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| Interview with Joanna Briscoe by Daneet Steffens YEARS ago, when she was working on her first, soon-to-be-published novel, Joanna Briscoe pursued that evergreen romantic dream of going off and being a writer in Paris – and found it completely wanting. ‘I went to live there, but it didn’t really work,’ she says with a grin that indicates no regrets. ‘I just got too lonely and was not prepared for that. I went there and started writing, but I should have done a language course or found other ways to meet people. I was on my own, just really on my own. I had blithely landed there without thinking about how it was going to work, thinking that I was going to just sit there and write and that it was going to be magical, and actually I was just incredibly lonely. And Joanna, it is clear, thrives on company. From her cheerful greeting at the door of her North London flat, to keeping her guest’s tea fresh, to describing her ‘hippy-dippy, mung bean childhood’ while munching with gusto on a most conventional biscuit, to her relaxed approach to being interviewed – more of a chat, really – Joanna exudes straight up warmth and downright vivaciousness. Even when discussing the success of her third novel, Sleep With Me, she is generous with crediting others’ input, from her publisher, Bloomsbury, to her ‘useful band of early readers. Her friendly, laid-back demeanor belies a discipline that Joanna has had to work at to achieve, a personal effort that she grappled with long before that escapade in Paris. But that struggle paid off: In 1994, while working as a journalist, Joanna published her debut novel Mothers & Other Lovers. The story of an overpowering mother and rebellious daughter in bucolic West Country, it won a Betty Trask Award while still in manuscript form and was critically well received. A second novel, Skin – a tender but unflinching look at the perils of plastic surgery as a deterrent to age – followed in 1997. Then, in 2005, came Sleep With Me. Like Mothers, which so precisely rendered the claustrophobia of living in a hamlet where rumours and gossip drive and define people’s lives, Sleep with Me cannily captured an equally incestuous atmosphere: a certain set of London’s upwardly mobile middle-class, carefully tightrope-walking the line between the literati and the glitterati. It was also, in terms of her career, a tipping point. For the whole interview, read Issue 32 » Subscribe! |
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