'Happiness makes for very boring reading'
Joanna Trollope is sitting comfortably by the fireplace at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Sporting a leather jacket, designer jeans, and trendy boots, she looks both elegant and hip, prompting a stare from a man in pinstripes.
We make our way to a room in the heart of London's clubland, and Trollope is smiling. Indeed, she's got a lot to be pleased about: she's fresh from a book tour for her latest novel Brother and Sister, and her work regularly hits the best-seller lists. This is a woman who writes about the 21st-century family, its problems and its foibles, and for that has received acclaim for her acute observations of contemporary Britain. Divorce, step-families, and relationships between couples are but a few of the issues she tackles. The inevitable emotional fallout isn't pretty, but as Trollope says: "Happiness makes for very boring reading."
She has had plenty of knowledge of both the ups and downs of life, which she feels to "inform the way I write." Born in 1943, Trollope lived for a time with her grandparents - a "talented, gregarious, delightful, opinionated country parson," and his wife. Trollope saw how frustrated her grandmother felt in her role as the dutiful spouse, unable to make friends with the 'parish groupies' who adored their 'hotline to God.' These experiences sowed the seeds for Trollope's 1991 novel, The Rector's Wife.
Oxford then beckoned and Trollope read English at St Hugh's, where as a fresher she was told by the Principal: "When you marry, don't do your husband's laundry and don't cook his supper."
But although the Swinging Sixties were gaining momentum, it was still difficult to follow such advice. Trollope believes that tradition was set in favour of early marriage, children, and limited career progression - notwithstanding a university education. "[Oxford] Career Services told us we could either be teachers or nurses. The City and other professions were only for men."
Trollope married at 22; now she says that it is "incredibly hard to imagine how fierce the pressure was [to conform]." As she recalls, "Girls were being forced to give up social freedoms. And of course there was the anxiety of 'will I have a baby?' The Pill only came in after my first child was born."
It was while juggling a job as a civil servant with running a busy household that she turned to writing historical novels with settings as diverse as South Africa, Afghanistan and Oxford. In The Steps of Sun, Matthew, the hero, jumps from the roof of Merton College.
So what prompted her to make the shift toward contemporary fiction? Trollope says that history, being "bound by codes of conduct that were corsets to humanity," became stifling to write about. She felt she had reached the "end of the rope" with the genre, preferring to chronicle the candour of today. Since The Choir - about the brewing tensions within the boys choir of a centuries-old cathedral - came out in 1988, there's been candour galore in Trollope's novels.
Leaving no stone unturned in the family drama, she doesn't hesitate to employ vivid descriptions of everything from the yogurts in someone's stepfather's freezer to a child's toilet training. Trollope even admits to receiving letters from readers protesting about the use of coarse language in her books. To this she answers: "If you're 35 years old and in a mess, you'll probably be using four-letter words."
Young or old, Trollope's characters often find themselves in sticky situations with no clear-cut endings. One of her favourite themes is the misunderstanding between couples, which she tackles in The Men and the Girls - and more recently - in Marrying the Mistress.
Both explore the issues in relationships between younger women and older men. It's an age-old situation, but Trollope is concerned less with a scurrilous tale of lust and desire, and more with holding up a mirror to the painful truths in modern-day marriage.
"Divorce is never easy," says Trollope. "It's a terrible human situation, to go from loving someone to hating them. At the same time, marriage can be soul-destroying, an emotional imprisonment.
"People are often criticised for changing partners and abandoning their children, but do they really know the story behind the separation?"
"Perhaps it should be harder to be married," she ventures.
Trollope herself is no stranger to the complexities in relationships: she divorced her second husband, TV writer Ian Curteis, in 1999.
At 60, Trollope clearly has a rich tapestry of experiences from which to draw. But she believes this comes with age and maturity. "You can be too young to write" she says.
"After 35, you have more wisdom." What then does she make of the hype surrounding 'hot' new writers in their twenties, such as Cecilia Ahern, author of the much-touted PS I Love You?
"It's the publisher losing its head with excitement," she says. "Writers have got to keep their own head. Even if your career is launched after one book, it's difficult to follow up with something equally enormous.
"And it could be an awful novel. Remember Bridges of Madison County? Well, the author [Robert James Waller] followed it up with a book that was crap. You can't fool the public twice."
But then, Trollope understands all too well the fickle nature of the book business; she has gone from having virtually no promotion for her early novels, to finding herself a literary megastar, regularly asked to speak at literary festivals such as Hay-on-Wye and Cheltenham.
"People think writers just go to film premieres, while the media beg for interviews.
"But really it's the writer doing the begging. You need humility. At the end of the day, you're alone. There's no shortcut."
And she doesn't envisage stopping her writing anytime soon. Trollope admires Alistair Cooke, presenter of the radio programme Letter From America, who at 95 filed his last copy with the BBC the week he died. "What an enviable way to breathe your last," she says. Her great-uncle, Anthony Trollope, would have been proud.
29th Apr 2004