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| Interview with Rose Tremain by Melanie Ashby Earlier this year Rose Tremain typed the last word of her latest novel, The Colour, and posted the manuscript to her editor. Now, two months on, she’s coming to it again, to look at it in a cool way, the passion of the writing phase spent. ‘When you’ve finished a piece of work you’ve had a kind of love affair with it,’ she tells me. She looks calm, in repose. We sip water, languishing on a rare hot August afternoon in the cool of her living room, out of the sunlight that disperses through a breadth of French windows and falls on white furniture. ‘The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you’re not in that existential panic when you don’t have a novel at all,’ says Tremain, with a voice full of well-bred vowels. She compares herself to a sculptor as she explains the process by which, with the basic human form completed, she can now concentrate on perfecting – ‘what Graham Greene called fingernails,’ she says. Her partner, the eminent biographer Richard Holmes, helps as much with the rewrite as her career-long editor. Away from their Norwich home, giving a talk in London, Holmes is not there to blush as she piles up the compliments: ‘he’s calm, cool, clearheaded and clever’ as well as ‘extremely affectionate’ and ‘very very enabling’; she tells me he’s the only one of her partners, or indeed friends… For the whole interview, read Issue 15 » Subscribe! Go to » Rose Tremain's Method |
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For more on ROSE TREMAIN, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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