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Robyn Sisman |
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I was born in Los Angeles, the home town of my grandparents. My grandmother was an actress and my grandfather a playwright and impresario. She acted with Ginger Rogers; he wrote the hit Broadway play, Burlesque, and took Laurel and Hardy on tour. As a small child my mother went riding with Douglas Fairbanks, and attended the LA premiere of Gone With the Wind on the arm of Charlie Chaplin. I now own the hand-me-down sofa that once bore the imprints of famous Tinseltown bottoms.
We moved around a great deal when I was a child - Illinois, Geneva, Oxford, Munich, England again. In the space of nine years I attended French-speaking, English-speaking and German-speaking school, and my parents divorced. At fifteen, it felt strange to go ‘home’ to America, where everyone mimicked my ‘British’ accent, and I determined to return to England for university (where my by-then American accent would be equally mocked).
Before taking up a place at Oxford I worked as an au pair in Cannes, then as a waitress in a village de vacance in Corsica. It was heaven. Sun, sand, speaking French again, dancing barefoot under the stars to loopy French songs and falling madly in love with one of the cooks, Jean-Paul (gorgeously unsuitable – not unlike Fabrice in Weekend in Paris).
After university I taught English in Ethiopia and racketed about Africa before reluctantly knuckling down to a proper job. I started as a very bad secretary at Oxford University Press, which was then almost heroically fusty and male-dominated. Here I met the new junior editor for history, Adam Sisman, who thrilled me with his irreverent attitude to our august employer and asked me to marry him on practically our first date. I agreed on the third.
We moved to London and I worked my way up to becoming Managing Director of Hutchinson (Random House), where I commissioned Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, among others. In the spring of 1992, just as Fatherland shot straight to number 1, and when I was seven months pregnant, I was made redundant. This seemed fairly cataclysmic at the time: I was the breadwinner as Adam was writing his first biography. Despite having never wanted to write a book myself (seen it from the other side: too difficult, too lonely), desperation was the mother of invention, and in between nappy-changing and clocking in at the Job Centre I began to draft the story that became Special Relationship. In one year I learned more about writers and writing than in a decade of publishing.
To my joy and astonishment the book was a success, and on the strength of it we moved to Somerset – again something of a culture shock until Soho House set up its country outpost of hipness at Babington, one mile from our home. Perfect Strangers and Just Friends followed – both Sunday Times Top Ten bestsellers and translated into 25 languages. Just Friends was bought for the movies by Warner Brothers and Perfect Strangers is under option to Working Title, due to start filming next year.
All my books revolve around the delights and misunderstandings of cross-cultural relationships – of which I have rich experience! – but Weekend in Paris is my first Anglo-French venture (the others shifting between England and America). Remembering my own escapades in France with irresistible Frenchmen, I have tried to capture a romantic young girl’s exhilaration and confusion at falling in love in a foreign country, in a foreign language; the overwhelming assault on one’s senses of a first trip to Paris; and the liberating experience of being a different person abroad. I also enjoyed subverting some of the chick lit clichés: my heroine Molly does indeed meet the man of her dreams, but not in the expected way. More seriously, the book draws on my experience of being virtually the single daughter of a single mother living on a restricted budget, and having an absent father for most of my childhood. Though secretly, the ghastly Malcolm Figg is my favourite character.
Have you always wanted to write?
No! I was driven to it by financial desperation, crazy though this sounds. What happened was that I got fired from my job as a Publishing Director at Random House. I was seven months pregnant, and my husband was writing a book for which we'd long spent the advance. Suddenly it was 'goodbye company car, hello Job Centre'. I thrashed around for other jobs, but I didn't much want to go back into publishing and wasn't qualified for anything else. The bank balance was tipping towards minus at an alarming rate. One evening, a few months after my daughter was born, I was listening to a radio programme about the American right-wing press and its portrayal of Oxford University vis a vis Bill Clinton's years there as a Rhodes Scholar. (Drugs! Lefties! Sex!). This was when Clinton was running for the Presidency and the opposition was frantically digging for dirt. Even Clinton's own campaign team was terrified that some skeleton might fall out of the Oxford closet. Quite suddenly, a plot for a novel unfolded in my head. What if an American running for President had unknowingly impregnated an English girl when they were students? What if the child - a son, brought up in ignorance of his parentage and now starting at Oxford himself - began to suspect the truth and went looking for his 'real' father. What if his mother decided that the only way to avert disaster was to meet the man she had once loved, face to face? I even had the perfect title: Special Relationship. But could I write? Six months later, after many false starts and tears of despair, I had written 100 pages and an outline and had found an agent. To my astonishment, the book was bought in both England and the US, and eventually sold in 14 countries. Suddenly, scarily, I was a Writer.
Do you think that experience of working in publishing has helped you in making the leap into being a Writer?
Yes, I do, though I want to knock on the head the notion that only people with 'contacts' get published. The truth is that publishers are desperate for good writing - hence the fairytale advances that we read about in the newspapers. Of course it helps to know the good agents and editors, but I firmly believe that anyone who writes well and is persistent and professional will get published. In my case, I think that working as an editor has helped me to be more critical of my own writing, and more prepared to cut or change what doesn't work. It's a big help to regard writing as a profession or a craft, rather than as some mystical process. Though there are works of art that are genuinely original and should not be tampered with, these are exceptionally rare and my books are not among them. It's important to be clear from the outset what kind of book one is writing, and to listen carefully to the advice of editors who publish in that field.
It's clearly paid off - your new book, Just Friends, has been sold to Warner Brothers. Are they flying you out to Hollywood?
I wish! The brutal truth is that they no more wish to meet me than you want to meet the manufacturer of your vacuum cleaner. My book is a product, which they have bought lock, stock and barrel. They own my plot, characters and dialogue. They can turn my witty romantic comedy into a psycho thriller or a cartoon. In movie-making terms, I am less important than the fourth assistant hairdresser. No one smoking a fat cigar turned up in a stretch limo to woo me, alas. In fact, I was just preparing to leave the cold little nun's cell where I work, wearing ancient jeans and holey sweaters as usual, with my hair scrunched up in a mad Mohican, when I got the call from my agent. He told me that Warners had made a mega offer, but would allow me only ten minutes to decide whether to accept it. After about ten seconds of stunned silence I accepted. Then I pick up the pages of re-writes I was still doing for Penguin and my clutch of Sainsbury's shopping bags, and drove home through the February gloom. That's the last I heard from Warners, apart from an incomprehensible contract the size of a telephone directory. Hopefully a cheque will arrive before too long, and I may begin to feel that this deal is real. And I get two tickets to the premiere - if there is one, and if I wish to fly to Hollywood at my own expense. The first 'if' is in the lap of the fickle Hollywood Gods. As for the second: is the Pope Catholic?
It wouldn't be your first trip across the Atlantic, though. You lived for much of your life in America, and all your novels are set in both countries. What do you like best about each place, and where to you feel most 'at home'?
I love the energy and can-do attitude of America. I miss the wonderful California beaches where I swam as a child, and the autumn colours in New England, where I went to school. No city I know is as exciting and extraordinary as New York. And I have a weakness for those tall, lean, long-legged men who are athletic without being sports bores, know how to make a proper dry martini, and can fix anything around the house. Other aspects are not so great: gun licensing laws, health care, welfare, racial attitudes, the crazy system for electing Presidents, and an excessive regard for money and celebrity. England is more low-key, for better and for worse. Politically and historically, England has a great tradition of tolerance, which makes it a very creative place and a pleasant society to live in. I like the respect for privacy (tabloids excepted), though a little more American-style friendliness wouldn't go amiss. The countryside is beautiful. I loathe the weather. I resent sloppy, surly service, which is possibly the obverse of English snobbery (misinterpreted by the Americans, I often think, though I have - rarely - encountered it). Probably the thing I like best is the sense of humour. America is not big on irony. Oscar Wilde, P G Wodehouse, Monty Python, Ab Fab, Bridget Jones, High Fidelity - none of these could have come out of America. And as for English men - Reader, I married one.
I suppose I live in a kind of transatlantic limbo. People in England take me for English - but I don't feel it. In America, my irretrievably English accent makes them think I'm a Brit even though my birth, passport and heritage are wholly American. This can be quite amusing, and my novels are largely fuelled by the humour and misunderstandings of the cultural differences. I don't feel strongly nationalistic in either direction and would probably be happy to live in either place.
How do you balance work with being a mother of two?
My secret weapon is a series of wonderful Australian nannies. They relieve me of the grinding routine of washing, cooking and tidying so that I can do the fun parts. Sometimes I feel I am short-changing my children compared to full-time mothers. I'm particularly manic and distracted when finishing a book, and there was a horrid period recently of eighteen months when we didn't have a holiday at all. The good side of being my own boss is that I can take time off work for things like Sports Day and can look after my children if they're ill. I am able to be much more flexible than women with demanding careers outside the home, and I admire such women for carrying this double load. It's very hard to be torn between a sick child and a vital business meeting and I'm grateful that for me that choice is easy and possible to make. Also, don't forget fathers! My husband is brilliant. I am actually able to answer this question only because (on a Saturday) my husband has taken our girls off to the park.
So, are you very disciplined about your work? Do you work from home?
These questions make me squirm with guilt. The fact is that we moved from London - where I rented an office to write in - so that we could afford a bigger house with plenty of room to work. But I found I just couldn't work at home. I kept worrying about the garden or the broken washing-machine, or whether the post had come or what my children were doing. In the end I rented a small space in the local town - actually a former nun's cell in a converted convent, now sparsely furnished with a computer, lamp and kettle. When I'm writing a new book I go there every day from nine to six - though I can't say I'm always productive. I envy and admire those people - women especially - who somehow manage to write novels in between giving their children breakfast and tea, while decorating their living-rooms with flair, going to the gym and very often working as journalists as well. I find writing very slow and laborious, although also wonderfully absorbing. I may sometimes feel despairing, but I am never bored.
Your plots are always very intricate. Where do you get your inspiration for new ideas from when you start working on a new novel?
I get ideas all the time - from newspaper articles, from films, from the stories friends tell or even overheard scraps of conversation, from my own life and observations - and I write them all down. Usually I focus on a key idea. In my second novel, Perfect Strangers, I explored the notion of whether you can fall in love with someone you'd never met. My new book, Just Friends, revolves around the idea of whether a man and a woman can ever be 'just' friends. (I've already described the plot of my first novel, but the central idea was about romantic attachment to one's first love). Then I think up big set scenes that will dramatise the emotions of my characters, and try to work out a plot structure that will reveal how these emotions change. I do a lot of careful planning in advance, which allows lots of possibilities for irony and humorous reversals. In this connection I strongly recommend Robert McKee's course (and book) called 'Story Structure', which is mainly concerned with screenwriting though I think many of the same guidelines apply for commercial novels.
The importance of true love plays a key part in all your books - are you a firm believer that there is someone for everyone out there?
Fiction is not life. No reader would thank me for setting up romantic expectations and then let the hero die in an accident or decide he has a vocation for the Church. We are all cheered by happy endings, and I suppose I do believe in romance in real life. But the essence of romance is risk, and it sometimes happens that you let a key moment pass out of fear or self-absorption. Often my heroines have true love staring them in the face and resolutely ignore it. They find it hard to see themselves clearly and to be honest with themselves. Most people who truly want to find a partner will, I think, do so. But of course finding a partner is only the beginning.
You create very strong characters. Are you ever tempted to bring characters from your past novels to your current work?
I'm glad you like my characters! I tend to write my stories from three different points of view, in the voices of those characters, and I find it impossible to start a novel until I know them extremely well. One can get a lot of fun out of showing how characters react to a situation while also showing how self-deluded they are. I think a lot of us women have been brought up on outspoken and passionate heroines - Cathy in Wuthering Heights, Elizabeth Bennet, Anna Karenina etc, not to mention Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davies in old movies - and I enjoy creating strong heroines who do all the things I'm never brave enough to do myself, and come up with witty retorts I would never think of until days later. People often think that 'romance' equals slush, but the more individual your characters are, the more complex their relationship will be. Jane Austen did not write slush, and though I am nowhere near her level, I can at least aspire to that level of wit without tricksiness and emotion without sentimentality. Towards the end of the book I suffer a pang of regret that soon I will stop living with the characters I have created, but so far I have been content to say goodbye to them and let them get on with their lives. It's good to leave their precise future to the imagination of readers.
Would you say that, following the huge success of Bridget Jones, there are now too many 'single city girl' novels on the market? Is Just Friends one of them?
Not really. What was so brilliant about Bridget Jones was that it was satire. Inevitably, it engendered a few copycat novels about single girls moaning about their fat thighs and dreary men - minus the ironic distance. That doesn't mean that the concept of the thirty-something single woman isn't a fertile one for many good, funny writers. Never before have women had so much choice about where to live, how to earn and spend their money, who to sleep with, whether to have children etc. It's genuinely difficult for them to accommodate a partner in their lives or to decide whether they even want one. Helen Fielding addressed these problems in her own uniquely funny way, and I wouldn't even try to imitate her. In Just Friends there are no trendy London wine bars or designer labels; my heroine, Freya, worries whether she is too thin; the plot takes place mainly in New York, plus a wedding in Cornwall and a few scenes in North Carolina. So I would say that my books are very different, though they probably appeal to the same market. (And I would love to have her sales!).
