Starting the conversation
“What I do in the books is that I want to start the conversation. I pick a topic that’s on everyone’s mind, it’s a sort of elephant in the room.”
Joanna Trollope’s latest read Mum & Dad focuses on the repercussions of Gus’s life after he has a stroke. Living in Spain with wife Monica for a quarter of a century, the couple’s seemingly idyllic life is turned on its head, leaving their three children – Sebastian, Katie and Jake – to help resolve the issues. However, when the trio arrive at their parents’ vineyard, they have to learn as much about handling their loved ones as the family business.
“It’s a very modern dilemma, this business of longevity, it means you’ve got parents who need looking after, you’ve got children who’ve got complicated and very real emotional needs at the other end of your life and you, probably, the woman, and society still expects you to do all the caring. You work full time so you haven’t got the time to look after anybody,” explains Joanna.
This is my second time interviewing her and she’s every bit as interesting and fun as I remember. Unlike other books which are nicely tied up at the end, Joanna’s reach a certain resolution, but with readers knowing that things may fall apart again.
“I don’t really believe in happy ever after,” she says of writing fiction. “I think it works for a little bit but immediately it all unravels again. Life is an organic business and you can’t ever really tie a bow on anything and think that’s that sorted. It might be sorted for now but circumstances change and then it’s a problem again.”
One of the beauties of Joanna’s work, and in Mum & Dad in particular, is her skill at creating 3D characters with whom readers can identify – and readers can feel the friction and tension between relationships.
“That’s entirely what I mean to happen. I’ve had a hand in the characters in that, I’ve made the people, but they’re actually a patchwork of real human observation of one kind or another. It doesn’t matter to me that people love some people and detest others as long as they think they’re real, as long as they’re as irritating as people are themselves! There are people who you love and admire and people who you really want to slap. It’s like real life. My aim is for nobody to feel they’re a freak or an outcast. There is no sensation that is too odd really.”
My favourite interactions within Mum & Dad involve Katie’s three daughters and their need to feel more mature in an adult’s world.
“Do you think it’s worse now that the youngest of any family grows up so fast?” asks Joanna. “When I was a child, you just waited to be grown up and you dressed like your mother and things. This idea was a teenager was not invented until the early 1960s when I was going to university and I was a young woman. The idea that adolescence has particular qualities and a particular sort of unfinished, and really how unhappy many adolescents were because they were half baked. It’s extraordinary… you were an unfinished child, you weren’t a grown-up when I was young… It’s worse now – social media doesn’t let you alone for a second.”
Joanna describes the writing process as being on public transport, which is why she isn’t considering a sequel to Mum & Dad.
“I think of these novels of mine as you joining a train at some point in the journey. The characters are on the train already and they’ve got a dreadful situation like Gus’s stroke happening. Then you do part of the journey with them and they come to some kind of resolution even if you won’t last. Then you, the reader, and me, the writer, get off the train and on they go. I get to some kind of solution and it’ll hold for now but it’s not going to hold forever.
“My aim with characters is to make them as authentic as I possibly can,” she continues. “I would plot the first four or five chapters. The theme is what I start with, which is the sandwich generation, and I always plot the end so I know where I’m going but I don’t know at all how I’m going to get there. That allows the book to develop organically, like life does. It’s full of random things and human behaviours and surprises.”
Our conversation returns to getting people talking, and how fiction can prompt a discussion on some of the topics touched on by Joanna.
“I’m trying to get people talking about things. In England particularly we have a kind of tradition of reticence. It’s much easier to say, ‘Have you read Mum & Dad?’ then to say, ‘What are we going to do your decaying old parents or our teenager?’ It’s easier to say, ‘Have you read the novel?’”
Mum & Dad by Joanna Trollope (Macmillan) is out now
