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Christobel Kent |
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Christobel Kent was born in London in 1962 and now lives in Cambridge with her husband and four children; in between she lived in Florence. She worked in publishing for several years, most recently as Publicity Director at Andre Deutsch. Her debut novel A Party in San Niccolo, was published in 2003. Other novels include Late Season and A Florentine Revenge.
Christobel Kent, author of The Summer House, describes her early childhood, her difference to the West Country, and the best bits about being a writer...
I was born in London in 1962, the second of four children; my mother, a painter, was fairly old when she had her first child and was ill on and off throughout our growing up. As a result I was sent to boarding school for a couple of years when I was eight, and this really started me reading in earnest. I was miserable at boarding school - a convent in Devon – and remember spending weeks crying and feeling sick with unhappiness, and the only thing that got me out of it was reading. We were allowed to take one ordinary book a week out of the school library, plus one religious book, and I remember ploughing my way through endless lives of saints; I got around to some pretty obscure ones. In retrospect I imagine this policy was designed to encourage girls to believe they might have a vocation; it didn't work on me for more than a week or two. The boarding school experience left me with an almost unnatural devotion to reading, and a lifelong and unreasonable hatred of the West Country.
My mother died when I was fourteen, and again reading was really the only way of feeling less unhappy. Within a year my father married again, a nurse with four children of her own, and we all moved to a cold, damp, leaking Thames barge on the Essex coast; I went to the local school and was encouraged - in reading if not writing - by some very good English teachers. By then (mercifully as my father's second marriage had begun to break down), the end of childhood was in sight, I managed to get into Cambridge to study English and left home for good. I met my husband at university; we now have five children and live near Cambridge, where he teaches.
What inspired you to start writing your first novel?
The thing that started me writing was going to Italy; it's an amazing country for inspiration. I went there to teach for a year after my first job went nowhere - a couple of years as a dosgbody in a literary agency - and I had a row with my not yet husband. I managed to learn Italian and made some of my best friends, and have been going back ever since; in 2000 I spent most of a year in Florence with my family and just spent the whole time walking the streets or looking out of the windows and marvelling at the drama of life in an Italian city. Florence is a place where there are dozens of different nationalities co-existing, where there is a just visible, intriguing underworld, the destitute and the very wealthy living side by side, and extraordinary beauty everywhere. Soon after we got back my then youngest child began at nursery and, having spent eight years mostly looking after children, doing bits and pieces of writing on the margins of publishing it was quite a shock to find myself pretty much unemployable. I missed Italy, and decided that if I couldn't get a job I could at least have a go at writing properly, so I began to write about the situations and characters I had seen - or imagined - in the streets of Florence.
When I'd got to about thirty pages I did begin to lose heart - it's very easily done if you're working on your own, and don't dare confide in anyone for fear of failure. I didn't even tell my husband what I was doing. But I sent the first thirty pages to an old friend who had become a literary agent - I was lucky in having worked in publishing for ten years in one capacity or another - and she encouraged me to keep going with what eventually became my first novel, A Party in San Niccolo.
Can you describe a typical day?
I write in the mornings, straight after I've dropped the children at school. It's a bit trickier now I've got a baby (my youngest daughter, Bebe, is eleven months old) but some mornings I can persuade her to sleep for an hour or two and for two mornings a week she goes to a childminder now. I make a pot of coffee and write for two or three hours, then that's it; then I go shopping. In the evenings sometimes I go over what I've written with a glass of wine; it's much easier to press the delete button if you aren't stone cold sober.
Which authors inspire you?
My influences are probably a mixed bag; as a child once I had weaned myself off the wonderful Joan Aiken, who sustained me through any number of miserable periods, I gorged on Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming, quite pulpy stuff. I love crime - P. D. James, Barbara Vine, Henning Mankell - and a good plot. My idea of great literature is probably a rather different thing; my favourite book, I think, is Madame Bovary. It is bleak, but so full of beauty and longing, so perfectly written, so profoundly involving. I love John Updike, for his humanity, and his extraordinary devotion to the minute detail of life, the way he records every last breath of his characters, and Beryl Bainbridge for her wonderful, bold, poetic imagination. She's magnificent.
What are your favourite films?
I like Robert Altman, especially Nashville, Short Cuts and Gosford Park, but there are certain actors I'll watch in anything, like Al Pacino, Gene Hackman and Dennis Quaid. But since having children I haven't been to the cinema except to watch kids' movies (fortunately they're a lot better than they were thirty years ago!) and only watch stuff on video, which isn't quite the same.
What are you currently working on?
At the moment I'm working on another novel set in Florence itself; we have a tiny flat in the city now, so I have plenty of opportunity to observe life there and I still find it irresistibly intriguing. I did plan to write about Cambridge, which in its own way is a very richly layered and beautiful place, but couldn't resist one more go at Florence first. It concerns a young woman working as a guide in the city and a mysterious disappearance; like all my novels to date it deals with different lives and how they intersect.
Who is your favourite character from The Summer House?
Although I like all my characters, I have a particular soft spot for Leo Cirri, the Italian policeman (I named him after a Florentine official who, a long time ago, bent the rules in very Italian fashion and allowed me a resident's parking permit to which I wasn't strictly speaking entitled.) Leo Cirri isn't quite middle-aged, but is getting to the stage when he begins to despair of modern attitudes to the important things in life, such as love and food, and realises that if he isn't old yet nor is he young any more. He loves his wife, and has a young daughter, Chiara who keeps him awake at night and makes him more alert to how dangerous the world has become. I have tried to embody in him the very winning combination of sweet-naturedness, sensitivity and hardheaded pragmatism I have found in my Italian male friends.
How do you manage your career with five children?
There are a lot of things I hate about being a mother, but they mostly involve other people, so I am rather reclusive as a parent. I can't stand toddler groups, singing groups, all that playground circling around and comparing; it makes me grind my teeth with rage and boredom. But having children is like nothing else, and nothing can prepare you for it; one of the wonderful aspects of writing is that, now and again and with great caution, because it can be very boring for other people, I find a way of describing it.
What are your favourite experiences of being an author?
I have had mostly only good experiences as a writer so far; some kind reviews, some nice letters from readers, and the euphoria of getting my first book deal, of knowing I had actually written what would become a book, took some beating. I sent a text message (one of only a handful I have managed in my life) to my husband who was lecturing at the time and I think he was lost for words for a second or two.
And your worst?
I have I think had only one properly bad review, which was upsetting, but I think it's something you have to learn to accept, just as some people you meet won't like you, some people, if you put enough of yourself into a book, won't like what you write. And it is modestly encouraging to think that, so far, more of my critics have liked my writing, than not.
