Monday, June 15, 2009

Zoë Heller : 'I loathe myself by the end of each week'
Despite a tan from the Bahamas, movie success and recent critical acclaim, Zoë Heller admits that her transition from columnist to novelist has left scars

The Big Interview by Christina Patterson
The Independent on Sunday.

Author photo by David Ashdown
Zoë Heller: 'Nobody talks today about the edifying purpose of literature but it does exist'

'It's very bad for the soul, all this banging on about yourself," says Zoë Heller, "and it induces simultaneously a sort of grotesque narcissism and paranoia and self-loathing." She is talking, of course, about being interviewed. "I've found," she says, lapsing into a voice you could imagine emerging from a Noël Coward chaise longue, "that it gives you a tiny glimpse into the world of proper celebrities and why they are so nuts."

The voice is just one in a medley in the hour or so we spend together, a medley which adds not to any sense of a tendency towards nuttiness, but of what seems like a pretty unassailable sanity. It's a sanity marked by self-deprecation and a tendency towards the hyperbolic – because this tall, lithe creature, glamorous in white jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt that reveals her toned-as-Michelle-Obama's arms, and her I've-been-living-in-the Bahamas (yes, really) tan, a creature whose latest internationally bestselling novel has garnered reviews Martin Amis would kill for, can't really mean self-loathing, can she?
"I do end up feeling very self-loathing by the end of the week, yes. You're thinking about yourself too much, and you're embarrassed by your own self-absorption. And then, of course, you know what you say and the way you are is regularly traduced. It doesn't help to be gamekeeper turned poacher..."
Well no, I'm sure it doesn't, and that, presumably, is why we're sitting in a soulless little room in the basement of a hotel in Bloomsbury, and not in a nice hotel suite, where I can scrutinise her cosmetics, and sneer at her clothes and her books. Not, I'm sure, that I'd want to. And as someone who listens to her own interview tapes with a sense of let-the-poor-man-get-a-word-in-edgeways irritation, I can fully understand a certain ennui with the sound of your own voice.

I, on the other hand, am not one of the pioneers of columnar confessionalism. I have not been writing in newspapers for 15 years about being dumped by my latest boyfriend, or my struggles with Prozac, or a bikini wax that left me looking as if I had a "Hitler moustache". Zoë Heller has. She started off writing in the pages of this newspaper, before moving to The Sunday Times and, finally, The Daily Telegraph.
She was still writing her column when her second novel, Notes on a Scandal, came out. The year before, in 2002, she was named Columnist of the Year. "Richard Littlejohn shouted out at the award ceremony, 'how come I've lost out to some silly girl who writes about shaving her minge?'" she confides. "I kind of understand what he was getting at.
"It was an embarrassingly long time," she adds, her long, slightly Virginia Woolf-like face twisting into a grimace. "Gawd, it was scraping the barrel. But it was always hard to give up, because it was such a lucrative thing, for relatively few words."

When she started writing it, she was a single girl about town, first in London and then in New York, a real-life Bridget Jones turned Carrie Bradshaw. By the time she stopped, she was (in all but name) a Smug Married with two children and the author of a novel that was about to be shortlisted for the Booker and made into a film.
"Although it's true that it wasn't exactly me," she says of her columnar persona, "it was a slightly twee version of myself, nonetheless it didn't really matter in the long run, because the twee version was understood to be me, and it was sufficiently related to me to still be quite exposing, and there are things about that it's been quite a long, hard road to come back from."
From a distance, a distance that takes in bestsellerdom, and reviews liberally sprinkled with words like "outstanding", "stunning" and "best", and a film directed by Richard Eyre and starring Judi Dench, and a happy marriage to a successful screenwriter, not to mention the little matter of that year in the Bahamas, it's a bit tricky to believe that the road has been that long and hard. But that would be to forget Everything You Know, Heller's first novel, and a critical reception that makes Richard Littlejohn's aside look like a blessing from Mother Teresa.

Read the rest of the most interesting Christina Patterson piece online.
Footnote:
Bibliography
Everything You Know Viking, 2000
Notes on a Scandal Viking, 2003
The Believers Fig Tree Press, 2008
Prizes and awards
2003 British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award (shortlist) Notes on a Scandal
2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Notes on a Scandal
2009 Jewish Quarterly - Wingate Literary Prize for Fiction (shortlist) The Believers

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I watched Notes on a Scandal on TV the other night and it made me want to read the book very much - that doesn't happen very often. I was so curious to read the voice of the Judi Dench character.