Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S2 Ep5: Bookshelfie: Joanna Trollope

Episode Date: March 29, 2020

In this episode Zing Tsjeng is joined by the author Joanna Trollope. Joanna has been writing for over 45 years and is well known for her contemporary works of fiction. She studied at Oxford University and worked at the foreign office before becoming a full-time writer. She writes under the pseudonym of Caroline Harvey, has been awarded an OBE and has had her work adapted for TV. Every fortnight, join Zing Tsjeng, editor at VICE, and inspirational guests, including Dolly Alderton, Stanley Tucci, Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis as they celebrate the best fiction written by women. They'll discuss the diverse back-catalogue of Women’s Prize-winning books spanning a generation, explore the life-changing books that sit on other women’s bookshelves and talk about what the future holds for women writing today. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, and this series will also take you behind the scenes throughout 2020 as we explore the history of the Prize in its 25th year and gain unique access to the shortlisted authors and the 2020 Prize winner. Sit back and enjoy. This podcast is produced by Bird Lime Media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At Harrison Healthcare, we know that lasting health starts with personalized care. We're not just a clinic. We're your partner in prevention, helping you achieve your health and longevity goals. Our expert team combines evidence-based medicine with the compassionate, unhurried care you and your family deserve today and for many years to come. When it comes to your health, you shouldn't settle for anything less than exceptional. Visit Harrisonhealthcare.ca.ca.com.com. With thanks to Bailey's, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction Podcast, celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and our perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Zing Singh, your host once again for a brand new season of the Women's Prize podcast, coming to you every fortnight throughout 2020.

You've joined me for a special bookshelfy episode in which we ask an inspiring woman to share the story of her life through five brilliant books by women. Now, we're being very responsible. We are heeding the government advice on the coronavirus lockdown and practicing social distancing. But through the magic of technology, I am connecting with our guest, who is none other than the illustrious Joanna Trollope. Now, Joanna's been writing for over 45 years. She is well known for contemporary works of fiction. She studied at Oxford University and worked at the Foreign Office before becoming a full-time writer. And she is the author of not one, not two, not three, but she is the author of not one, not two, not three, but 17 bestselling novels, exploring wide-ranging themes from historical romance to adoption and identity, and her newest book, Mum and Dad, is out now this year. She also writes on this

pseudonym Caroline Harvey and has been awarded an OBE for services to literature and her work has been adapted for TV. Joanna, welcome. You're well known for your contemporary works of fiction and I'd love to talk to you a little bit about your childhood, you're growing up, your development as a writer. I know you studied at Oxford University, you worked at a foreign office before you became a full-time writer. I think I've probably written about 30, 35 books in my lifetime, because I had the great good fortune to be published in the days when,

well, in the olden times, really, when there was no kind of need to promote, vote yourself on social media or anything. It was word of mouth stuff. And the best cellulists were the best cellar lists, and they were worth something. So who would you say are the kind of people who picked you up when you first became a writer

and really talked about your work to others? Well, in the 80s, there was something called the Sex and Shopping Blockbuster, which was enormously popular. and that was in a time of great consumerism and it was sex on a white mink bedspread and most of the paperbacks were hugely fat and had embossed lettering on the covers and so on.

And I tried to write something, I tried to write the kind of book I wanted to write and it got absolutely nowhere. and then the rector's wife, which was the first one that, you know, it was the fourth book I'd written, and I'd written three before it, which hadn't really got anywhere, because of this prevalence of consumerism, sort of vulgar consumerism. And then suddenly, in 1992, I think,

the rector's wife absolutely hit the button and it was about the position of women in modern society and the rector's wife says at one point I want to say to God I am another boat I'm not just an appendage to the rector and this really really hit home with everybody

it was suddenly it was absolutely right for the moment And it was in the bestseller list. It was at number one for about nearly a year in 19. And that is a long time. It's a very long time. Yes. It was quite extraordinary. So then after that you were off to the races?

Well, yes. I was kind of established then. I had I think I had three books. in the top 10 or something for most of that year. It was an extraordinary year. Wow. It was kind of simpler to establish yourself then. I can imagine now that publishing is a very, very different beast to what it was in the 80s and 90s.

It's a transformed beast. It's almost unrecognizable. So with bookshelfy, we're going around asking famous women like yourself about the kind of books that have influenced them. they've picked a whole huge range of stuff. We've had everything from the Moomans to much, much weighty of books of literature. Not that the Moomans isn't a weighty book of literature, but it's very different. So you sent through a list of the books that you would love to talk about. Our first book that Joanna's picked is The Taylor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter.

Is this the original book that you read? It is the original book. I mean, I read it all my childhood. It was, it's got everything in it. You know, it's got magic, animals, winter, Christmas, glamour in the form of the mayor of Gloucester. It's got absolutely everything in it. And it's an extraordinary story. And, of course, the thing is that Beatrix Potter didn't just write it.

She illustrated it. She was a really, really good watercolourist. And so she not only wrote the book, but she actually illustrated it too. It was quite extraordinary. So how old were you when you read this book for the first time? Well, I think anybody of my generation learned to read terribly early. We were all reading really competently by the time we were five. Because you have to remember that we grew up, anybody born.

during the Second World War, grew up pre-screen. So books were all the was. And it was deemed extremely immoral to read a novel before lunch. You could read a work of nonfiction, but not a novel, which was supposed to be a very light thing and rather frivolous. I have never heard that before. An extraordinary thing. Yes.

What about if you were a child? So would you only read, you know, fun books like Beatrix Potter in the evenings when you're out of school? Or would you be reading these books in school as well? There was no children's literature. We just read the books that our mothers and our grandmothers had read. So I grew up reading Ennisbit and Francis Hodgson Burnett and so on. And I should think lots of people would say the same, because part of the war effort in the Second World War was to send all the books you've got for salvage,

because it was all supposed to help the war effort. So there were no books. and the children's book market that has exploded now, and quite rightly, is an extraordinary thing. You know, it's a phenomenon that probably started, I should think it started at the turn of the century, you know. So I'm assuming you don't quite remember World War II, but do you remember the period after it and what it was like to grow up then? Yes. I mean, this particular lockdown, or, or, you know, you know, all these restrictions are very familiar to me because I should think I still remember a ration book. I think ration books went on until about 1952, 1953, and the war ended in 1945. I mean,

the first 10 years of my life were all Russian books. Did you feel like it was a particularly deprived moment or was it just because you didn't know any different? You didn't know any different. No, it was fine. No, it was absolutely fine. But so growing up in the UK then, you know, were you always a big reader? Did you write as a child at all? Or was that not encouraged in children? No, no, everybody wrote. And I think the moment you wanted to explain yourself to anybody, you wrote it down. And you wrote a lot of things privately, particularly, poetry, very, very understandably in my case, because it was all so bad and it was very

histrionic. But, you know, the printed word meant an enormous amount. So you read a great deal, you memorized a great deal, particularly poetry. So moving on to, you know, growing up in Gloucestershire, what was your family like? I assume, you know, if it was after World War II, there must have been quite a lot of family, so we're in the same kind of the situation of having to cope with rationing and things like that. Oh, very much so. I didn't meet my father till I was almost four because he'd gone out to India, having begotten me, he went out to India and he didn't come back till 47 when I was almost four. And so my brother and sister were born after the war. And I think, you know, as with all children, you just accept what, how life is, really. You know, you just, you just do that.

And I'm not alone in feeling like that. I think lots of people didn't really know their fathers. and I would say too that I, those formative years at the beginning, I mean, he was a perfectly nice man, but I never really got to know him awfully well. And people don't know their fathers now for completely other and much sadder reasons. Would you say that that's quite common of people from your generation that they don't really know their fathers particularly well? Very much so.

And I think also we spoke much more formally to our parents. parents then. Right. And I think we always did. You know, it was parents really, especially fathers, had nothing to do with the upbringing of their children. It's an extraordinary thing to think of now. Because, you know, that generation, I mean, my generation of men are proud of the fact that they have had nothing to do with childcare. They're proud. Almost proud, because society didn't let them. You know, the cultural norms didn't let them.

It's an extraordinary thing. And you think now a young man can say he desperately wants a baby without society coming down on him like a ton of bricks. And it does. And it's quite right. It's interesting that your latest book, Mum and Dad, is about that generation. of parents, isn't it? Where you have to take care of your grandparents

and you're sort of like the sandwiched generation between children who are used to more, I guess, involved parents and then stuck in between that and your actual parents who were very much distant. Yes, exactly. And often there's a tremendous bond between the grandparents and Gus and Monica in mom and dad are in their 70s.

so they're of a kind of wartime generation. And they get on far better with the grandchildren than they do with the children. The cliche is that those two generations have got a common enemy in the family. I know it's an extraordinary thing. Do you have grandchildren yourself? Oh, yes, I've got nine. Oh, wow. Wonderful, yes.

So tell me a little bit about the second book that you read on this list, The Diaries of Virginia Woolf, written, of course, by Virginia Woolf, between 1915 and 1941. I would love to say that I think she was a remarkable and games-changing novelist. I can't read the novels personally. Really? I think she was absolutely, she was breaking the mold kind of novelist. But the diaries, I think are absolutely.

absolutely fascinating. And she kept them from 1915, so just really the Great War, second year of the Great War, till she committed suicide till the early 1940s. And they are extraordinary because they're, she was enormously groundbreaking as a writer and I think as a woman. too, if you think about it. She had a very, very neurotic, possessive father. She always said she had been raped by one of her half-brothers as a teenager. She adored her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. And she was terribly interested in class.

as well. She always looked marvellously elegant. She was mentally, I think, she was very, very fragile indeed. She was extremely worried about what she called the black dog. You know, the madness came on her in a sort of absolutely unstoppable way. And that was why she committed suicide in the end. But these diaries are quite, quite extraordinary. And to think she actually wrote them by hand, and she would have done. She'd have written them with a quill pen or a fountain pen in a series of diaries on paper, in a series of books, with ink. You know, it's the way everybody wrote everything.

It's extraordinary. And when did you encounter the diary? in your life. How old were you then? I think they were always around, because I remember when I went up to university in 1962, I know it's 100 years ago, I was very conscious of how remarkable she was even then, as a groundbreaking woman who was really not afraid to talk about her mental frailty. I mean, I know it's rightly discussed a great deal now, but rather as if it had been just newly invented.

But it never, ever was. And I think she was very, very bold and brave about coming clean about it. So I know you went to Oxford because you won a scholarship, So I'm guessing around a time of the 60s, that must have been the first few decades where women were allowed to go to Oxford. They were. They were. When I went up to Oxford in 1962, there was one woman for every seven men. It was quite extraordinary now.

And a lot of the men were really, really thick. because they were good oathmen or something they were not a place. Right, yeah. They were good sportsmen or something of that kind. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish cream. Bayleys is proudly supporting the women's prize for fiction by helping showcase incredible writing by remarkable women, celebrating their accomplishments and getting more of their books into the hands of more people.

Bailey's is the perfect adultery, whether in coffee, over ice cream, or paired with your favorite book. So your third book, Joanna, that you picked, was Testament of Friendship by Vera Britton. Yes. Now, this is the one, this is the actual copy I was given by my very best friend at university at Oxford, who was called Jill Herbert Jones. And she gave me this book as a, well, I suppose it was a testament of friendship because we meant. so much to each other. And we really did. And it's got an extraordinary introduction,

which Thearer Britain writes, about the fact that in the past, you know, if you're thinking of, you know, Homer and the great classical heroes of the past, that male friendship is always very celebrated, but female friendship is denigrated. And this was a book about Vera Britton's best friend who was called Winifred Hoteby, who was a novelist who died very young, and who'd written South Riding,

which is a novel set in Yorkshire. And it's excellent. It's a really good book. And it's still got, you can see inside, it's still got the letter. that Jill wrote me. Oh, that's lovely. Yes, about the importance of friendship. She terribly sadly died of cancer when she was 49.

Oh, God, that's so young. A long time ago. I'm really sorry to hear that. I miss her all the time. You know, she was a kind of soulmate. She was like, really, having a sister, you know, if you could choose a sister rather than be awarded a sister.

Right. I'll be stuck with one. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And it's a remarkable book because it's really a book about, well, it's really a description of what these female relationships are like. And it's terribly important and it's extremely significant for now when women's friendships are so. crucially important. And they are for the right reason.

I imagine it must have been amazing to have a friend, a best friend like that when you were at Oxford surrounded by what were you saying earlier, like one woman for every seven men. Yes, exactly, exactly. Exactly. And I remember going with Jill to the careers officer who was in, who lived in St. Giles,

operated in St. Giles. and she wore a droopy cardigan and all of that. And she said, well, you can do a great many things. She said you can teach or you can nurse or you can sit the civil service exams. You know, be proud of that. And that was it. And surrounded by all these stupid men who were going straight into the city and earning a fortune. It was really annoying.

I can't imagine what somewhere like Oxford must have been like when you talk about, I mean, even now Oxford gets criticized for being elitist, but I imagine it was so much worse when there were so many more men than women around. Well, it was elitist, but the women's colleges, because I was at, I was state educated, I was at one of the old grammar schools. And there were several women's colleges,

St. Hilda's St. Hughes, which specialized in being open to state school girls. So I applied there and I got a scholarship invisible to the naked eye. It was so small. But I remember Lady Margaret Hall was deemed very grand and Somerville very clever. And St. Anne's was,

it had just emerged from being home students only. So, you know, just people who lived in Oxford. It was extraordinary. But one of my aunts had been at St. Hughes before I was there. And she had had to put on a hat every time she went to post a letter. And if she had a man to tease, she had to push her bed out into the corridor. So, yes, I know it, of course it's extraordinary. But it was only a generation.

less that I was living through, and look at, you know, two generations on, look at your horror at that sort of antiquated, old-fashioned behaviour. So I'm guessing the swinging 60s didn't quite make it to Oxford? Well, I don't know quite where the swinging 60s happened. I think it was really that what the 60s did was, you know, it was the bohemian group, the, if you'd like to say, the sort of grand Bloomsbury group, which had been, they'd all got private money, you know, but their carelessness with morality, if you like, and filtered down

and that's really what affected the swinging 60s. So it probably took most of a century to filter down. But it did. And so everybody was then, you know, there was a kind of sexual free-for-all. Not, I have to say, that it really impinged very much on any of us. Now, I wish it had.

in my mate also more fun yes I think more fun and more relaxed and of course there were you know there were all kinds of sort of hideous stigmas social stigmas around like you know for example a woman was deemed

entirely responsible if she'd had a baby out of wedlock I mean for my sake how dare anybody and how dare society think that that's that a woman's to be blamed for that what about a man were you always kind of the radical in the corner saying you know well it's not you know the man has to take up his share of the work and take up his share of the responsibility because I assume those attitudes must have been quite rare they were that that was why I think I'm a very old-fashioned feminist you know I'm I'm I was in on the ground floor. I wore out, I think I had three paperback copies of Doris Lessing's, the Golden

Notebook, which I've just tried rereading, and it's almost illegible now. It's awful, and it's so dated and stuck in its ways and all of that. But I adored it at the time, because I felt that, well, I just felt the terrible injustice of women's positions. So for those of our listeners who don't know what Doris Lessing's book is about, do you mind giving a kind of potted summary? Of course. The Golden Notebook was really a description of what it was like to be a liberated young woman in the world of the 1960s.

When you were supposed to be able to please yourself, but actually society hadn't quite caught up with it. So there were all kinds of strictures and barriers and so on that you kept on crashing into. And of course, you know, it was lovely for men, who I'm very keen on as a gender. I mean, it's not their faults, you know, that it's been the way it has.

But obviously, their way of life suited them extremely well. And why wouldn't you take advantage of having life on your side, really? Because I know for almost anybody of my generation, we were born knowing that we were the second sex. And I don't think modern girls quite rightly feel like that at all. No, I don't think we do. I think we just immediately, instinctively kick against. that idea. Precisely. Well, quite right too and not before time. So when you left Oxford, what did you end up doing afterwards? I did qualify as a teacher because in those days you could, if you got a reasonable degree from Oxford or Cambridge or London, it is really shocking to

look back on. But it was the case. And you were overseen by. an inspector from the Department of Education and you were also overseen by your head of department and by your head mistress in my case, you could go and practice teaching. So I did because I terribly much wanted babies. I worked in a furtive little department of the foreign office, which has now been disbanded, I think again quite right too. I did that for a couple of years. And then I learned to teach because I was going to have a baby. Because, you know, that was very much what I wanted to do.

But I remember my late mother saying, you know, when was I going to have a baby? I suppose I was about 24. at the time. So I had a baby when I was 25 and another when I was 27. But I think everybody did. You know, you got married when you were 21, 22. Some people got married when they were younger than that, much younger than that. And I know that it's physically quite a good idea to have a baby fairly young. But it's not very good for you psychologically. I think that probably explains why more people put it off. Yes, exactly. So when did you fit in all this writing and novels around your children? Well, my husband, my then husband, my first husband, was traveling enormously then.

He was working for one of these merchant banks, you know, and it was constantly on a plane. So he was never there. And so I would put the children to bed and then I would write. Did you always have the sense that you're going to be a writer or did the urge come to you only when you had children? No, I don't think it did. I think it was always there. And it was a feeling, a very strong feeling, which I very much adhered to now, which I don't think writers are prophets.

They're not, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, you know, they're not the prophet philosophers who are showing the way to the world. I think my view is that writers are simply interpreters and translators. Because there's nothing, really, if you think about it, there's nothing to say about the human condition that Shakespeare or Sophocles hasn't said already. But all we can do and all a writer can do is to reinterpret those old truths for their own times

so that you can hold up a mirror to the times you're living in now. And just that, you know, this is what it feels like now. And if you think of the world I grew up in is socially so different from the world of today. and that's just, you know, a very small reflection of how it is. So I think that brings us to our fourth book, which is The Towers of Trebizond by Rose McCauley, which is, again, a description of a very specific time and place. It is.

This is an extraordinary book. It's a Folio Society edition, for which I wrote an introduction some time ago. And I would say that this book has this novel has got everything in it that you could possibly wish for. It's a love story, it's a travel book, it's got polemic in it, it's got the position of women, it's very much argued in it, the position of the church is very much argued in it. It's funny, it's wildly funny.

It's very romantically hopeful about the future. it's very lyrically written. It's got absolutely everything in it. And Rose McCauley herself was a literary lioness. I mean, this book was first published, I suppose, about 1954. I didn't read it then. I didn't read it till about 20 years later, I should think. But it's an extraordinary example of everything.

everything in a particular novel. It's a wonderful book. And it's an example of writing kind of honestly about yourself because Rose McCauley always wrote she said she discovered quite early on when she was only a child

she discovered something in herself which she called this queer inner life and of course we've all got one, haven't we? We've all got a life we lead privately. We've all got a kind of narrative that goes on accompanying whatever we're doing in real life. And this particular novel, The Towers of Trebizond, is about exactly that.

It's the heroine, who's the I in the first person narrative, narrator of the novel, she's really investigating everything about herself as a person. It's a wonderful book. We published in 54. Yes, and she was a literary lion. in her day. It just shows how, because nobody ever reads her now, I don't think. But, you know,

this particular novel has got everything in it. And it's, it's a tremendous. It should be a feminist Bible because it's got an enormous mind in it about the polemic of female equality. How did you come across it? I can't remember. I think, I think it must have been, it was just kicking around. I think my parents had, there was something just after the war printed on very bad paper called the Reprints Society. And the books were bound in primary colours, all very different and on terrible paper. And I think the Towers of Trebizond must have been one of those. and my parents belonged to the reprint society. And I imagine I read everything that came my way,

everything that the reprint society produced. And I think this was one of them. It's an interesting book because I've heard you speak about it before, and it's essentially a travelogue masquerading as something else. But it's something else masquerading as a travelogue. It's about, you know, in the quality. Certainly travel comes into it very much, though. But it's also it's got a most wonderful passage at the end about hope.

And I know Rose McCauley says in it, you know, we will never have this life again, that being alive is worth so much and don't squander it. You know, don't diminish your capacity to relish just being a human. being who's alive. So when you read it, you must have already started to write novels. I probably did. Well, I wrote my first novel when I was 14 and I was still at school and I, nobody's ever seen it because I think, you know, the children can all fall about with mirth about it when I'm safely dead. But not before because I was very tall. I grew to this height. I'm, I was five foot nine. Wow. I know, really quite tall. And I grew to that height when I was 12. I'm probably shorter now. And I had frizzy hair. I had braces on my teeth. I had pebble lenses, spectacles. There was nothing to recommend me, really. And I wrote a novel about the kind of teenager I wished I was in.

instead of the one I actually was. Right, so glamorous and... Well, you know, looking rather like Jane Fonda used to look. Right, yeah. You know, with a tiny waist and pink and white gingham skirts over an enormous two petticoat. And very, very popular with all the sports jocks of the school, you know. What was the name of your fictional self?

I can't remember. I think I probably wrote it in the first person. And that's what the insta poets are doing now is writing out their feelings in poetry. That's true, yeah. So we've talked a little bit about, you know, the rector's wife and, you know, when you really came into your own as a novelist. Do you kind of feel like you're still on this journey now as an author? Always. Always. I mean, for example, the rector's wife, I wouldn't write it the way I wrote it in 1991 now.

I wouldn't write it in the same way at all. I'd make the rector and his wife slog through a long, dreary divorce now. If I was rewriting it now, I wouldn't have the sort of. ease. Well, it's a bit of an ease, really, of the rector killing himself under a bus. You know, inadvertently, that was a kind of cop-out. But it seemed perfectly fine then. But there's a lot of things I would do differently now. But I would never really leave a novel without hope. I think that's really incredibly important. But I think, on the other hand, I would, never, I never tie a novel up with a kind of a happy ever after because they don't happen

in real life, do they? And I'm very keen on echoing reality. That's why I was so confused when I read interviews with you and people have brought up this criticism of your work as aga sagas because that to me implies that everything of a happy end. You can imagine the gender of the person who invented that term. Of course. Yes, I must be guessing. Yes. Exactly. Well, they're quite subversive, my novels, and they are sections of, their reflections of reality, let's say that. And they wanted to dismiss them as being sort of cozy and second-rate and, you know, entirely.

And Virginia Woolf said once that it was a grave mistake to believe there was greater significance in great things than there was in small things. Because small things are really a symbol of exactly not just domestic life, but how we work out how we're going to live our lives. I think that's very true and very wise. So the fifth and final book for bookshelfy is a book called period piece. Yes, it was written by a woman called Gwen Ravarit, illustrated by her own woodcuts. And she was Darwin's granddaughter. The Charles Darwin. Yes, the Charles Darwin.

And it's really a recollection of growing up in Cambridge as a time. child. And it's a very affectionate piece, sort of recollection, a memoir of her childhood in this extremely clever, rather wayward, random family. And it's full of jokes, too. It's like the Towers of Trevisand. It's really very funny. And there's one of her uncles, her Darwin uncles once, who used to toddle off to the sideboard for his early evening sniffter. And he would always say to himself, dear old gin. And there's something very sort of sweet about that and affectionate. And, you know, it should be allowed.

That kind of gentle teasing humour is rather missing from life now, I find. Do you try and incorporate that sense of likeness into your own books? They are quite funny. Yes, they are funny. And I always see them as if we are, the readers and I are joining a train at some point on its journey. And the characters will all be on board already and we will follow them for part of the journey. And so is the dilemma on board that they're facing at the time. That's always there. And we follow them until they get to some kind of resolution. And then we all get off and they go on. But how is it, how is, are these people and their story going to unravel once we've left them? You know, are they going to be different?

I would always leave something for the readers to do because the readers and I are very much on this journey together. They're amazing, my readers. They're so loyal. And they've been around for so long. I mean, they've been around for nearly half a century. Have you met quite a few of them as well? Yes, yes. And I'm read by people who are in their teens, and I'm read by grandmothers in their 90s. It's lovely. And I'm read also right across the social spectrum. What do you think it is about your work that kind of appeased to that larger variety of people? I think it's that I'm quite good. I'm not good at many things, but I'm quite good at picking up on the zeitgeist, you know, of what is preoccupying people at the moment. I mean, mum and dad is about the Sandwich generation. That is your parents are falling to pieces one end of your life. Your children are very complicated and needy, the other end of your life. you, the woman, are probably working.

In fact, there are some women who hold down two or three jobs. So you haven't got the time that, you know, you might have had in the past. Do you feel like you're in that sandwich generation now or you're on the other side of the spectrum? I'm about to be the problem, aren't I? I feel like your children might disagree with that. It sounds like a fascinating book. I also feel like, well, it seems especially relevant,

especially now that I've had so many friends my age say, well, what can I do? My parents want to go out and they don't care about coronavirus. I'm horrified. Because, you know, with the virus, all the senior virologists at Oxford University are saying we should behave as if we already have, the disease. We have the virus.

No, I think that's a good way of approaching it. Yeah. It's certainly zeitgeisty. Do you think you end up writing a book about this? No, I shan't because I think that would be very depressing and so on. I'm started a new book, but I haven't got very far yet. Only because I haven't quite felt right about writing it. I just haven't, well, I haven't got my head in gear into, the writing mode, because I suppose, of being at home and writers are very used to their own

company after all. So I'm fine on the isolation. It's just until I've got the house settled and sorted and various work things out of the way, I can't quite relax into it. But I will. I think there's going to be weeks and weeks of this ahead. Well, I mean, given your track record, I'm sure you have no problem producing another few dozen. No, I, well, I'll do it rather more slowly, I think, now. It'll be a book every few years rather than every year. Well, thank you so much, Joanna, for joining us on the podcast. I've loved it.

Thank you so much for having me. And thank you hugely for your interviews. I'm Zing Zing, you've been listening to the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast, brought to you by Bayleys and produced by Birdline Media. You definitely want to head to our website to find out more about the Reading Women Challenge, get exclusive video and audio content, and check out the hashtag Reading Women on Instagram and Twitter to join in the conversation around the 24 brilliant past winners of the Women's Prize for Fiction. Please click subscribe and don't forget to rate and review this podcast. It really helps spread the word about the female talent you've heard about. today. Thanks very much for listening and see you next time.