From
November 14, 2004
Interview: Amanda Craig meets Meg Rosoff
Suffering? It’s how I live now
Every silver lining has its cloud. Meg Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now, had no sooner been bought for six figures after a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic than she discovered that she had breast cancer.
She was in hospital in July having her first session of chemotherapy when flowers and cards flooded in congratulating her on publishing what has been the most remarkable debut of the year.
The book has gone on to win The Guardian fiction prize, was last week shortlisted for the Whitbread best children’s novel and is hotly tipped to win the Whitbread book of the year.
Second only to the Man Booker in pre-eminence, the Whitbread prize is awarded to “the most enjoyable book of the year” and has a habit of overturning expectations.
Philip Pullman became the first children’s author to win it for The Amber Spy-Glass two years ago. Last year Mark Haddon became the second, with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and this year Rosoff looks likely to make it the third in a row.
However, while Rosoff is delighted, the triumph is overshadowed by the disease which has already killed one of her four sisters.
“I had six months of feeling deliriously happy that my novel was being published and I was able to quit my job in advertising, which is such a great moment and everybody’s dream, and in those six months of excitement I missed my annual mammogram,” she says dryly.
“Then they found it. Two of my sisters have had a particularly aggressive form of the cancer. You don’t get a prognosis about whether you’re going to live. I’m halfway through my chemotherapy and with each dose it gets worse. It doesn’t hurt but you feel nauseated the week after so that even cranberry juice makes you feel sick because it’s the same colour as the medication.
“There’s no doubt now that it’s inherited from both parents. I have a geneticist friend and he said, ‘You’re an Ashkenazi Jew, so you’re hard-wired for intelligence, depression and breast cancer’.”
The irony of her situation is underscored by the fact that How I Live Now, written in what Haddon describes as “a magical and utterly faultless voice”, is a profound meditation on death and bereavement, wrapped up in a compellingly topical narrative.
The brilliance of How I Live Now is that it strikes at the nerve in us all about the threat of terrorism. It is set at a time when London is being bombed by terrorists and invaded by “the Enemy”.
Rosoff’s heroine, the angry, anorexic 15-year-old Daisy, has been sent from New York to England to stay in the countryside with her aunt and four cousins. She falls blissfully in love with all of them, particularly the 14-year-old Edmond, and an idyll of near-incestuous underage sex ensues when Daisy’s aunt flies off to negotiate in peace talks abroad.
Daisy’s pin-sharp observations of her cousins and of English country life make it seem like a version of Dodie Smith’s classic, I Capture the Castle. However, as she warns us, “it would be so much easier to tell this story if it were all about a chaste and perfect love at an Extreme Time in History. But let’s face it, that would be a load of crap”.
The chaos in London at first seems remote. Daisy says in one of the novel’s most memorable lines: “No matter how much you put on a sad expression and talked about how awful it was that all those people were killed and what about Democracy and the Future of Our Great Nation the fact that none of us kids said out loud was that WE DIDN’T REALLY CARE. Most of the people who got killed were either old like our parents so they’d had good lives already, or people who worked in banks and were pretty boring anyway, or other people we didn’t know.”
What follows is harsh and heartbreaking. The selfish, incurious teenager is forced to discover her own capacity to care when, separated from Edmond and the boys, she finds herself solely responsible for Piper, her youngest cousin. The two lost and starving girls have to find their way home, making an epic journey across the English countryside.
“I was dying, of course, but then we all are,” Daisy remarks in a voice which flips between irony and anguish in the twitch of a sentence. “Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.”
Her 48-year-old creator says that she drew on her teenage self for parts of Daisy, and one thing they patently share is courage.
Rosoff has covered her bald head, formerly adorned by thick springy dark hair, with a Vermeer-style scarf. Wearing beautiful earrings and no make-up on her pale face, she is the incarnation of the witty, New Yorker-reading American expatriate. Despite the horrors of her illness she is devoid of self-pity.
“I’m not a worrier. When people rang up and said, ‘What a tragedy, your family is so unlucky’, I said that I expected it. You don’t get through life without something terrifying happening.”
Daisy may talk like a character out of Friends or The Princess Diaries, but she is forced to confront and survive things that no child, or indeed anyone, expects to live through.
“I refuse to be frightened and I hate the whole culture of fear that is making people afraid to travel on the Tube,” Rosoff says.
“There’s been a lot of criticism over Daisy’s casual remark that “seven or 70,000 people died’, but it’s the way people feel — it doesn’t affect People Like Us. Americans have always had this inborn sense that war always happens somewhere else to other people. One of my real goals in the novel was to show how there are no People Like Us any more.”
The daughter of a Harvard professor of medical science, Rosoff grew up in the heartland of American academic excellence and herself went to Harvard before coming to England at 19 to study art.
Like Daisy she has always felt that Britain is her spiritual home. Now married to an English painter, with an eight-year-old daughter and living in north London, she spent the next 20 years as an advertising copywriter, claiming that she was “a complete failure and never held down a job for more than two years”, writing commercials for products such as Persil.
When she began to write her first novel in slack periods at work and at home in the evenings, she could not believe the freedom that it allowed her. She loved it.
“I didn’t know anything about writing a novel although I’ve been a fanatical reader all my life,” she says in her soft, hesitant voice. “I was used to writing what I thought were brilliant ads and then having a test-panel of housewives say they didn’t like them.
“I only came up with the story in the taxi on my way to see my agent and I asked her whether I was allowed to write in the first person. She said, ‘You don’t have to think about your audience. There are no rules. Just write a terrific book and someone will read it’.”
Now in its fifth reprint it has become another “crossover” book that has grown by word of mouth into a bestseller.
What has surprised her is that elderly people, who remember the second world war, love it as much as teenagers. Obsessed with the first world war herself, she used details from both world wars — how, for instance, all signposts and railway station signs were removed — to paint the scenes through which Daisy and Piper struggle. The Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands was another source.
So were the half-joking north London dinner parties last year in which people would discuss whose cottage in Wales they would flee to in the event of a dirty bomb going off, before concluding that they would all be killed before they could go anywhere.
“It’s partly being Jewish, and partly being an American living over here, but I was shocked by how close England came to being occupied in the second world war and how little that has sunk in. I wrote the novel in three months, between January and March of last year, just before the invasion of Iraq; there was that atmosphere around.”
Rosoff describes the teenagers in her book as “weird, lateral-thinking children, changelings”. They survive through luck, an intimate knowledge of plants and wild-life and bloody-mindedness, but are changed for life. “Children are endowed with rare and subtle talents,” she says, “and our faults are sometimes more useful in life than our so-called ‘good’ qualities.”
The grief and black humour that reverberate through How I Live Now are unmistakably authentic: Rosoff says now that she “wrote about things I didn’t know I knew”.
Rosoff was with her sister Debbie as she was dying; she flew to America a few weeks after September 11, 2001 to find her sister, like Edmond in the novel, unable to speak. Now, when going through her own bone scans and chemotherapy, she cries “because this was what Debbie was going through and I didn’t know how it felt”.
Yet she did: and it is because she makes us laugh and cry through her characters’ suffering that she has written something that strikes at the heart of how we live now.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff is published by Penguin, £10.99
Jasper Gerard is away
She was in hospital in July having her first session of chemotherapy when flowers and cards flooded in congratulating her on publishing what has been the most remarkable debut of the year.
The book has gone on to win The Guardian fiction prize, was last week shortlisted for the Whitbread best children’s novel and is hotly tipped to win the Whitbread book of the year.
Second only to the Man Booker in pre-eminence, the Whitbread prize is awarded to “the most enjoyable book of the year” and has a habit of overturning expectations.
Philip Pullman became the first children’s author to win it for The Amber Spy-Glass two years ago. Last year Mark Haddon became the second, with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and this year Rosoff looks likely to make it the third in a row.
However, while Rosoff is delighted, the triumph is overshadowed by the disease which has already killed one of her four sisters.
“I had six months of feeling deliriously happy that my novel was being published and I was able to quit my job in advertising, which is such a great moment and everybody’s dream, and in those six months of excitement I missed my annual mammogram,” she says dryly.
“Then they found it. Two of my sisters have had a particularly aggressive form of the cancer. You don’t get a prognosis about whether you’re going to live. I’m halfway through my chemotherapy and with each dose it gets worse. It doesn’t hurt but you feel nauseated the week after so that even cranberry juice makes you feel sick because it’s the same colour as the medication.
“There’s no doubt now that it’s inherited from both parents. I have a geneticist friend and he said, ‘You’re an Ashkenazi Jew, so you’re hard-wired for intelligence, depression and breast cancer’.”
The irony of her situation is underscored by the fact that How I Live Now, written in what Haddon describes as “a magical and utterly faultless voice”, is a profound meditation on death and bereavement, wrapped up in a compellingly topical narrative.
The brilliance of How I Live Now is that it strikes at the nerve in us all about the threat of terrorism. It is set at a time when London is being bombed by terrorists and invaded by “the Enemy”.
Rosoff’s heroine, the angry, anorexic 15-year-old Daisy, has been sent from New York to England to stay in the countryside with her aunt and four cousins. She falls blissfully in love with all of them, particularly the 14-year-old Edmond, and an idyll of near-incestuous underage sex ensues when Daisy’s aunt flies off to negotiate in peace talks abroad.
Daisy’s pin-sharp observations of her cousins and of English country life make it seem like a version of Dodie Smith’s classic, I Capture the Castle. However, as she warns us, “it would be so much easier to tell this story if it were all about a chaste and perfect love at an Extreme Time in History. But let’s face it, that would be a load of crap”.
The chaos in London at first seems remote. Daisy says in one of the novel’s most memorable lines: “No matter how much you put on a sad expression and talked about how awful it was that all those people were killed and what about Democracy and the Future of Our Great Nation the fact that none of us kids said out loud was that WE DIDN’T REALLY CARE. Most of the people who got killed were either old like our parents so they’d had good lives already, or people who worked in banks and were pretty boring anyway, or other people we didn’t know.”
What follows is harsh and heartbreaking. The selfish, incurious teenager is forced to discover her own capacity to care when, separated from Edmond and the boys, she finds herself solely responsible for Piper, her youngest cousin. The two lost and starving girls have to find their way home, making an epic journey across the English countryside.
“I was dying, of course, but then we all are,” Daisy remarks in a voice which flips between irony and anguish in the twitch of a sentence. “Every day, in perfect increments, I was dying of loss.”
Her 48-year-old creator says that she drew on her teenage self for parts of Daisy, and one thing they patently share is courage.
Rosoff has covered her bald head, formerly adorned by thick springy dark hair, with a Vermeer-style scarf. Wearing beautiful earrings and no make-up on her pale face, she is the incarnation of the witty, New Yorker-reading American expatriate. Despite the horrors of her illness she is devoid of self-pity.
“I’m not a worrier. When people rang up and said, ‘What a tragedy, your family is so unlucky’, I said that I expected it. You don’t get through life without something terrifying happening.”
Daisy may talk like a character out of Friends or The Princess Diaries, but she is forced to confront and survive things that no child, or indeed anyone, expects to live through.
“I refuse to be frightened and I hate the whole culture of fear that is making people afraid to travel on the Tube,” Rosoff says.
“There’s been a lot of criticism over Daisy’s casual remark that “seven or 70,000 people died’, but it’s the way people feel — it doesn’t affect People Like Us. Americans have always had this inborn sense that war always happens somewhere else to other people. One of my real goals in the novel was to show how there are no People Like Us any more.”
The daughter of a Harvard professor of medical science, Rosoff grew up in the heartland of American academic excellence and herself went to Harvard before coming to England at 19 to study art.
Like Daisy she has always felt that Britain is her spiritual home. Now married to an English painter, with an eight-year-old daughter and living in north London, she spent the next 20 years as an advertising copywriter, claiming that she was “a complete failure and never held down a job for more than two years”, writing commercials for products such as Persil.
When she began to write her first novel in slack periods at work and at home in the evenings, she could not believe the freedom that it allowed her. She loved it.
“I didn’t know anything about writing a novel although I’ve been a fanatical reader all my life,” she says in her soft, hesitant voice. “I was used to writing what I thought were brilliant ads and then having a test-panel of housewives say they didn’t like them.
“I only came up with the story in the taxi on my way to see my agent and I asked her whether I was allowed to write in the first person. She said, ‘You don’t have to think about your audience. There are no rules. Just write a terrific book and someone will read it’.”
Now in its fifth reprint it has become another “crossover” book that has grown by word of mouth into a bestseller.
What has surprised her is that elderly people, who remember the second world war, love it as much as teenagers. Obsessed with the first world war herself, she used details from both world wars — how, for instance, all signposts and railway station signs were removed — to paint the scenes through which Daisy and Piper struggle. The Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands was another source.
So were the half-joking north London dinner parties last year in which people would discuss whose cottage in Wales they would flee to in the event of a dirty bomb going off, before concluding that they would all be killed before they could go anywhere.
“It’s partly being Jewish, and partly being an American living over here, but I was shocked by how close England came to being occupied in the second world war and how little that has sunk in. I wrote the novel in three months, between January and March of last year, just before the invasion of Iraq; there was that atmosphere around.”
Rosoff describes the teenagers in her book as “weird, lateral-thinking children, changelings”. They survive through luck, an intimate knowledge of plants and wild-life and bloody-mindedness, but are changed for life. “Children are endowed with rare and subtle talents,” she says, “and our faults are sometimes more useful in life than our so-called ‘good’ qualities.”
The grief and black humour that reverberate through How I Live Now are unmistakably authentic: Rosoff says now that she “wrote about things I didn’t know I knew”.
Rosoff was with her sister Debbie as she was dying; she flew to America a few weeks after September 11, 2001 to find her sister, like Edmond in the novel, unable to speak. Now, when going through her own bone scans and chemotherapy, she cries “because this was what Debbie was going through and I didn’t know how it felt”.
Yet she did: and it is because she makes us laugh and cry through her characters’ suffering that she has written something that strikes at the heart of how we live now.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff is published by Penguin, £10.99
Jasper Gerard is away