all, it’s all been fiction or journalism related to the fiction, so they’re not separate.
I’ve noticed that the theme of motherhood comes up a lot in your novels. What do you find fascinating about this theme? What compels you to write about it?
I think we live in a culture that tends to blame mothers for everything. I think that as a daughter as well as a mother. I mean people will say ‘Oh i do this because my mother did it’ or ‘I do this because my mother didn’t do it’ and that’s accepted uncritically. And it seems very strange both to believe that mothers are responsible for everything that’s good and everything that’s bad, but also that their lives are not interesting and that maternity is not interesting. I think it is interesting, i mean it’s philosophically and politically interesting. And it’s interesting how often motherhood is perceived as some kind of pink frilly minority interest, which is just bizarre because the one thing we all absolutely reliably have in common is that we have mothers. So yeah I just think it’s not thought about as thoroughly as it should be and i quite enjoy doing that. If you could co-author a book with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?
Oh, wow. I’m trying to think who would be bearable to work with as well as who I’d like to work with because I suspect trying to coauthor a book with Charlotte Bronte or Virginia Woolf would just be tears of rage all round. I don’t know because co-authorship’s weird, but what i’d really like to do, that i’ve been thinking about recently, is co-author a book in several different languages with somebody who’s more competent than I am in another language. I’d
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