The Memory Box

Penguin spoke to Margaret Forster in December and recorded
a full video interview

Many of your novels feature the theme of mothers and daughters including your new one, THE MEMORY BOX. Could you talk about that?
No book I've ever written has ever started with me thinking - I'll write about mothers and daughters. Books don't really start like that. They start with some problem that I'm thinking about. For example, if you look at THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTABEL, I was thinking at the time how extraordinary it was to see a sudden rise in the number of young women - young, competent, often successful women, deciding to have babies on their own. It started there and then developed into being a great deal to do with the relationship between the mother and child.

It wasn't really until the sixth or seventh novel that mothers and daughters really emerged as a theme. I think it's probably a touch of the same thing that motivated Jane Austen. You write about what is closest to you and what's emerging from your own life. Male writers scorn this and we're constantly sneered at - you know, because the men write ranging across centuries and generations whirling around the world and here the women are, sitting modestly in their kitchens with a pen and pencil, writing about what's closest to them and what's in their lives. It's not just that I like to write about that, but that's what I like to read too. That's what I often choose to read - women writing about the domestic life - however much I admire more scintillating writers.

You have said that you worked through the school library reading each book in alphabetical order. Did you do this as a means of escape?
In the house I was brought up in (an absolutely commonplace small council house) there wasn't really a great deal of room for books. I was born in 1938 and you didn't have paperback books in the 1940's so the only access to books was the library. Discovering the library was incredible - I could hardly believe that you could really take these books out and it didn't cost anything. You could take them home and keep them and read them. People talk about escapism as though it's something nasty but escapism is wonderful! I mean, when you are an adult you have many ways of escaping but when you're a child you really don't have many, apart from your imagination. It's a way of feeding the imagination and that's what led me to it. I did go to the library and once I got to the adult library I did work my way through it. Well actually I used to shelf hop, because I wasn't really interested in any author who had only written two books. I had to be reassured that I could go back and there would be a great many more books by the same author. So books like Jane Austen's, the Brontes, especially Dickens of course, were terrific because I was reassured by the amount of them. Yes, I practically lived at the library and in those days of course, libraries were not the friendly places they are today. They were very formidable establishments where you lived in great fear of the librarian. It was totally silent, you could literally hear a pin drop. I just loved it. In fact my earliest ambition was to be a librarian.

Which were your favourite authors then, and have they changed over the years?
Well, I started with Jane Austen and I didn't really make a lot of her. I found them a bit dead. It wasn't really til I got to the Brontes that I found what I was looking for - especially Emily Bronte. I absolutely adored WUTHERING HEIGHTS and fell in love with Heathcliff as most girls do. And Dickens, I loved Dickens, all of Dickens really. Those are the ones that stand out but later on, much later, it was contemporary fiction that I came to like best and that's what I like now. I especially like first novels. These days, author profiles and interviews (like we're doing now) and all that actually gets in the way of the book. You bring to the book what the author looks like and what they sound like and you know what you've read about them so that's why I like first novels best and I like books about my time.

You published your first novel in 1964. How has publishing changed?
well perhaps the cult of the author has gone too far but on the other hand I can see the problems for the publishers. I mean I'm very familiar with books and when I go into a bookshop, one of the big chain bookshops, I get vertigo because there are so many books there. How do you choose? Publishers are not charities they are there to sell books. Very early on with my hardback publisher I had a clause in my contract to say No Parties. I just couldn't bear parties and I couldn't bear to go around the country. I did it once for a biography of Daphne du Maurier because with biography you have to stand by your subject. I'd written this book, I knew it was going to be attacked and I felt I had to stand by it. The things you do are lovely - I mean the bookshop events, literary festivals and signing sessions and everyone's lovely but at the end of it you just get so depressed because you think this is just one big ego trip. All you've done is smile and I find being charming very hard. I think I was lucky because all the authors that started off in the 1960's and there was quite a clutch of us, we got in before it was difficult for publishers. It's very, very tough now for young writers starting off.

Your writing has moved from novel to biography to personal memoir. How do you find that progression has worked?
When I started off, what I most wanted to write was novels. Novels are what I love and I do find it a sort of organic progress. If I was reading a novel (this is when I was young) there would be an excitement about it being good and part of that excitement wasn't just the enjoyment of it but a feeling of 'I can do this' or 'I want to do this, I want to be part of whatever this is' and so it began in that kind of natural way, but then when my second child went to school and after writing being crammed into when the two babies were asleep, I suddenly had this child-free time for at least two hours every day, I discovered …., well my kind of novels are natural, they have to arise in me. I can't say - Right, I'm going to write a novel about whatever and then plot it. This little germ comes or it doesn't and if it doesn't come (and it doesn't come more than once a year if you're lucky) what else are you going to do?

I also like biography and I did my first biography. I find, you see, that it is a manufactured thing whereas fiction is natural and it either rolls or it doesn't roll. Biography is manufactured, it is almost cold-blooded. I don't mean to say that you don't have enthusiasm for it but the starting point is … who would I like to write about, who interests me. Fiction is very quick to me, I rarely spend more than a few weeks on a novel. With biography it's years and years and it splits into very different parts. I mean you've got the research part, going out and looking at sites. If it is modern biography, you've got the going out and meeting people your subject knew. Then there's the sitting down and writing it. So it feels like real work and it's extremely satisfying on that level but it hasn't got - what you have to call, the corny word - the magic of the novel, this thing that springs up and has its own life. Novels are easy, natural, magic in process and non-fiction is very, very hard work and deeply satisfying.

Having written HIDDEN LIVES, do you think some secrets should have been left untold?
When I started to write the family memoir HIDDEN LIVES, my mother had been dead for nearly ten years. I certainly wouldn't have written it while she was alive because she regarded her pathetic secret of her mother having been illegitimate and then having an illegitimate baby herself as ….well, I don't know how much she knew about that, I suspect quite a lot … but she regarded her mother's own personal history as something deeply private. She never told me about it although I asked often enough. I do think that you have to respect the secrets of the living members of the family.

How have things changed for women over the generations - who has the best deal out of it? You mother, your grandmother? What do you think about the choice between family and career?
When I wrote HIDDEN LIVES I said at the end of it how relieved I was that I had been born in 1938 and not 1869, like my grandmother. I could hardly bear to think of what my fate would have been if like her I'd been the illegitimate daughter of a working class single mother. There would have been no life. Whereas born as I was in 1938 I was just in time for the Butler Education Act of 1944. I was in the first generation of working class girls that could go right through the education system and go on to careers and do what they wanted to do and I think that's brilliant. After the book was published, I did get some letters and some press response from women saying It's alright for her, but what she doesn't realise is that things haven't really changed. And they make me furious because they have changed. It's all about opportunity - women of my grandmother's day had no opportunity and I don't want to hear this drivel about how they've got it all now, and it makes life much more difficult. It doesn't! It gives you choice. Choices are hard, but it gives you the choice and the opportunity to choose and that's important. I don't like the way that critics of the present say that the domestic part isn't important. Of course, it's important! Even if you are a single mother in a high rise block of flats you can still have your baby in hygienic circumstances and you won't die in childbirth. You can still take your clothes to a launderette and have them washed. You're not doing as my mother, let alone my grandmother, did - trailing out to freezing wash-houses, boiling water before you can start, using mangles and dolly tubs and all this stuff that's almost a Monty Python sketch. But it was for real; terrible, back-breaking hard work. Now very few women, however hard their life, go through that kind of physical hard labour. Compared to that the mental anguish of choosing between careers and motherhood is nothing…

You had your first novel published when you were 25. You had three children and no help. How did you manage it?
The first novel was published in January and the first child was born in March and from then onwards I was always writing with children and people say How did you do it without help with the children or the housework. Looking back it was hard and I did it because I loved it. It was never easy when the children were in bed to start writing but I had a system whereby my husband looked after them from 6 to 9 three evenings a week and so I wrote from 6 to 9 three evenings a week and as time went on I switched to writing when they were at nursery school for two hours and of course it was hard and now in glorious late middle age when I have all the hours of the day in which to write, it's wonderful. And the work has got better, it's true. I think I've improved because I have more time and I certainly would have found it very difficult to do non-fiction like that. But you just accommodate yourself and writers are lucky (unlike artists who have to get out their easels and need rooms or whatever) because you can sit and scribble in the kitchen with your pen and you just snatch at the time you've got and make it do. Back to Jane Austen again. I've never had what you call a social life, I mean I've never wanted to go out in the evening and spend much time with friends. In fact, I don't really deserve the friends I've got because I give them so little time. So I lead, I always did lead a very orderly sort of life and somehow it fitted in. It was tiring, of course it was, and I do now commit the awful sin of looking back and thinking How did I do it? Now I am looking after my visiting grand-daughter which I adore doing - just one baby for short periods of time, half a day and I haven't written a word since the grand-daughter arrived! I'm absolutely exhausted but somehow you do it when you're young.

What was the inspiration behind THE MEMORY BOX?
The inspiration was really reading in the newspapers about two or three young women, reading about their anguish because they knew they were going to die with very, very young children. Everyone was writing about this and saying how terrible for the children and suddenly it occurred to me that maybe it wouldn't be, maybe in the future the thought of their mother who died when they were six months old or two years old (it was different in the case of each of these young women) maybe the dead mother would become someone they didn't want to know.

Around about that time, I opened the door one day and there was a young woman of about 20 standing there. She stood on my doorstep and said, You don't know who I am, do you? I just looked at her and I saw her mother, who had died when she was very young. So here she was, grown up and she had come to see me because she wanted to know what her mother was like. All that she'd got fed were these stories of a saintly person who was too good for her, and she knew it couldn't be true. She was searching for her mother, and she told me how her father had given her things belonging to her mother when she was 13 and older. She'd hated it, she absolutely hated being given these things. So everything came together and I thought …. Suppose I wrote it from the point of view of an older woman in her thirties who hasn't got children herself and who has rejected the idea of this saintly mother because she has been happy with her stepmother. But then suppose she was angry because she had had this mother shoved at her, and then something happens which makes her think that she does want to know this mother after all and that she needs to know her because it will help her know herself. That's how it began.

I want to ask about unravelling secrets - is it a good thing or a bad thing?
In our day, secrets are thought of being a bad thing. I mean we're all into sharing our problems and letting it out and being counselled. You hear people sharing their feelings in the most extraordinary ways - even in buses travelling around. I think there is a place for secrets and people should be allowed to have them. There are often good reasons for having secrets. It means that those who know there are secrets are desperate to find them out and secrets can cause agitation in families but I'm all for a certain level of privacy. Privacy and secrecy are not the same - keep the privacy and don't necessarily expose the secrets.

Can you expand on that?
It seems to me the difference between a secret and something that's private is that a secret contains something in it that will be damaging to another person and might very well affect their life. Privacy is simply a person deciding that they do or do not want to share something that is intimate with another person but does not necessarily contain anything that's damaging for anybody. So I'm all for privacy and I think I'm probably all for secrets but you have to keep them distinct. You don't want to spill secrets out but you can decide that something isn't as private as you thought.

Why do you think THE MEMORY BOX has been so successful?
I've no idea! You're the one who knows about that!

Perhaps it's because it is a very good story and you are a fantastic story teller!
Well, I've no idea. I've no idea why THE MEMORY BOX has sold so many copies, taken that I do so little to help it along. But I am surprised because it wasn't really as successful as I would have liked it to have been. I mean, I say that at the end of every book but I particularly felt it with this one. I thought maybe I had made Catherine too angry and not sympathetic enough and because I wanted it to be real and feel real there had to be lots of loose ends. I have had letters complaining about the loose ends and I had to write back and say Yes, but I was trying to make it real and in real life you don't know what happened, you can't fill in the gaps. THE MEMORY BOX has probably done well because of HIDDEN LIVES in some way. Nothing could have been more unexpected than HIDDEN LIVES. I mean my husband kept saying What are you writing that for, nobody wants to know about your boring family in Carlisle. For heaven's sake, it's not WILD SWANS, you haven't got anything to tell anybody. I rather thought that myself but you touch chords that you don't even though are there and I got the most brilliant letters after HIDDEN LIVES. I have a file of them from people with stories far more interesting than my own, about real heartache that had gone on, about illegitimacy in the past and the classic thing of sisters turning out to be mothers. It's all part and parcel of what used to go on and it was the ordinariness of it that appealed, I think.

Is that what people want to read about? Ordinary lives with extraordinary things in them?
I think the recent rise of the memoir, the personal memoir, might have something to do with the millenium. It sounds a bit far-fetched but as we got to the end of the millenium, there was a feeling of wanting to know more about history. Not the history of battles but the history of people. It's a far fetched theory but people might have wanted a summing up of what their lives had been and most people's lives are desperately ordinary.

Thank you Margaret. Would you like to recommend another writer to our readers?
I'm not the sort of person that has heroes or heroines in the literary world. My tastes are utterly catholic. I'll read 4 or 5 books a week. I'm never without a book. But a young writer I'm interested in is Jill Dawson. She's only on her third novel and her book just out is FRED AND EDIE which has been shortlisted for the Whitbread. It's a very passionate story based on a real life case in the 19th century. I also like an American writer called Anita Shreeve who I've come to rather late. I enjoy her but on the whole I have no particular favourite.

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