Motherload

When I was working for Cambridge, I could not envisage working for myself (although oddly you are like a barrister and you do work largely for yourself). I had a monolithic and binary view of working/not working, being/not being. I existed through my achievements. As things went wrong and went on, though, I went through a long (l-o-n-g – a positively Proustian) process of change.  Over time, I have stopped working overtime. I’ve completely revised the way I see myself as a working person. I now think of myself as a Working Mother, and give both terms equal weight, because they have equal weight in my mind and life.  I don’t apologise any more for existing, being a woman, being a mother, underachieving, trying to balance, and I don't judge myself for failing to be all things to all people. Stopping justifying myself is the single hardest thing I have ever achieved – far harder than the Phd and two births and relocating to and from Australia,...

I've been having trouble with hearing voices for years now. Don't worry, I'm not going nuts, or no more than usual. The problem I have is a writing problem. How do you convey multiple voices in a narrative? How do you do polyphony convincingly? When you're in the school playground, on the bus, in a restaurant, in a cafe surrounded by mothers, when you're in a park, or waiting outside some activity or other, you are surrounded by conversation. People — especially women — chat about their lives constantly. While it's very difficult to define what the 'stuff of life' really is (once you've identified DNA, you realise you don't even know what consciousness is), we are indubitably brilliant at using language to continually construct, shape and reshape our reality, and that's what conversation is all about. So at least capturing conversation might help you convey 'reality'? I've been trying to write Motherload  for something like ...

I've never really understood the fuss about the Theory of Relativity. Essentially Albert Einstein took the idea of 3D and thought, "What would this look like over time?" Time is the obvious fourth dimension. What complicates time — I guess this is the bit that I would call poetry or Proust and Einstein would call physics — is our experience of it. We understand that time passes because coasts erode, buses leave without us, and because we used to be children and will die. What we find much harder to understand and explain is that a single moment can feel as if it has expanded to infinity, and conversely, that we have no memory of our babies, now seven, now ten, now teenage, now adult, now gone. They rush through our fingers, and leave photos behind, but we cannot remember them as they were. Our children are like palimpsests — my daughter boils down to a steady stare, over the edge of her nasty plastic cot in UCH hospital, the night after I delivered her. Days passing...

I turned down an offer to write a Proust biography in 2006. I didn't want to write on the writer, having spent several years drowning in his book while I swam my way through a doctorate. Why so snotty about biography? I had been indoctrinated as an undergraduate with the idea of focusing exclusively on reading text — privileging close reading to the exclusion of history, whether personal or contextual. In fact I was taught to despise history and biography as being unworthy of study in their own right, in order to bring the study of language further into the light. This was the late 1980s, the heyday of critical theory. It was assumed, firstly, that I would just know historical and biographical facts, and secondly, that they were of a lower order of knowledge than interpretations  of the text. There was such a debate about the valency, credibility and construction of historical perspective, that I was able to wriggle through university history-free. It shocked my history-lov...

When I was writing about A la recherche , I stumbled across an amazing quotation: "Because they don't take in what is really nourishing about art, they need artistic joys all the time, victims of a bulimia that never fills them up." I thought this was an extraordinary sentence when I first saw it, and made it the epigraph of my book. I didn't even know ' la boulimie' was a word back in the 1900s. Ever since, I guess I have been trying to make decisions about 'what is really nourishing about art', trying to find a credo to live by, and avoid the trap that I think Proust absolutely put his finger on. By using bulimia as a metaphor for the ways in which we fail to find satisfaction from our lives in general, and for him, from art in particular, he neatly brought together all kinds of appetite, some conscious and some unconscious. We're all hungry for experience, don't want to waste our time on earth, and this shades over into greed when some of o...