Quickfire Questions with Nicci  |  Quickfire Questions with Sean

Who or what always puts a smile on your face?
We have just given in to five years of pressure from the children and got a dog - a black Labrador puppy called Maisie, who gallops sideways with her ears flapping and her tail beating and her tongue hanging out. She's ludicrous, clumsy, greedy, grubby, eager, unconditional, absolutely without dignity or guile. And it makes me feel cheerful, just to think of her.

What are you reading at the moment?
Keats' poetry with my eldest daughter, 'How to Paint with Watercolours' with my youngest, and 'Fugitive Minds' by Antonio Melechi.

Which author do you most admire?
Charlotte Bronte because she wrote 'Jane Eyre' which remains a shockingly passionate account of buried female desires and fears.

What's your earliest memory?
A dream of a woodpecker attacking my thumb, and being driven in the car at night by my parents, being half asleep and entirely safe and watching the stars out of the window.

What is your greatest fear?
Something happening to one of the children.

How would you like to be remembered?
Giggling.

Have you ever done something you've really regretted?
Yes.

How do you spoil yourself?
Lying in a hot bath with the door locked and not answering when someone shouts for me.

What's your favourite word/book?
Fizzgig (a police informer, a flirtatious young woman, a firework or spinning top that makes a spinning sound) and giggle (see above) for my word, and if I had to choose a book, Tove Janssen's miraculous story for children and adults, 'Moominland in Midwinter'.

Who do you turn to in a crisis?
Sean or my mother or no one at all.

What makes you angry?
Bullying.

Have you ever had any other jobs apart from writing?
As a student I picked strawberries and hops, worked in a library, was a waitress, sold jewellery on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, taught English to Italian children. Later, I worked with emotionally disturbed children, taught very briefly in an American university, was a freelance reviewer, a magazine editor, a literary editor, a feature write...But now, I just write, which was all I ever wanted to do anyway.

Are you in love?
Certainly.

What's your worst vice?
I nag my family. I have no patience. I'm obsessive and a binger.

What are you proudest of?
The fact that almost every evening we sit down together round the kitchen table, all six of us, and eat and talk and argue.

Where do you write?
Usually in a lovely study at the top of the house (as far away as possible from Sean's study at the bottom of the house) - but actually, anywhere and everywhere: planes, trains, boats, bus stops, gardens, other people's houses...

Where's your favourite city?
Venice.

When was the last time you cried?
I cry pretty much every day, usually in a maudlin and most enjoyable kind of way.

One wish; what would it be?
That all my children have long, good, full, thinking, loving lives.

Did you enjoy school?
I liked rounders, tennis, learning poems, finding out about the causes of the first world war and the properties of a thermos flask, colouring around maps, acting in plays, making friends, writing stories, getting the giggles. I hated getting up when it was dark and sitting glumly on the bus, wearing a uniform, polishing my shoes, going for cross-country runs, being part of that close and cruel girls' world of exclusion and belonging. And I hated revising for exams when it was sunny outside.

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Who or what always puts a smile on your face?
Laurel and Hardy attempting to deliver a piano or to fix the radio aerial on their roof.

What are you reading at the moment?
One of my bad habits is reading lots of books at the same time. So, by my bed at the moment in a pile are: The Victorians by A.N. Wilson, the vast John Updike Early Stories 1953-1975, The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman, Rubicon by Tom Holland, Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller, a collection of the letters and poems of Keats, The Feeling of What Happens by Antonio Damasio, In Siberia by Colin Thubron, Antwerp by Nicholas Royle and a few others. This really is a form of psychological illness.

Which author do you most admire?
Just at the moment it's Samuel Beckett (for me a funnier writer than P.G. Wodehouse - and with certain other qualities as well), but last month it was somebody different and next moment it will probably be someone different again.

What's your earliest memory?
Snow on Hampstead Heath, forests and lakes in rural Sweden.

What is your greatest fear?
Violence.

How would you like to be remembered?
As someone who is still alive.

Have you ever done something you've really regretted?
Almost every day. But, funnily enough, my real regrets are for the things I didn't do.

How do you spoil yourself?
I always think it's important to reward myself with alcohol for the achievement of having reached the end of the day.

What's your favourite word/book?
I don't have a favourite word any more than I have a favourite number. It all depends what they're applied to. Three dry martinis: good. Three months to live: not good. If a gun were put to my head and I had to choose a favourite book, it would probably be Anna Karenina or In Search of Lost Time.

Who do you turn to in a crisis?
Nicci, poor thing.

What makes you angry?
People who don't put CDs back in their cases.

Have you ever had any other jobs apart from writing?
I haven't had many jobs. I was a stage hand in the first West End production of Jesus Christ Superstar (which caused a profound aversion to the works of Andrew Lloyd-Webber), I've been a cleaner in a Swedish hospital, and a few editing jobs but that's about it. The last time I worked in an office, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

Are you in love?
Yes.

What's your worst vice?
In 1972, I bought Yessongs, the triple live album by Yes. And I still listen to it occasionally, when Nicci is out of the house. It's not something I can share with her. Also, I used to play Tetris on my Gameboy so obsessively that I would see the shapes when I closed my eyes to go to sleep.

What are you proudest of?
This question brings out my superstitious side. I'm sure that if I said - for example - my children, they would instantly be struck by lightning. So I'm going to take the Fifth on that one.

Where do you write?
I've tried not to develop fetishes about writing. I've written on trains and in hotel rooms and with children screaming in my ear, but when all else fails I have occasionally retreated to a remote hut in deepest Sweden.

Where's your favourite city?
London. It's just so weird and messy and big and unmanageable. I hate it as well, in lots of ways, but it just occupies a huge part of my brain in a way that no other city ever could.

When was the last time you cried?
I mainly cry at films so it would probably be the bit in The Adventures of Robin Hood when Richard the Lion Heart throws off his disguise or when the orchestra play the Marseillaise in Casablanca or when the old man remembers seeing his parents on the other side of the creek at the end of Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

One wish; what would it be?
I'd like to know the place where I'll die, and then I'd never go there.

Did you enjoy school?
There were good times - working on plays with friends, playing rugby, discovering wonderful books - but when I look back on my schooldays, 'enjoyment' isn't the first word that springs to mind.

Quickfire Questions with Nicci  |  Quickfire Questions with Sean

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