But by then, I was starting to break the rules. I was living with a man. I was happy with him. I wasn’t always alone, reading and writing. I ate meals with Nick, instead of a book. I got married, and my agent worried, and my publisher sent Nick around the world to write his book about Robert Louis Stevenson.
In a way, things were going swimmingly. Suddenly I had love, work and money, only a couple of years after a thirtieth birthday made bleak by my sense that I had none of them. But in another breath, there were problems ahead, and I hadn’t the experience to see them, or avoid them. Four years in, then five years in, my magnificent puffball of luck seemed to expire in a slow soft sigh of missing increments. I wasn’t winning prizes, while the peers who joined Faber not long before me—Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro—had won, or been shortlisted for, the Booker. Faber made less effort with the paperback of Light Years than they had promised in a florid memo which mentioned dump-bins and national tours. (So what? I would think now, but I was young and headstrong, and believed the enormous praise I had received, and took it for granted that, if I was good, I would automatically get sales and prizes.) How young I was. How very foolish. And the family trait of anger let me down. Anger and rashness, which you could call passion, but self-righteousness also, which makes us all blind. I quarrelled with Robert, and left my agent, swayed by what I now think was largely empty praise from a youngish female agent who approached me at some ‘Best of Young British’ jamboree and said she thought I was ‘the bees’ knees’. (Meaning what? Perhaps nothing. But I thought she would dust me with the pollen of money.)
These days I get on with publishers. I haven’t argued with them for a decade, except for the odd callisthenic textual wrangle that invigorates the editor-writer relationship. But in those days I argued, and Robert wrote a letter saying goodbye when Rosa was not many months old, and Grace was still languishing in notebooks. The timing was dreadful, just after childbirth. Everything was suddenly uncertain. I didn’t like the novel I had written while pregnant, and yet I had no time to rewrite it. I had a new agent, but no publisher. I was thirty-eight, potentially a dangerous age, although I believed I would be young for ever, though I still looked young, and slimmer than before as I ran around Rosa, and (quite soon) after her.
And here I am still, running around the subject, avoiding the nub of the question I asked—writing and Rosa: Rosa and writing. Before Rosa, writing. Why write? Why Rosa? How in heaven’s name could I have both? I have been kicking up dust for several pages, unable to touch the heart of things.
I have to write because I have to speak. Most genuine art is a break for freedom, a run into the light, evading the warders. Then craft comes in, refining, restraining, but the initial impulse is usually rebellion, the will to bring something new into the world. In the home I grew up in, too much was not spoken, or was dangerous to speak, suppressed and diverted. This is normal, of course. There are taboos and customs.
The custom in our house was, defer to the male. My father always had the last word. My brother John, being four years older, and very brilliant, knew more than me, and must have had more say, though that’s simplifying—he also represented more of a challenge to my father, which sometimes made his position precarious. My younger brother arrived when I was nine, so he wasn’t really part of the original family that established my sense of the universe I lived in, and my place in it as the youngest and most fearful. For the taboos in our house were backed up by fear, and once the fear was removed, once I had fled the coop and the old cock could no longer harry his flock, I wrote irrepressibly and joyously. And in social life, I couldn’t bear to be talked down; still can’t, to the cost of many talkative men who assume women only want to sit and listen. I like to listen, very much, I like to ask questions and learn from the answers, but I sometimes like to speak, as well, and sometimes I’m not ready to stop speaking. ‘Leave it,’ was my father’s way of closing subjects where we disagreed with him, or upset him. But he couldn’t tell me to leave my writing. He didn’t know I was doing it. And when he read things I had written, poems or stories, he praised them and encouraged me, not seeing that one day this precocious skill would enable me to write about the family, not seeing that I was acquiring the tools I needed to tunnel my way out into the open.
Though the nature of writing is always two-edged: it frees you, but it makes you work to excess. The novel is far too long, as a form, but still too short and too unyielding to relive your own life and make it right. The book suddenly takes off somewhere else, on its own. It makes a dash for the future as well as the past. It grows bored with the self, and seeks otherness. So I never quite found the infinite terrain where I could reinvent and absolve myself. But I think that’s the impulse, I think that’s why I do it. And yet the ground always falls away, the truth is not quite there, the door’s only half-open.