shem32
I've read quite a few otherworldly Victoriana novels recently - Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, Sarah Waters' Affinity, your Laura Blundy. Do you think it's a phase the early 2000's are going through?

JulieMyerson
I'm not sure about phases (and though I love Peter Carey generally I thought Jack Maggs was more like a piece of repro furniture - beautifully done, but what's the point? All I know is that I wanted a different landscape, somewhere exciting and (to me at least) new to go when I was writing.

I'm sure I ended up writing about the same old things (motherhood, love, ghosts, darkness) but to me it felt new and that was important. But other people have made the same point as you - I think it's sometimes possible that ideas are sort of in the air and you pick up on them - so suddenly you get a whole lot of writers doing something slightly similar ...

btanzilo
I am about halfway through the new book (in its galley form here in the US - I work at an independent bookseller) and I have a question about the era. It took me a bit of time to grasp the fact that the story takes place in a Victorian setting. My mind began to assemble what seem like clues to the time period, rather than knowing it from the start. Was this on purpose or am I simply a dim bulb? If it was your intention to insinuate rather than state the era, what was your reasoning? Do you feel the era is crucial to the story or more incidental. Is it a story that couldn't be set in London in 2000?

Anyway, a Bristol-born friend of mine introduced me to your books earlier this year and I have since devoured (it seems an appropriate word) all of them and was happy to discover a galley of the new one here in the shops.

JulieMyerson
Hello Bobby - who's your Bristol friend? i went to university in Bristol ... do I know him/her? To answer: no, you're not a dim bulb and yes, you're absolutely right on everything. I wanted the reader to be unsettled, confused, to have the rug pulled from under their feet a little. This is not easy-on-the-eye history, no balls, bonnets or sweet ladies with baskets on their arms.

I wanted to write about Victorian times in a modern, non-cliched way, getting rid of all the stuff we automatically bring to it (from costume dramas on TV and even a lot of fake Victorian novels). I wanted to make the people speak in a normal way, using the kind of slang that I'm sure they would have used but that novelists of the time did not always choose/feel able to write. I'm not good at history, but a couple of historians I've come across have confirmed this to be so.

And the story? Well, I'm not sure if it could be set in London now - my characters are living at street level in a way that only the homeless do now... to me the era felt crucial because I wanted the atmosphere of the river, and was especially inspired by photos of London before the embankments, sewers and underground railways were built. Everything was awkward, smelly, inept and skewed.

blackbird21
With all the fuss made over the sex in your previous books, are we to assume Laura Blundy, 'a Victorian pastiche', will not touch on the subject?

JulieMyerson
Page for page there's actually not much sex at all in any of my novels (no, really, I swear it!) - it's just the type of sex. In Sleepwalking, no one could believe I dared write about someone so very bulkily pregnant having and enjoying sex. In fact one (male) publisher who loved the book and wanted to publish it even asked if I could just make my heroine a 'little less pregnant' in the 'bonking scenes'. I did not realise I was addressing a taboo when I wrote it, to me it just seemed like the truth. I just try to write about sex as I truly perceive (or sometimes, let's face it, imagine) it to be - ie. wonderful, terrifying, and with all the bodily fluids, the mess, the uncertainty, the no going backness, etc.

I'm proud to do this - and yes, there's a small amount of sex in Laura B and, I suppose, yes, it's sex with an amputee - but what I'm really trying to say is that people are not always beautiful or thin or complete (of limb!) but love with them is still crucial, vital, still the business really... why do hardly any authors seem to write about this? To me it seems an obvious subject, not an exotic or saucy one!

btanzilo
Hello, me again. I had another question after reading blackbird21's. In all of your books sex plays a prominent role, but it's never the type of "fantasy"-style sex most authors write, nor is it what most people would call "normal" sex - sex with an amputee, sex with a tremendously fat man, pregnant sex.

Is this your way of driving home the point (no pun intended) that human sexual experience is not always a fantasy land and that people love one another and make choices based on reasons outside conventional ideas of beauty?

Or is it simply a way to spice things up, add dimension to the story?

Now i promise to leave you alone.

Bobby

JulieMyerson
Hi Bobby, back to you. I love your next question because basically you just illustrate and explain what I just said. So YES, absolutely, is the answer - oh, all right, and to spice things up a bit of course. Stories have to have drama, characters who are up against it, with something at stake. Love and sex and whether or not you should/can/dare have it seem to me to be one of the ultimate dramatic situations.

mmreed
Are you already working on your next book? What will it be about?

JulieMyerson
Yes I am, but if I tried to describe it it would sound either weird or very boring or both. The ideas I tend to begin a book with (ie very few) always seem very babyish and ludicrous. I just write my way through/into them until the smoke clears and I begin to see what I am writing about. The glimpses you get are SO exciting! The world seems to be divided into writers who would never write in such a fumbling way and writers who only can. I haven't told anyone this, but at the moment my heroine is called Lindsay and has short hair and an awkward stout body and no confidence in herself and she does a job that is very repellent to people. Can't tell you any more and all of this may change. (And she's not Victorian, not yet anyway.)

tamara
Dear Julie, who were your first influences to become a writer, and which authors do you rate today?

JulieMyerson
So many. I always read and I have always read. At 13 I read all Daphne du Maurier and wrote to her announcing that I was going to be an author like her (!) and asking for advice. She kindly wrote back to me (can't remember the advice) and kept on writing back when I kept on pestering her... she must have been extremely generous to write so many letters and I still have most of them. I loved so many people like Enid Blyton, Noel StreatfieldÉand I was amazed to read Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce to my own children a few years ago and realise that it had influenced me in the writing of Sleepwalking, my first novel (ghosts, time, a sense of longing and beauty and mystery and sadness).

Today I love individual books more than writers. My top ones that spring to mind are - in no particular order - Sabbath's Theatre (Roth), Disgrace (Coetzee), A Child In Time (McEwan), The Tax Inspector (Peter Carey), any Updike, Sue Miller, Jane Hamilton, Anne Tyler, Alice Hoffman, Toni Morrison, some of Rupert Thomson, The Salesman by Joseph O'Connor. I'm especially aware that I love American writers (oh yes, and Jane Smiley) and I think it's that I love their lack of uptightness, their natural grace. Too many British writers are too busy being concerned with their own cleverness, instead of just getting on and telling a wonderful story.

miner49er
Julie,

Are you a pen and paper girl or do you write on a PC? And do you work conventional hours, or do you prefer burning the midnight oil?!

JulieMyerson
Have just moved from an old-fashioned Amstrad to a proper computer so now can email all my writer friends, and I also like that the printer's quick. Have to type, can't read my own handwriting and also can't believe anything I handwrite is any good (I would love to be one of these people who could write a whole novel in an exercise book in a cafe ...).

Three kids means I have to write in conventional hours, and on the whole I think that's fine because all this insisting that you can only write at dead of night is like imagining much great art has only ever been written by people who are stoned or drunk. On the other hand, both my man and I sometimes wish we could do that blissful thing of writing till, say, 7 or 8, and then sloping off to a wine bar together and then perhaps just doing another hour later on. Instead it's home at 6.15 and straight into spellings, times tables, the Romans in Britain... ah well, one day.

rgsharp
I liked the way that in Laura Blundy the language of the Victorians was so fresh - because today we can include words they would have considered obscene in a novel. Did you research all this language, and if so where did you find it? Or did you just use your instincts?

JulieMyerson
Yes, that's a good question. I did research the language and on the whole I can just about swear that it is all 100% genuine Victorian. But I hope it doesn't sound Victorian and I do want it to make people do a double take, to think hold on, could they have said that then... (to a certain extent I am asking for trouble by doing this, because one or two critics assumed I had tried it on or made mistakes). I chose to use only slang that is either still very much in use today, or else that we haven't ever heard on a BBC costume drama. The music that the language of the book makes in my head is very peculiar and very satisfying to me, and that was the point really. One critic took exception to my characters saying Yeah, but really she was wrong. Of course yeah wasn't written down or spelled like that then, but do we really mean to say that every Victorian from every walk of life always pronounced the 's' on the end of yes?

buttercup23
I read that your husband is also a novelist, as well as an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. Do you have any plans to collaborate, maybe turning one of your books into a film? Do you find it helps to have a partner who is also a writer?

JulieMyerson
Yes! He and I are just about to adapt Laura B for Channel 4 TV, all v exciting though nothing actually signed as yet. We work extremely well together because we have no reverence whatsoever for each other's work. Everyone, including my film agent, agreed that Laura B was unfilmable to start with, but Jonathan has produced a treatment that not only works, it's wonderful. That's the advantage of living with a screenwriter (the drawback is that he is SO BOSSY).

buttercup23
A recent report found that the majority of writers cannot afford to live off the money that they earn from writing. Do you think that this is a parlous state of affairs, or is it good for writers to get out into the world a bit? How did you sustain yourself while writing Sleepwalking?

JulieMyerson
Of course writers should earn more. I am not at all badly paid for my novels compared to some, but I couldn't live off just my novels so I do bits of journalism that pay so much better for so much less, which is not very gratifying (and the easier and crasser the bit of writing, on the whole the better you will be paid for it). My husband pointed out to me recently that I am paid for my novels at about the same rate as a barista at Pret A Manger.

It always sounds grand when a writer gets a large sum for a novel (and if, like me, more than one publisher wants to publish you, then there's competition so at least you get goodish amounts) but, stretched over two or more years, it's pathetic... I'd be happy if I just got paid what an editor of my age gets in any of the major publishing houses.

I wrote Sleepwalking at nights and weekends whilst doing a part-time job and having my third baby. We could not afford any childcare on my days off so it was all done in the scraps and fag ends of my day - and with a huge amount of support from my man, who understood how important it was to me that I did it. I had no idea it would be published and, looking back, I don't know how I kept going. It was a delight and a luxury to be able to write the second in the daylight (ie I got paid just about enough to give up the day job...).

blackbird21
Reading about your rather unusual childhood in a recent magazine article, I wonder whether you agree with the idea that having some emotional upheaval in a life makes for a better writer?

JulieMyerson
It would be nice to think so but I'm not sure, I really don't know - has anyone ever done any research on how many authors who win the Booker have divorced parents? All I know is that though I always thought I coped with my father's rejection of me and subsequent suicide rather well, there are definitely great dark holes in my head that I sometimes seem to explore when I write. I don't understand them and sometimes they scare me (in fact I realised quite recently that I tend to write about all the things that scare me - as a way of keeping control perhaps?).

What I'd be writing if I didn't have them I'm not sure, but I am sure I'd be writing. I don't write for therapy but because of the wonderful zingy moment of satisfaction when a group of words come together and express something absolutely perfectly. Yes, that's why I write.

Kudra
Following on from Bobby's question, there don't seem to be many novelists who write about sex in such an honest and unglamorous way - the choice is often between flowery, overblown descriptions, or the crass 'bonking and shagging' of the 'city girl' genre... Why do you think this is? Which other writers do you think tackle this subject in a realistic way?

JulieMyerson
Thank you for saying honest and unglamorous, because that's just what I'd like to be. I really honestly don't know why, though I tend to think that British women writers, though extremely clever, are disappointingly coy about sex. I just don't do coy, and I try to write before I think - that's how the best and sharpest things come out. As soon as you think too much you stop telling the truth.

I like men like Roth, Updike - as I said before. Life and sex are really pretty much entwined, aren't they - I mean even if you don't do it, you'll have an interesting attitude to not doing it. It's hard to understand much about a character if you don't understand how they feel about sex - that's where I'm coming from, whereas some writers seem to tack sex on as something incidental (and therefore a bit embarrassing). But I have been influenced by a huge number of good writers who can do sex.

shem32
Does a book begin with a character, or a situation, or a first line - or is it more complicated than that? Do you know what will happen as you write?

JulieMyerson
I think I answered this in a previous answer really. But to be more specific, the first line I write is never the one that ends up being the first line of the novel. I do so much editing all the time, going over and over refining and deleting what I've done, sometimes I can barely remember what I began with. But I do think writing novels is half about writing and half about knowing how to be ruthless and edit yourself, how to get rid of a passage even if you spend all day on it if it's not working... I read some bad novels that have simply not been edited by anyone, least of all their authors.

trapeze What's the next trend for women's contemporary fiction now that the 'Bridget Jones' genre seems to have saturated the shelves? Can we expect something a bit more intelligent than the 'get me a boyfriend, save my career' novel?

JulieMyerson Despite the massive publicity and sales, the Bridget Jones genre as you put it is still only a genre - more a product, like a magazine. Literary fiction is what interests me - by which I mean novels written not for quick easy sales, but because the author wants to express ideas/feelings and maybe play around with language/style etc. These novels are all over the tables at, say, Waterstones, all of the time, and they are new, fresh and deeply exciting. Some are not so good (authors take risks which don't always work out) but many are just brilliant. You won't have heard of them like you have Bridget Jones, but I bet you anything that the best of them will last longer.

btanzilo
Hello Julie,

My Bristol friend is Nick Peters, who, after seven years in America, recently returned to Bristol and bought a house with his hometown sweetie. They've spent the past three months stucco-ing, painting, and comparing swatches. Sickening, really. But before he was in Milwaukee, he was at university in Leeds for a few years, so it's been a long time since he's been in Bristol full-time, so I suspect your having crossed paths with him is unlikely. But he will be excited to know that we discussed him, so I couldn't help but respond to your question.

I just thought I'd tell you that I left off last night when Ewan's head bobs back up (p. 207 here in the States)!

As a small-minded person, I'm glad that you veiled the Victoriana as I would most likely have put off reading the book and felt a little disappointed that you'd sold out to grannies! Instead, I'm thoroughly enjoying the book, although I love Sleepwalking the best - although that may be because, as in love, there's nothing like the first time. The thrill of discovery, if you will.

Cheers, Bobby

JulieMyerson
Yes, tell your friend we discussed him and I think Bristol's a great city - in fact, one day I'm going to write a novel set there (Me and the Fat Man, which is published by Ecco in the States, was set in Bath, almost next door ...) Thanks for your great questions. Did you say you were a bookseller? Please try and sell Laura B for me. It comes out in October!

Best wishes, Julie