimidated by the success of their parents; they feel they have to emulate them. So I kept it quiet. They just saw me at home, at my desk, grumbling about publishing.’

It wasn’t until she was 17 that her daughter Ione came home from school and said, ‘Mum, I’ve found out you’re really quite famous.’ ‘They were startled to discover that,’ says Fine.

Unlike Trapido and Barker, writing does run in Fine’s previous-generation family: ‘My father wrote three novels but they were never published. He wasn’t good at taking advice and his women were rather stereotypical. My uncle wrote a thriller which was a terrific story but he died before it was taken on. The family printed a limited edition as a tribute to him.’

So how did her parents react to Fine’s publishing success? ‘In general, they were jolly pleased for me,’ she says. Her first adult novel however, The Killjoy, was about a sadomasochistic sexual affair and ‘my mother had to grit her teeth to read it, so it was a relief to her when it was well-reviewed and she was able to preen herself a little. She always had a great capacity for finding the cloud in a silver lining, so when I became the Children’s Laureate, she was delighted – but she said “What a tragedy your father is not here to see this!”’

Fine’s daughters now appear to be carrying the writers’ torch. Cordelia Fine is author of an acclaimed popular science book A Mind of Its Own, and in between academic papers Ione once wrote an (as yet unpublished) romantic novel. Anne is immensely proud of them: both multi-skilled daughters are also neuro-psychologists, and share their mother’s keen interest in what makes people tick.

‘It sounds mad,’ she says, ‘but both are tremendously good at science. Their dad is an academic, but if they decided they wanted to be fiction writers, I’m sure they could do it. I’m from the generation where your parents would pick holes in you with a sharp stick; they weren’t worried about your self-esteem! My daughters have been raised in a very different atmosphere.’

Should (or when) her daughters become novelists, Fine thinks it will be ‘as much because of a family reading habit as a writers’ gene. All their lives they’ve seen people reading; I read when I was breastfeeding; for years we had no TV; I used to take them to libraries. They have become passionate readers, and, having read so much, you absorb it through the skin – and then you write the book you want to read.’

Fine’s elder sister Elizabeth Arnold is also a scientist – and also an author. ‘She was over fifty when she wrote The Parsley Parcel,’ says Fine. ‘It was shortlisted for the Whitbread’s children’s prize and serialised on television.’

Is there any rivalry between the sisters? ‘It has never been an issue,’ declares Fine. ‘I started at the age of 25; she started 25 years after that. We have the same agent, but we made a policy decision early on that it would be distasteful to promote ourselves as sisters. I’ve been as helpful as I can be to her, and she’s always been incredibly nice about my books. Sometimes she asks me “where did that come from?” And we fall into hysterical laughter, because she knows who in the family that character is based on – and she finds it very funny. Unlike certain other sisters who shall remain nameless....’

Treading on toes

Deborah Moggach didn’t begin to write until she went to live in Pakistan in her twenties. At first she wrote journalism. ‘It felt separate enough from my parents. I did need to be wrenched away’ – a process she believes all writers must go through in order to find their own voice. ‘You need distance from your relatives to do that.’
She delivered her first manuscript to Collins at the same time as her father delivered one of his. She didn’t use his name, Hough, as she didn’t want ‘to be beholden.’

"I grew up thinking that I couldn’t be a novelist. I skirted around it for years... I thought, 'I can’t do that – mum’s doing that.'”

Instead she used her married name, Moggach. ‘His was rejected; mine was accepted. He was very nice about it. He wanted me to do well, and he helped me. He recommended editors and, through his contacts, got me my first commission to write book reviews for The Telegraph. It does help to have an entrée.’

The only time Moggach’s father found her writing ‘difficult’ was when she wrote Porky, a novel about incest written in the first person. ‘It was very raw,’ she says, ‘and very unsettling for a father to read. He told me, “I admire it, but it makes me uncomfortable and I hope you don’t write any more like it.”’

Of Moggach’s two surviving sisters, one is a physiotherapist who has written a handbook about her line of work, ‘but she doesn’t consider herself a writer.’ The other is the children’s writer Sarah Garland. Is it a problem for them that Deborah’s is the better-known name? ‘It doesn’t crop up,’ she says. ‘And at times people have rushed up to me and said – “Oh, you are Sarah Garland’s sister!” That shuts me up if I am getting ideas above my station!’

It is important to Moggach and her sister not to be ‘treading on each other’s toes,’ a phrase she also uses about her parents whose toes she partly avoided by writing in a different genre. ‘We all struggle to be unique. The essence of adolescent rebellion is that we don’t want to follow in our parents’ footsteps – and yet we inherit the farm, or take on the butcher’s shop or the solicitor’s practice.’

Or the author’s role. Deborah’s daughter, Lottie Moggach, works as a journalist on a London paper. ‘But she has started writing a novel,’ says Deborah. ‘It is tough being my daughter. I’m helpful; we do look at it together, she can take criticism from me. I’ve looked over the chapters for her. But I don’t know if it’s a good thing. One does have to find one’s own voice.’

As for me and my father, Public Lending Right payout time is coming round again, in which authors get paid a fraction of a penny for each time a reader has borrowed one of their books from a library. We’ll call each other up as usual to compare paltry sums. The winner buys the other a pint. 

BRIGID MCCONVILLE is a journalist, author and filmmaker. Based in Somerset with her family, she travels widely in Africa and Asia, filming and writing about the lives of women. Her first novel is yet to be published.

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From Issue 32 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2007

We asked the scientific experts:

ONE VIEW...

When asked if there could be such a thing as a ‘writing gene,’ Dr Daniel Nettle, Reader in Psychology at Newcastle University and author of Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature, argues that many of our abilities are genetically determined and that creative endeavours – writing, painting, acting – are no exception.

There is no scientific research to date into the existence of such a specific gene, he says, but ‘being a creative person is a multi-item job description, and all the things you need tend to run in families. Firstly, you need to be very bright and quick-witted. But more interestingly, creative people tend to have ‘no filters’, to have an openness to experience. They take everything in, are interested in everything, and see everything as connected.’

This kind of mind, believes Nettle, has a child-like quality. ‘A lot of creative people say to me “when I grow up, I’ll do this, or that...” The openness that we often see in children tends to be shut down in adulthood. But creative people don’t shut down: They tell me they are off to start something altogether new, at the age of fifty.’

AND ANOTHER VIEW...

Clinical psychologist Oliver James, author of They F*** You Up, takes the very different view: skills are learned and not genetically determined. ‘The resources of love and attention are scarce in families,’ he says, ‘and the best way to get them is to do what your parents are interested in. It’s a mixture of social learning as you observe your parents at work, and of competing for your parents’ attention.’

He sees other powerful psychological drivers too. ‘If your parents were not successful as writers, you may be trying to put right what went wrong for them. We have an amazing capacity to carry on generation after generation making exactly the same mistake. To a very significant extent, people do write to deal with their problems. It’s very satisfying as you can control the words on the page.’

Another vital factor is the social class of your family and its networks. For instance, argues James, going to public school and Oxbridge has ‘a huge impact on the process by which someone becomes a published writer. Whatever you want to achieve in life, the sooner you grasp one cardinal rule the better: ability plays a very small part in how you progress. What counts is office politics and the capacity to network.’

• IMAGE © CLARE NICHOLAS