Amanda's blog

       THE LIFE-WORK BALANCE

 

Now that the school holidays have begun, I am once again pondering the life-work balance. I suppose everyone is confronted with this; as a writer you are ideally suited to bringing up children. Or are you?

I have always treasured stories about how women authors keep a kind of green belt around their working lives, though a description in Dorothy L Sayers’ work about how her alter ego, Harriet Vane, managed to keep her small son quiet by instructing him not to bother her until both clock hands pointed to noon roused some scepticism, even as a teenager. I try to be stern (the “I’m not to be disturbed unless you have a broken leg” line) and taught mine how to cook, read and do their own homework as soon as possible. However, like many of my generation I am also a surrendered mother. Even though my younger one is nearly fifteen, I still drive him to and from school most days, because he has been mugged twice and I’m not madly keen on it happening again.

Writing during term time is constrained by this – I know I have to be home by 3.30, which means any interviews I do as a journalist, or meetings I have as a novelist, are curtailed. I can do some evening events, like talking to book groups or chairing discussions, but the sort of things that men do are beyond me, as they are beyond a great many of my sex. Every now and again I get cross and threaten to go to the famous writers’ retreat, Hawthornden Castle, where you can live in luxury for a month just writing and being served exquisite meals. Needless to say, I never do this, and strange to say neither do the other over-worked mums I know either. I didn’t have the confidence to apply when childless, and now I’ll just have to wait until my twenty-year sentence has expired.

The thing is, it doesn’t get any easier. If the first ten years of motherhood are a hard physical slog, with constant broken nights and illness, as well as the usual financial constraints, the second are more of an emotional slog. Nobody tells you that when your own children are teenagers you get a lot of turbulence as they fall in and out of love, flog themselves to pass exams or fail to prepare at all, get bullied, get drunk, get lost and so on. This drains a considerable amount of energy that could go into writing; and yet, I have no regrets. My sex may be totally ignored by the literary establishment (and a piece in the Daily Telegraph by Harry Mount this week, lamenting the absence of literary page-turners did precisely that) but I think that the experience of having and raising children enlarges us as writers.

The novelist Candia McWilliam claimed, famously, that “every baby costs four novels”. Few female novelists with children manage the novel a year that is the ideal rate of productivity; whenever I look at, say, the production rate of a childless author like Iris Murdoch, I sigh with envy. I also remember a piece AS Byatt wrote the year that Possession came out about how she suddenly realised her children were grown up and she was free. Yet most of us manage one every other year or two. Furthermore, even if it sometimes feels like (in the words of one of my characters) being shackled to a lunatic, the experience of having a child forces you to see the world afresh, and opens up whole areas of human life. Not enough writers seem to celebrate this, I think.

There is a democracy to motherhood that is much like the democracy that can arise in any other kind of long-term emergency. (Perhaps the reasons why sensible women loathe the cliques and trouble-makers at the school gates is that they run deliberately counter to this.) When you have a child, you have something in common with women of every kind of background. I know that the big leap between my first two novels, and A Vicious Circle was partly due to suddenly finding myself not only talking to mothers from very different social backgrounds, but invited into their homes. A male writer would simply not have this opened up to him; Orwell, who is one of my heroes, had to go undercover as it were to write Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. He idolised the working-class, whereas I am just interested in people and the human condition. I am not a political animal, as he was, but I am passionately curious about the here and now. When you become a mother, you are given a free pass into some of modern life’s most hidden aspects. I am able to write about the lives of the poor, and the dispossessed, because I have been allowed into them as a person and this is a privilege I have both sought and been given.

Yet the work-life balance remains very hard to achieve. What motherhood gives with one hand, it also takes with the other. To work in an office is tiring, not least because of the commuting often involved, but the domestic coal-face can be just as stressful. I have always worked, and always earned even when seriously ill, but I am not the principle bread-winner in my family. Inevitably my own work takes second place to the smooth running of family, household life and supporting a more successful partner. I do have a cleaner, though nothing like the army of immigrant helpers I needed when seriously ill five years ago – an experience which of course informed the writing of Hearts and Minds. There are plenty of women who write in far more adverse circumstances, but we all, I suspect, achieve what we do by cramming our “real” work into the interstices of our lives, getting up early and going to bed late, feeling permanently tired and stretched.

Some people look forward to a time when this isn’t the case, but I’m not sure that I do. The writers I most admire are those who, in Kipling’s words, “fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds' worth of distance run.” Anthony Trollope, for instance, wrote most of his novels while working for the Post Office (whose post boxes he invented). He composed and wrote, in long-hand, as fast as the fastest typist can type if his Autobiography is to be believed. People like to imagine that all they need in order to produce their own novel is more leisure, but I suspect the complete opposite is due. Despite the image of the artist enjoying the freedom of the garret, unencumbered, most of us produce our best work in between sorting the laundry, making fishcakes for supper, overseeing piano practice and watering the garden. With which words (there being a drought on) I must leave to switch off the tap....

View comments (11)

     LAUNCH PARTIES: ARE THEY NECESSARY?

 

The first time I ever met a Literary Editor, he was fulminating about  a launch party.

“Do they not realise,” he said, “that I could be out at a party every single night of the week, and that the kind I go to have CHAMPAGNE?”

This was the 1990s, when novels were fashionable, and the lavish literary launch party was in full swing. I caught the tail-end of it once I realised that it isn’t enough to sit all alone in your room toiling at your craft. You have to get out and play the game: for even now, people are more likely to get a decent contract if they’re on the circuit of about 300 “movers and shakers” than if they are just good at what they do. It’s astonishing the way that contacts continue to be such powerful things, but I suppose publishers are as susceptible to blandishment as anyone else, provided an author is under 45 and reasonably photogenic. Here is a passage from my third novel, A Vicious Circle, describing how an Irish waitress called Mary infiltrates the literary world:

I’ve written before about the strange double-act that novelists are expected to perform. By nature, we must enjoy our own company more than is usual or we couldn’t produce our work; yet increasingly, we can only sell it if we are bold enough to get out and stand on a stage, or go to parties. Little has changed about the parties of the 1990s and those of the 2010s, except that hardly any publishers now pay for such parties as are thrown. A lead title might still get the full club-and-champagne treatment, but those such as myself have a party, if at all, at home or in a friendly bookshop and buy their own wine. You’re lucky if you get so much as a bunch of daffodils from your editor on the day.

Having been over-lavish with entertainment budgets, publishers have now decided that everything other than in-store promotions is now a waste of resources. They may well be right. As I wrote in A Vicious Circle, most books make a loss, so to celebrate their arrival into the world with a party can seem a pointless extravagance. I’m not impressed by the whole caviar and champagne treatment myself: as a critic, I’d rather see the money go towards a newspaper ad – as this helps to pay my wages.

Yet writers do really need some acknowledgement of all the hard work that goes into a book. Even the worst gives its author pains beyond those of childbirth, accompanied by a wracking sense of self-doubt that is ghastly both to experience and to inflict upon our nearest and dearest. A party makes the pain seem almost worthwhile, though it can throw up memorable irritants of its own. The only big party I was ever given was for A Vicious Circle, as it happens, but that was due as much to the scandal that surrounded its publication as to its perceived merit. Many of the people who turn up to launches are no more than lice in the hair of literature: the superficially friendly, privately sneering sort. Some are amazingly grand about whether they will attend or not – as if it honestly mattered – and some are just there for the canapés. They will, like that long-gone literary editor I mentioned, feel personally affronted if there is no champagne.

My favourite kind of launch party happens in somebody’s home, or a pub, and thanks to the recession there are more of these and less lavishness. I was at one last night for Louise Doughty, to mark her gripping new novel Whatever You Love, which Faber had supplied copious amounts of wine for. Even with the usual speeches – first by the fulsome publisher, then by the grateful author – so stylised as to be no more than a cuckoo emerging from a cuckoo-clock, it was lovely, probably because the guests were almost all other writers who wished her well, and family. The very worst parties tend to be at The Ivy, where the canapés are in inverse proportion to the author’s number of true friends and supporters.  

Launch parties can seem, to those who don’t go to them, to be the essence of enviable metropolitan glamour. They are, in actual fact, more like work than they seem but they mean nothing to the readers who, you hope, will ultimately buy the book. Now that we are all living in reduced circumstances, seeing a publisher’s entire entertainment budget been splashed over just one author (even if the author makes a contribution) is so irritating as to be counter-productive, but not having a party at all makes the whole enterprise feel like a failure from the start. Like the christenings in fairy-tales launches are often a mixed blessing; but like christenings, launches are somehow necessary – if only to prove to an author that the book they’ve had in their head for so long is now out there at last.

View comments (5)

 

As listeners to Radio 3 may know, I did a Private Passions interview with the composer Michael Berkeley some years back in which I talked a little about how important music is to me as a novelist. It was not an altogether happy experience, partly because, as with most enthusiastic amateurs talking to a professional, I felt more and more of an ignoramaus when discussing an art about which I have very little technical knowledge or ability. I have listened to Radio 3 most of my life, sang in choirs and am now learning to play the piano again thanks to the inspiring composer and teacher Robert Ninot (whose recording ONE I recommend) who shares a passion for Bach. But the gulf between this and real musicianship is immense, and humbling.

I listen to music while writing, and often put passages into my novels describing it: the most recent being in Chapter 14 of Hearts and Minds, where one of my characters, the deeply unhappy American dogsbody, Katie, hears Couperin played at the Wigmore Hall. The pianist is Grub Viner one of the main characters in my second novel, A Private Place, who has now grown up and become a professional pianist:

I was thinking of several things when I wrote this. One, of course, is the famous, absurd and marvellous passage in EM Forster’s Howards End, when the Schlegel sisters listen to Beethoven’s Fifth, which moves Helen so much that, fatefully, she goes off with an umbrella that isn’t hers. I have a particular love for Forster, and his motto, “Only connect”, is very close to the central theme of Hearts and Minds. I suspect that I listen to music in a way not unlike he did, in that I, too, find my imagination stimulated to see and feel strange things – though I also have more of an aesthetic sense of the structure of classical music, and a little of its history. Couperin was important to the aristocratic French audience of his time, who found relief from their highly artificial, emotionally repressed existence at Versailles by listening to his compositions, whose dreaminess and unpredictability enabled them to weep (behind a curtain) as they could never do in public. Katie herself is emotionally repressed, and, having starved herself to the point of anorexia, this experience is a release for her, too – though her presence at the Wigmore is also necessary for the plot.

Piano is the instrument that means most to me. I have periods of practising obsessively, and know that it can easily overtake the impulse and sheer application needed to write fiction. Like Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, I know that "my fingers do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see many women's do. They have no the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault - because I would nopt take the trouble of practising," I gave up playing as a teenager, much as I gave up Art, because it became perfectly clear to me that if you are serious about one kind of art, the others have to fall by the wayside. Of course, I always regretted this, but I still think the decision was correct, for I have two friends who are outstanding amateur musicians, and failed writers. The hours they put into practising their instruments should have gone into writing - or so I believe - because just as you need 10,000 hours of practise in order to master an instrument, so you need those same 10,000 hours to master your voice as a writer.

I love many different kinds of music, from classical to jazz and folk; though I loathe almost every kind of pop music written after the 1980s. (I think this is because it tends to be "composed" by people with no proper musical training, but it might just be my age.) The musician I listen to live whenever possible is Angela Hewitt, the goddess of the keyboard. She has recorded both Bach and Couperin, among others, and those who have heard or seen her will know what I mean when I say that she’s as great a story-teller as she is a musician. When you watch her you really feel she’s more fully engaged with a composer’s thoughts and feelings than anyone alive. I was thinking of her when I wrote that passage in Hearts and Minds.

One of the difficult things about writing fiction is finding something akin to a kind of musical “key” for each book, and each character within each book. The one I’m writing at present is set in Devon, and I've been listening a lot to Seth Lakeman's  Kitty Jay and Freedom Fields, so imagine my joy when I discovered that he not only lives and works quite near me there (and his family once had as its Health Visitor my friend Lynne Hatwell, the http://www.dovegreyreader.co.uk book blogger) but has a new album out called – yes – Hearts and Minds!   (http://www.sethlakeman.co.uk/) The title song is stunningly good, and if you click on Seth’s website you can hear him playing it at the extraordinary Minack Theatre in Cornwall (http://www.minack.com/theatregoers/minackbrochureweb.pdf).  

 A composer/fiddler/ rock folk singer of serious talent, Seth Lakeman  combines visionary lyrics about Dartmoor with an extraordinary bluegrass quality. He sings while playing the fiddle, which gives a nervy, exhilarating pitch to each track. It's not music to relax to but it his music has a feel to it that is both so traditional, so Devonian,  so cutting edge, so full of energy, tragedy and joy that I don’t know how I’m going to be able to wait until he plays at the HMV launch for it at the Jazz Cafe on June 29 (http://www.jazzcafelive.com/now_booking.asp  . I’ve already pre-ordered my copy of the CD, and something of Lakeman’s inspired music and (if I’m given permission) lyrics is definitely going into my new novel, which is about rural poverty,  love in adversity, the landscape of Dartmoor and (as so often) murder.

View comments (3)