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Interview

Joanna Trollope

talks to Melanie Ashby

From Issue 28 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2006

‘Have read a few Trollope – don’t tell many people as she is seen as a bit housewife-y and Radio 4ish, but I like her,’ posts one of the ‘finders’ on the bookcrossing.com discussion forum. The website’s little cluster of readers, new ones and firm followers amongst them, have, for the most part, very positive things to say about their experience of reading a Trollope (a ‘JT’ as the author calls her contemporary novels).

Joanna Trollope is a reader’s writer. ‘A combination of a desire to communicate, and a passionate belief in the power of story to build up relationships, to shape us,’ is her practised answer to the well-worn question ‘Why write?’. She trots it out with zeal, as if for the first time. Unlike many writers, including Kate Atkinson in the last issue, Trollope is highly conscious of writing for readers – they are sewn into the fabric of her process. With a characteristically gracious superlative, Trollope stresses that ‘one must always have the most profound respect for the reader’s intelligence and experience’. This is why extensive field research – listening to and interrogating friends, acquaintances and strangers about their life experiences – plays a significant part in her Method.

In her chosen field of modern relationship/family mores and dilemmas, the writing must ring true to be worth its salt. And Trollope’s ongoing popularity, to the tune of over six million paperback sales, is testament to her getting the formula – and her perceptions of contemporary life – right. This is in spite of more than a few, at best, mildly disparaging reviews, at worst, vicious swipes from the British media. Plus an enduring tag, ‘Queen of the Aga Saga’, that characterises her writing as cosy, conservative, and Laura Ashley-
patterned. She brushes off the title with a weary laugh.

‘I suddenly thought, she thinks these people live and breathe. It’s so gratifying.’

Her publisher Bloomsbury has arranged for the interview to be conducted in a plush, if anonymous, ‘library’ room in the swanky Knightsbridge Hotel, perhaps to lessen the potential for snide comments about her home and life. We both agree it’s posh, although Cotswold-born Trollope does Kensington Sloane very well, her country-set chic accentuated with a suede poncho, punctured with holes, à la mode.

At 62, she is tall, elegant and thin, qualities the late Daily Mail supremo Lynda Lee Potter advised were Trollope’s achilles heel in the bitchy world of British journalism. Potter asked the author to set the record straight some five years back, following a spate of nasty inferences and squalid actions reserved for ‘celebrities’ (going through her rubbish, doorstepping her mother); Trollope declined the interview – ‘I mistrusted [Potter] most profoundly’ – but asked the journalist her worldly opinion about why the press had it in for her. ‘Oh, it’s because you’re thin,’ she replied, leaving the author lost for words.

Trollope was particularly disillusioned by the fact that the more vicious journalism came from women – motivating her to tell up-and-coming hacks at the Catherine Pakenham Award two years ago that while it is good and proper to be angry about things that matter to them, they should ‘try not to be so bitter’ in their writing.

With a dash of writerly grit, her experience has also become fodder for forthcoming work (which she prefers not to discuss in interviews): ‘The time is coming to write about women among women,’ she says, admitting this idea is ‘one of the planes that are hovering, waiting to land’. ‘We need to take a clear look at our generosity and our loyalty to each other.’

The cattiness, however, didn’t only come from gossip columns. Trollope has found herself on the fraught borderline between high and lowbrow (where to place her?), giving ample opportunity for the literary intelligentsia to weigh in. In the words of self-appointed vanguard of the literati Will Self, Trollope is a ‘lower-middlebrow novelist who has just enough sophistication to convince her readership that they may be getting an upper-middlebrow product’. Trollope has found it all rather a shame: ‘I like him so much, I think he’s absolutely fascinating,’ she says generously.

‘A cliché is only a cliché if it’s happening in someone else’s life, but the first time it happens to you is the first time in the history of the universe.’

In her own assessment, she is ‘everything the English find uneasy. I’m more than middle-aged, I’m middle class, I sound like this, and I’m successful.’ With her polished persona, Trollope is easy game, as is her writing – for those who haven’t given her a fair read. Her books are stocked with mainly well-to-do people contending with the apparent minutiae of their lives; family life and women’s issues are an ongoing focus – another literary faux pas that leads her to be dismissed as a ‘women’s writer’.

And while her later novels (Girl from the South, Second Honeymoon) have London settings, following Trollope’s own move to the metropolis, many of her earlier novels (notably The Rector’s Wife, A Village Affair) are set in rural middle-England, establishing her ‘aga saga’ reputation. However, the cosier the setting, the sharper is Trollope’s scalpel as she works her way under the skin of social institutions to reveal hypocrisy, intrigue and power struggles.
Despite the storm clouds that threatened her career some five years ago, at which point she was also going through her second divorce, Trollope managed to hold herself together and keep working, and now has a better-deserved recognition for the quality of her writing. She can count enough television adaptations of her books to rival Austen, and currently has a stage adaptation of her novel Marrying the Mistress touring the country.

This dogged persistence is, ‘in a rather dull way’, the thing she admits to being most proud of in her writing career. ‘I never thought I’d get to where I got to, but I thought I might get somewhere,’ she muses. Trollope wrote her first, unpublished, adult novel when pregnant, aged 24, with her first daughter Louise. It was ‘that typical, post-college, over-written book’ – and it won’t see the light of day, she vows, until she’s long gone. Over ten years later, having done ‘scraps and bits’ of writing while working as a teacher, her first historical novel was published. Then, after what she calls her ‘apprenticeship’ writing romantic period fiction under the name Caroline Harvey, she finally reached a publishing peak with The Rector’s Wife, which hit the No. 1 bestseller spot in the summer of 1991, some 13 years after her first novel was published.

In common with many women writers, Trollope has a skirmish with confidence every time she starts a novel (‘one’s so beset by panic that one will never be able to do it again’), but is spurred by the eager responses of her readers. She particularly relishes the time, at an author reading for The Rector’s Wife, where one woman stood up and demanded to know why she had not sent the sparring spouses, Anna and Peter, to a branch of Relate. ‘I suddenly thought, she thinks these people live and breathe,’ she smiles, ‘It’s so gratifying.’ Her publishing success has been ‘unbelievably influential’ in the area of confidence, she adds. ‘If half to three-quarters of a million people buy the paperbacks, and they buy them every two years on a regular basis, it’s neurotically self-indulgent to tell yourself you’re not getting it right for those people’.

Ironically, one of the biggest drives in her writing is a foundering of confidence on an emotional level, ‘a sort of neediness’, she reveals (see Thanks to…). ‘It’s abidingly uncomfortable, but I think it keeps me going. It makes it much easier to understand other people.’

Joanna Trollope prides herself on bearing the scars of ‘experience’ as a necessary part of an author’s freight. Her motto is that novelists should not write before the age of 35. ‘You need to have been knocked about by life a bit. There are the teenage prodigies, but not many of them develop to become better writers than they were with the first flush.’

In addition to a sense of being an outsider – an observer – that hails from her school days, the knocks, the disappointments and the joys that come with age provide insight, she surmises, for the relationship dramas she stages. Trollope has been coined ‘Mistress of the cliché’ in reviews, and while her subject matter may concern life clichés (in her most recent book, empty nest syndrome, sibling rivalry, female ambition), her writing is far from hackneyed. ‘A cliché is only a cliché if it’s happening in someone else’s life,’ she points out, ‘but the first time it happens to you is the first time in the history of the universe.’

This is not to say that Trollope’s books draw directly on her own life. Having begun with an idea, something in the air that strikes her antennae, she tunes in by considering her own feelings on the subject, following up with a mass of research – which, at this stage of her career and life, she says, is ‘more a voyage of confirmation than discovery’.

Her most recent novel Second Honeymoon, whose central character Edie fails to let go the emotional reins as her youngest, Ben, moves out to live with his girlfriend, was triggered by a social encounter at a drinks party she’d been to two years back. There, Trollope met an acquaintance who was looking ‘absolutely amazing’. She presents the scene:

‘What’s spicing up your life? I wondered, and complimented her on looking fantastic.
“Oh, it’s wonderful, Robbie’s back,” she replied – referring to her son.
“What, back to live at home?”
“Yes, and it’s so sad, poor darling,” she said, face wreathed in smiles. “He’s lost his job and he’s just been dumped and he’s so unhappy, he’s so pleased to be back. It’s thrilling – somebody to dress up for, somebody to cook for.”
I asked, “What about Nigel?” – her husband, for the sake of the story.
“Oh, well, he’s terribly jealous.”’

After her neat dramatisation, the author says gleefully, ‘I thought, right, that’ll do nicely.’ And while this incident told her something novel-shaped lay ahead, the ‘empty nest’ idea had been tenuously floating around for years as part of her own life. When her own daughter got married ‘to a man I absolutely love and trust’ she had experienced ‘feelings of bereftness’ that were acute.

Trollope realised that she could gather energy and feeling to the issue, channelled initially through a central character: ‘The crucial thing,’ she explains, ‘was in finding that scene of Edie in Ben’s bedroom – like somebody who’s lost a lover. And because Edie is rather over the top, she exaggerates this.’ From this initial scene and character, Trollope constructed a cast of characters inhabiting additional themes she wanted to explore, including a portrait of steadfast male love (Edie’s longsuffering husband) and the implications of having ambition as a woman (her son’s partner) – a subject she plans to return to.

Like many of her novels, this book is a gently effortless – though not simplistic – read. Trollope handles a typically sizeable cast-list with an evenhandedness that gives her novels a 19th-Century feel; like Austen and Eliot, through the small interactions of family members she captures the seismic movements of contemporary life and society. Her style is slow-burn, it takes time to get to know the characters, but they are deftly drawn, and gradually seep off the page and sink deep into the reader’s consciousness.

Her forte is in writing dialogue – often tinged with humour – a knack developed over the years, ‘that’s ear, and practice,’ she says, adding, ‘I’ve learned that you can do accents with rhythm’. (In Second Honeymoon, for instance, she gives the son, Ben, an estuary accent, with the merest hint of glottal stopping). The music of her prose has become increasingly important to her: ‘Sentences have to have a euphony – so much of writing is a matter of ear,’ she states. ‘If it doesn’t sound harmonious as I read it through, I will tinker eternally with the balance.’

But Joanna Trollope doesn’t claim to be a stylist, and neither does she consider herself a ‘great’ writer. Self-deprecating, she giggles, ‘you wouldn’t read me for the beauty or the lyricism of my prose’. Indeed, traditionalist rather than innovator, she expresses a distaste for clever or fancy writing. Equally she doesn’t do grim lit, preferring to opt for – in the main – endings with a sense of possibility.

However, the ‘formula’ that Trollope has established cannot be described as formulaic. Far from being ‘a mistress of cliché’, she doesn’t evade the emotional complexities of life in her writing. The everyday predicaments, dramatised and characterised, are the centrepiece of her novels; they are the reason why so many readers find appeal – and consolation – in her books.
For her, the value of good fiction is ‘that it is your confessional, it is of infinite consolation’. The phrase ‘to curl up with a book’ is so telling, she says, because ‘to the book you can confide all sorts of things you’d rather the rest of the world never knew’.

And while Joanna Trollope doesn’t use fiction to explore or heal the complexities of her own life, she does like to curl up with her writing. But not to close off from reality, rather to pay intimate attention to it – and, for the moment of writing, to live her characters ‘absolutely, fully, intensely’.

JOANNA TROLLOPE, OBE, was born in her grandfather’s rectory in the Cotswolds in 1943. After winning a scholarship to Oxford, she worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time author in 1980. She has written 26 novels, translated into more than 20 languages. Several of her books have been adapted for television and theatre, including Marrying the Mistress, a stage-play currently touring the county. Second Honeymoon, her new novel, is due out in February, and The Book Boy, a Quick Read story for World Book Day, in March.

100 WAYS TO WRITE A BOOK

*28 The Trollope Method

• The narrative grows out of a situation – often an emotional relationship complication. You like to defend an unpopular social category.
• Anxious to make the novels as accurate a reflection of contemporary life as you can, you always do a ton of research. You set off, often for months, to talk to people who are in the situation you have set your heart on exploring – rectors’ wives, widows, mistresses, adults adopted as children…
• From the initial idea you create a cast list and establish a location. You then plot five or six chapters quite minutely, and decide on an end. The author William Boyd says no-one should embark upon a novel unless they know how it’s going to end – most wise advice, you agree.
• You start to write, in longhand, using a Papermate pen, medium point, blue ink. The computer is a useful tool, but you regard it as an inhuman, inflexible, intractable thing and simply can’t use it for creative work.
• You begin on the right hand side of a narrow-ruled A4 pad with a margin, leaving the left hand side blank for corrections and redrafting.
• Getting going each day is the hardest part, and you recall the words of V S Pritchett who said it was like trying to start a very cold, old car on a hill on a winter morning.
• When it’s going well, you can write like the wind – 1,000 words an hour. A novel takes, usually, between nine and 12 months.
• Because you leave three-quarters of a novel, not unplotted, but unfocused, the book is free to develop organically the way relationships in life can do.
• The power of the unconscious mind is, you find, more and more crucial in the process. You know more than you think you know, you’ve remembered more than you think you do, you have noticed more than you think you’ve observed. The physical process of writing seems to unlock all this perception.
• The most exciting part is the penultimate chapter – the end is in sight, but the activity of the race isn’t yet over...
• A great friend who has typed every book but one then transforms your large childish handwriting. The manuscript comes looking completely impersonal; it has stopped being, as it were, your baby. You can then be quite fierce about lapses, the gaps, the inconsistencies. You now tend to take things out than put in – less is more.
• By the time the manuscript is delivered to your editor she’s probably seeing a fourth draft.

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