Charlotte Mendelson

20 | March 13, 2014 | cambridge-news.co.uk | Cambridge News

Books

Charlotte Mendelson: “It’s about bums on seats and writing words.”

As the countdown begins to this spring’s News-backed Cambridge Literary Festival, ELLA WALKER talks to the Man Booker-long listed novelist about good reads, odd shoes and doing more than quite ‘well’

C

harlotte Mendelson reads a lot; a ridiculous amount in fact.

On her bedside table at the moment, for instance, is a stack of crime novels (“My indulgence! The gloomier the better”), Middlemarch, which she’s planning to re-read (“I really, really love it”), and a pile of new proofs, because when she’s not writing Man Booker-long listed novels, Mendelson is an executive editor at publishers Headline Review.

“It’s very difficult,” she laughs. “I’ve already got far more books than I’ll have time to read in my life, and I can’t stop buying them!”

However, when we speak on World Book Day, she’s not got a novel on her: “I should be doing something good and I’m not! But a book is for life, not just for World Book Day. . .”

Mendelson is gearing up to appear alongside Natasha Solomons, author of Mr Rosenblum’s List, as part of the Cambridge Literary Festival’s New Fiction strand, where she’ll be discussing her fourth novel, Almost English – the one that caught the attention of the Man Booker judges.

With a froth of dark curly hair, she’s got a touch of actress Rebecca Hall to her features and is awfully polite and very well spoken (that’s growing up in Oxford for you – her father taught law at St John’s and she studied at the university too).

Regularly sputtering into laughter and trying to graciously shut me up when I tell her how impressive a read Almost English is (“Ok, that’s nice! Thank you very much, yes”), Mendelson was born in 1972 and blends London roots with mittel-European Jewry (her muchloved grandmother escaped Prague using false documents in 1939).

Now a mother of two, with her partner, fellow writer Joanna Briscoe, and a contributor to the likes of the Guardian, TLS and the Independent on Sunday, she’s much happier talking about her reading habits and the joys of a good book, than whether her own writing merits the spotlight.

Editor: Paul Kirkley Writer: Ella Walker Email: ella.walker@cambridge-news.co.uk

“I like books that make me laugh, but hardly any ever do, and it’s very frustrating,” she muses. “I love books about dysfunctional families, and I love crime.

“Basically, the thing I most want is to forget where I am, forget I’m on the bus: being captured by a book.”

She grew up devouring “everything from the Beano to my mum’s Jane Smileys,” never got into Enid Blyton, and raced through PG Wodehouse (it bothers her that so few books make her laugh out loud – “It’s so rare!” – but Wodehouse is one of the few that makes her “really, really laugh”), and “when I was a teenager, I forced myself to read important Russian novels, and hated them!”

It’s this, the self-punishing need to furnish her mind with painful literary greats, that most uncovers the early kernels of Mendelson’s writing career. At school, getting less that 80 per cent on a test would always end in tears, she chose Greek over Latin because it was tougher to master and waved goodbye to an English literature degree she’d have enjoyed in favour of the more stringent ancient and modern history.

The self-confessed “enormous girly swot” considers this innate bookishness and geekiness responsible for her becoming an author – despite a careers questionnaire at school recommending her for road haulage. . .

Stories, she says, are “my passion. It’s not the fact I wanted to be a writer, I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing to be a writer?’ But I could never be one.”

Fortunately, in her mid-20s and working in publishing, she ‘forgot’ to go to law school, found herself with her own office and “bit the bullet and tried.”

She started whizzing up paragraphs and plotlines on her lunch breaks, and the results have been quite wonderful.

Aside from Almost English, her 2001 debut, Love in Idleness, preceded Daughters of Jerusalem, which won a clutch of prizes and saw

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Cambridge News | cambridge-news.co.uk | March 13, 2014 | 21

FIVE MORE CAMBRIDGE LITERARY FESTIVAL GEMS FROM THE NEW FICTION STRAND

ᔡCharlotte Mendelson and M Natasha Solomons, N C Cambridge Literary FFestival, Divinity S School Lecture Hall, S Sunday, April 6 at 22.30pm. Tickets ££8-£10 from (0 (01223) 300085 / aadcticketing.com

1. Rachel Joyce and Jill Dawson Joyce (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry) and Cambridgeshire-based Dawson (The Tell-Tale Heart) will be chatting about their novels and what it’s like to write a bestseller.

2. Melvyn Bragg The Radio 4 presenter and arts and culture expert behind The South Bank Show is set to discuss his latest novel, Grace and Mary, a touching tale of a mother and her son.

NOVELIST: Hanif Kureshi

3. Hanif Kureshi The Buddha of Suburbia writer will be discussing his life, work and latest novel, The Last Word, a tale of preserving your reputation and reviving your fortunes.

5. Debut writers’ panel with Ali Smith Festival patron Smith picks her three favourite debut novels of the year and quizzes the authors on their ideas and work.

DEBUT PANEL: Ali Smith

h shortlisted her for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, while 2007’s When We Were W Bad waltzed into in the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist.

Mendelson still doesn’t seem to think this all adds up to her having done particularly well though. “That depends on what you consider as ‘well’,” she says, clearly uncomfortable, adding, with a deprecating laugh: “I don’t feel I have done very well, I’d like to do better!”

You were long listed for the Man Booker, I tell her, incredulous. A day after we speak, Almost English gets named on the long list for Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014 too (Cambridge’s very own Mary Beard is on the judging panel, alongside the barmy, but brilliant, Caitlin Moran).

She caves in reluctantly: “[The Man Booker] was a lovely surprise, and being on the Orange shortlist a few years ago was fantastic and not expected at all. So yes, I am really pleased about the prizes, but I’d like more people to read the books.”

That’s practically guaranteed, especially as Almost English has already become quite the book club staple.

It tells the tale of 16-year-old Marina who lives with her mother and three eccentric, ancient Hungarian relatives. Desperate to escape the bizarre food and her family’s stifling expectations, she runs off to boarding school, realising too late that she’s made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Why does Mendelson think it’s struck such a chord with readers? “I think it’s because I write about things that a lot of people can identify with, like how horrible it is being a teenager, and frustrated love and mild despair and really dysfunctional families.

“An awful lot of people have immigrant backgrounds and even those who don’t still feel quite outsiderish, and Almost English is a book about not feeling like you belong. So that resonates for lots and lots of people. “ When it comes to the actual process of writing, she’s very frank. “I go up to my desk with some coffee, and usually with an enormous pile of provisions and just try to keep my bottom on the seat until I’ve written,” she explains. “But it’s quite difficult not inventing very urgent tasks. There isn’t a magic to it. It’s about bums on seats and writing words really.”

She doesn’t make it sound particularly romantic. . . “The rare moments when it’s not a complete slog, the moments when you actually manage to describe something that’s been evading you, is wonderful,” she admits happily, but the most challenging thing is: “Writing the books! That’s the stinker. And keeping up confidence.

“If you weren’t a neurotic, soul-searching person you probably wouldn’t be a novelist.

It’s very unlikely you’d go, ‘oh I’ve done terribly well! I’ll stop now’.”

Thank goodness she has no retirement plans just yet, although she is having problems with her next book: “I might be about to start it again actually. I’ve become incredibly frustrated with it. I can’t really tell you any more than that!”

But she is looking forward to visiting Cambridge in April, by which time hopefully she’ll be able to tell us a little more. “I love university towns and I love seeing extremely brainy scruffy people wandering around like it’s normal to wear odd shoes,” she laughs. “And I’m looking forward to that slight thrill being in a rival city will give me. Because even though I feel very, very ambivalent about Oxford, I’m obviously still very, very pro-Oxford when it comes to Cambridge!” n Read our Book Club’s verdict on Almost English at cambridge-news.co.uk/Whatson.

PICTURE SARAH WOOD

4. A. L. Kennedy Winner of the Costa Book Award (for Day), Kennedy is set to be grilled by the New Stateman’s culture editor Tom Gatti on her new collection of short stories, All the Rage.