A Selection of Recent Journalism

The Times - October 2009

Trick lit, or why you can’t believe everything you read

The literary hoax is as old as literature. Melissa Katsoulis discovers why the gullible keep on being gulled

Everybody loves a good hoax. Even those of us who would not so much as contemplate planting a plastic fly in their aunt’s soup will devour the latest story of a mug taken in by Ali G, or a far-fetched e-mail scam, or a death faked for life insurance. Why? Because, secretly, we’re sure it will never happen to us — we’re much too clever to be duped, aren’t we?

Yet how many right-thinking readers of books pages bought James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and stayed up late devouring this unbelievably harrowing, but pithily written, memoir of addiction and recovery? And unbelievable it turned out to be — after readers who knew something of Frey forced him to admit that it was more a work of fantasy than fact.

Frey is, perhaps, the quintessential literary hoaxer of our age: he stands on the peak of a slush-mountain of misery memoirs, daring us to judge him. After all, as he told one interviewer, he achieved what he set out to in becoming, for a while at least, the most talked-about American author of his generation.

Yet the history of literary hoaxes has not always been so dark: there are a great number of wonderfully eccentric, bold and inspired characters who populate this corner of literary history.

Take Sir Edmund Backhouse. At the turn of the 20th century, he was sent down from Oxford for having accrued astronomical gambling debts in his first term, and fled to Peking, where he was able to indulge his keen interest in rent boys and exotic herbs. Well-funded and fluent in Mandarin, he was having the time of his life. Then he encountered the Times correspondent in the city and began to spin him some tales based on the spurious notion that not only was he the sole foreigner to have access to the Forbidden Palace, but also that the dowager Empress Cixi relied on him to perform athletic sexual favours for her. The resulting collaborative publications earned him great fame — as did the faked Chinese manuscripts that he sold to the Bodleian and the phoney arms deals he presented to local officials — and his mischief was not debunked until Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote a brilliant study of his life in the 1970s.

It is paradoxical that Trevor-Roper, who cut his teeth on the Backhouse story, was one of the key hoax victims a decade later when the Hitler diaries debacle left egg on the face of The Sunday Times. But then the Hitler diaries were that rare thing: a brilliant hoax and a lousy fake — the content was little more revelatory than “Got tickets for the Olympics. Eva nagging me about my wind again. Walked dogs.”

But it is the power of what we wish were true that underpins the success of a hoax (just as it does all works of fiction). It was this power that led one of the most brilliant academics of 19th-century France, Michel Chasles, to pay vast sums for a series of letters by historical figures that sang the praises of his nation. The “writers” included Mary Magdalene, telling a resurrected Lazarus what a nice holiday she was having in Gaul. In retrospect, ridiculous; at the time, just what the doctor ordered.

Of course, all the hoaxes mentioned so far were not designed to be debunked. They are what you might call “genuine” rather than “entrapment” hoaxes. But it is entrapment hoaxes that are the most fun. These are perpetrated to display the foibles of a literary or academic rival, and to this group belongs the most famous literary hoax of all: Ern Malley, whose afterlife as the subject of the Peter Carey novel My Life as a Fake has kept his name alive.

Malley — billed as a recently dead, semi-educated, inner-city Modernist poet — was the creation of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two traditional Australian writers doing war work in Melbourne in 1943. Irritated by what they saw as European-influenced twaddle taking over the good old-fashioned world of Aussie poesie, they decided to play the prank to end all pranks on the chief promulgator of the Modernist movement. Their victim was Max Harris, leader of the avant-garde arts movement Angry Penguins, and editor of a poetry journal of the same name. Carefully constructing a back-story for Malley, the two sat back and watched in delight as not only Harris but the whole of literary Australia raved about this powerful new voice. By the time the two pranksters outed themselves as the “real” Ern Malley, the damage to Harris’s career was done and, although they didn’t know it then, Ern’s reputation as one of Australia’s most enduring literary personalities was established.

So what is the future of literary hoaxing? The internet must surely play a part, both in allowing any unchecked fantasist to publish a memoir and also in helping others to debunk illegitimate writers. All the hoaxers of the past decade have been uncovered thanks to the increased availability of public electronic records.

Nevertheless the essence of the hoaxer’s motivation will remain the same. The lure of seeing your work in print, especially if, as with most hoaxers, you have failed to make your mark as a writer through legitimate channels, will never diminish. Writing something and having a professional agree to distribute it a huge vote of confidence. Seeing my own first book in print gave me a deep thrill, just as seeing my first piece in a newspaper did, and before that my first terrible poem in the school magazine. But did I have to resort to the hoaxer’s art to make my new book as sensational as possible? Is every single one of the stories of literary trickery in Telling Tales strictly true? Well now ... that would be telling.

The Independent - October 2009

Why would any writer make up stories about the Holocaust?

Melissa Katsoulis explores the strangest corner in the bizarre world of the literary hoax

Researching a book about literary hoaxes led me to investigate a sub-section of the misery-memoir genre which often left me reeling in amazement: the Holocaust hoaxers. Special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe, but they have certain duties too.

It is their right to write how and when they want (perhaps many decades later, if they are ready) and, as with Elie Wiesel, with their own definitions of truth and fiction. It was he who said that "Some stories are true that never happened."

However, those memoirists who think that they can pretend they were there when they weren't ought to remember that hijacking the experiences of others for selfish ends will only end in ignominy. Their motivations were, as so often in life and letters, a combination of pain, hope and greed, and they were emboldened by a marketplace in thrall to the misery memoir.

Why the huge demand for such books? Perhaps what readers seek in trauma stories is akin to what people look for in pornography: something edgy they have never seen before, followed by a spectacular resolution. And they want to identify (safely) with what they are reading; to try on someone else's crisis for a while and see how it compares to their own. All these hoaxers had difficult childhoods but, feeling that their truth was shamefully small, they sought the grand signifier of the Holocaust to attract the compassion that they desired.

Misha Defonseca's story began to emerge from her adopted Massachusetts in the mid-1990s and was, like many a hoaxer's tale, one which in retrospect seems ridiculously far-fetched. It also had that great asset of the schmaltzy life-story: the love of a four-legged friend.

She told of crossing the wastes of war-torn Europe as a lonely child and not only being adopted by a pack of friendly wolves, but single-handedly murdering a burly German soldier. She gave inspirational talks about her epic journey, smiled sweetly for the camera at a local wolf sanctuary and eventually published her story in 1997.

Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years was an instant success, embodying the vain hope that belief, endurance (and fluffy animals) could mean something even in the face of Hitler's machine. It was money that brought her down. A falling-out about royalties led her publisher to enlist the help of historians to look into what was beginning to seem like a fishy back-story. When zoologists confirmed that no such wolf-woman love could have existed, and photos appeared of her war-time childhood (smiling, well-fed and out shopping with her grandmother), "Misha" knew the game was up.

Last year she finally confessed, admitting that she was in fact a Belgian Christian whose father's work for the Gestapo left her traumatised by the stigma of being a "traitor's child". She said: "It is not the actual reality – it was my reality, my way of surviving".

Binjamin Wilkomirski, who turned out not to be a Latvian-Jewish orphan but a rather comfortably-off Swiss clarinettist, is the most famous example. His spectacular lies were similarly accounted for by the repentant author. He initially claimed he had escaped to Switzerland after nearly dying in the camps, and in Fragments detailed rats feasting on corpses and Nazis crushing men to death. The book won him a host of literray prizes, but survivors noticed that his descriptions of camp life were unconvincing.

Research revealed him to be a local lad, Bruno Grosjean, fostered during the war after his mother gave him up. In her meticulous exposé in Granta, Elena Lappin concluded that as a child Bruno and his mother might have been indentured labourers, but that he had been conflating this with an imagined ghetto past for so long that he had become a "Man with Two Heads".

His humiliation was complete when it was revealed that one of the girls he claimed to have befriended in the camps, Laura Grabowsky, was a fraud herself – an unhinged American serial-hoaxer who had written not only a fake Holocaust memoir but a phoney one about satanic ritual abuse to boot.

The most recent case is Herman Rosenblat, the twinkly-eyed American pensioner who came forward with a story so magical that it lifted the heart of every cynic in New York. As a young boy in Buchenwald, he said, he strolled daily along the perimeter fence to meet a little girl on the outside. She would toss him a shiny apple and in so doing gave him the hope - and the vitamins - to carry on.

Decades later, as he wrote in Angel at the Fence, which very nearly got published earlier this year, he randomly met a woman in New York who had also fled post-war Europe. As they talked, Herman decided that she must be the apple girl. They went on to fall in love and marry.

When his story came out, via appearances on Oprah, it was easy to debunk: anyone approaching the perimeter fence would immediately have been shot. Rosenblat had been promised a comfortable retirement on the proceeds of his late-flowering career as a memoirist, and his claim that he was only trying to spread a little hope with his story fell on deaf ears.

In fact, he really had been in a sub-camp of Buchenwald and the true story of his and his devoted brothers' survival is far more moving than the one he made up. Only nobody wants to listen to that now.

These three had at least been born in or near the theatre of war. But what would make an Australian born in 1972 fabricate a Holocaust story? The case of Helen Demidenko is the most peculiar of them all. Demidenko - real name Darville - was a right-wing student in Brisbane who in 1993 published The Hand That Signed the Paper, about the wartime experiences of the narrator's Ukrainian father and uncle. However, they were not victims of Nazi violence but the perpetrators, having joined the Einsatzgruppen after being terrorised by Russian-Jewish "commissars".

Florid accounts of their life as merry Jew-hating death squad members flowed enthusiastically from her pen, and when she won the Australian/ Vogel Literary Award she began appearing in Ukrainian national dress and speaking in a funny accent. Her unmasking was aided by the ire of the international Jewish community at her sideline as an anti-Israeli journalist. Interviewing David Irving was not her finest hour.

But unlike the other hoaxers, she remained unrepentant, blithely speaking of the "wog accent" she put on and her annoyance at a politically-correct culture whose prejudices she despised.

Darville's case may not be typical of Holocaust hoaxers, but it fits exactly into the mould of the Australian literary hoax. All of them, even the harmless-sounding Ern Malley poetry hoax, whose victim was a radical Jewish poetry editor despised by the young fogies who made up Ern's oeuvre, are characterised by a combination of racial anxiety and anti-intellectualism.

Darville is more than just a juvenile postscript to the strange canon of the Shoah-fantasists. She would never have committed her distasteful hoax had she not picked up on and wanted to subvert that dangerous concept of the "Holocaust bore".

That idea is perpetuated by people – like Defonseca, Wilkomirski and Rosenblat – whose output contributes to the notion of an unregulated Holocaust "industry", where victimhood is rewarded by money and fame.

Yes, the notion of absolute truth in life-writing is notoriously fraught. But when a writer stands before other survivors and gives as scripture what is stolen from the memories of real witnesses, they can expect little sympathy.

The Sunday Telegraph – May 2009

Review of In The Kitchen by Monica Ali

Prejudice is a terrible thing. Monica Ali’s bestselling East-West-athon, Brick Lane, led her to be hailed as the most vibrant scribe of modern Britain, so naturally we expect intellectual fireworks every time she puts pen to paper. However her third book, In The Kitchen, despite dealing explicitly with the identity-clashes that make multicultural London fizz and buzz the way it does, is little more than a diverting, food-themed thriller.

The setting is the kitchen of a big London hotel whose history and hierarchy make it a perfect but unoriginal simile for post-colonial Britain. Only one of head chef Gabe’s workforce is British, the others coming from countries where poverty and violence are commonplace. To prevent readers suffering from Russian novel syndrome - forgetting which funny name belongs to which eccentric character - there are frequent reminders of who’s who: Afro-Caribbean Oona is a stew an dumplin’-munching God-botherer with gold teeth and great fat feet; the Slavs have “rodent” eyes and seem bound by a gangsterish code of honour; the Liberian, with his “salt-white” teeth is frightfully polite. And Victor, whose corpse is found laid out in a store-room in Chapter one, was Russian and therefore an alcoholic.

Gabe, the protagonist, is no less text-book: the son of a northern cotton-mill worker, he has fought to better himself with books and fine food. When he gets stressed he stays up all night preparing the perfect mirepoix. And when we meet him, he has a lot to be stressed about: his father is dying, his kitchen is a crime scene, he suspects the hotel manager of people-trafficking and he has just cheated on the woman he loves with a surly Belarusian girl who seems somehow linked to Victor’s death.

The plot is tightly spun but undermined by one too many op-ed-like soliloquies on the economy, immigration, war in Iraq etc. which sound much more like what a 42 year old British-Bangladeshi intellectual might say on Newsnight than what a comis-chef might shout out across a sweltering kitchen.

If nobody knew of Ali’s supposed greatness, or if In The Kitchen were the debut novel by, say, Anthony Bourdain, the world would be touting it as the best thing since sliced vitello. So either put aside your prejudices and enjoy it for what it is - a meaty, urban mystery story with a conscience - or curl up in front of a Hotel Babylon re-run and give the price of the book to Amnesty.

The Times - February 2009

The Food of Love: Valentine's Cookery Course at Brown's Hotel

To step into Brown’s hotel in Mayfair is to go back to an age when things were done so much more nicely. When tea was taken with aunts rather than sweetener and when clever Frenchmen did exquisite things with choux pastry below stairs. When everyone was rich and beautiful and in love and wearing Lanvin.

That was pretty much how the world seemed to me last time I entered the famous wood-panelled lobby of Brown’s five months ago. It was my wedding day and, having been too happy to eat all afternoon, I was ravenous. Craving something simple, I ordered a leek and potato soup from room service, resigned to getting something whipped and creamy in a chic little puddle at the bottom of a large white plate. But what I got nearly made me weep with gratitude: a crystalline broth of herbs and bright little slivers of veg, seasoned only with salt and pepper. Heaven. I remembered the chef’s name was Lee Streeton and resolved to thank him in my prayers (I don’t think I did, that night. But I meant to). So when I heard that Lee hosted Culinary Days for small groups of amateur cooks, and there was a Valentine’s special in the offing, I leapt at the chance to take part. He would teach six of us how to source, prepare and present a romantic meal guaranteed to have our lovers champing at the bit.

From the moment we arrived at Brown’s early on a wet Saturday morning, it was clear that this was no ordinary cookery course. After breakfast in the hotel’s opulent lounge with Lee (whose combination of cheeky patter and devotion to seasonal food has already attracted the attention of television producers) we were whisked off to Borough Market where he introduced us to his favourite suppliers and showed us how to identify the liveliest produce. Never buy an upside-down oyster: the preserving juices will have leaked out. And a fresh scallop should be really stiff to the touch: a good cook loves the feeling of rigormortis.

Back in the kitchen, we learned how top chefs get everything to taste so good. Butter. An embarrassment of it. If adding it to potatoes at a ratio of 1:2 seems outrageous, the resulting mash is unbelievable. Then came scallops, caramelised in a dash of oil before being bathed in ladlefuls of foaming butter; and a huge bass, roughly stuffed and topped with a salady mixture of tomato and herbs and baked until just blackening.

Next, roast partridge, and only when we were told to “have a feel of that firm little breast” did I remember that this was supposed to be a Valentine’s course. Whither the heart-shaped strawberry mousse? Lee countered that way to really impress a lover is to think fresh, tasty and subtle rather than sticky, highly-coloured and unnaturally shaped. He’s right, of course.

Finally the pastry chef, Fabien, demonstrated his delicious buttermilk panna cotta: far more refreshing than when made with cream, and a doddle to put together with its seasonal blood-orange garnish (the key to successful fruit syrup? Marmalade). At this point, with two quivering, milky mounds on the plate in front of me, I couldn’t help but cast around for a pair of pink mini-marshmallows... but of course there were none. The kitchen of Brown’s is no place for people who want to make their puddings look like boobs. It is a serious, careful, ethical studio in which a very fine young chef is revolutionising the stodgy world of traditional English hotel food. It was a real treat to cook alongside him, and I’m sure my husband, on not being poisoned with rotten oysters and choked on dried-up partridge this evening, will agree.

The Times - April 2009

Making Your Own Knickers at the Make Lounge, London N1

Imagine a place that’s open late, where the wine flows freely and the fun is presided over by a beautiful hostess with a cut-glass accent and a naughty twinkle in her eye. From a series of softly-lit rooms come the giggles of girls having fun with lace, ribbons and satin to a soundtrack of funky music. The clock said 10 when I left, but time loses its meaning in the cocooned surroundings of 49-51 Barnsbury Street. Especially on Knockout Knicker night, which it was when I attended The Make Lounge for the first time.

You see, The Make Lounge is an uber-cool craft centre where consenting adults learn new skills in a relaxed, sociable environment. Each one-off session is geared towards making a particular object (belts, candles, necklaces) and taking home the expertise to do it again. Its success is due not only to the provision of alcohol and biscuits but also the sudden status-increase in crafting as an activity not only for the infirm, insane or incarcerated but for anyone seeking an alternative to spending their leisure time shopping for pointless tat.

I chose Knockout Knickers for two reasons: firstly, I have all but given up on commercial manufacturers to fulfil my exacting comfort / glamour mandate. Secondly, I recently took delivery of a fancy new sewing machine but my attempts at making delightful gifts for loved ones have thus far resulted in one strange, frayed object which started life as a pencil case, went through several permutations as mp3 holders and ended up as something an excitable Anne Summers customer might buy to decorate her husband.

I wasn’t expecting my first foray into lingerie making to be easy, but as soon as Ruka, the sexy school-marm type who would be our mistress – sorry, teacher - had us all measuring our bottoms and picking fabric, I knew we were in safe hands. Ruka is the proprietress of Sugarlesque, London’s coolest burlesque costumier, and she is a brilliant teacher (anyone whose CV says they cut their teeth on nipple tassels is fine by me). She gently steered us through the tracing, cutting and pinning together of the 3-piece pattern that would make up our drawers, and then introduced us to the wonders of the overlocker: a mini-machine that cuts as it stitches and gives you the secure, zigzag hemming that soft knicker-fabric needs. Once the back, front and underneath parts had been stitched together – and there was a hairy moment with my gusset but Ruka held my hand throughout – it was time to sew in the elastic.

Now this was where I – and my lovely candy-striped cotton drawers – began to malfunction slightly. Guaging the relative tension of knicker-elastic and bias-cut fabric is, it transpires, neither intuitive nor easy. You must concentrate hard to get it right, but I was so busy dreaming about how marvellous I’d look prancing around in my DIY kecks that I ended up with some quite spectacular ruching – more toddler’s trainer pant than saucy burlesque fantasy.

Still, the addition of a glossy, black bow to the waistband raised things back up out of the nursery, and when I gleefully pulled the finished items on over my trousers I was delighted to find that although I had “overlocked” rather too enthusiastically on one of the thigh-holes (either that or I had just contracted sudden-onset withered leg), they looked, well, like knickers. It’s true that my class-mates had made things that you might actually pay money for, and had done so with a fraction of the cussing and pricked fingers I had. But it’s amazing what you can love when it’s your own creation and to me, they’re beautiful. Now, if I could only get the buggers off again...

The Times - April 2009

Review of Shadow Child by Libby Purves

It can’t be very nice having the word “poor” prefixed to your name, but since the well-publicised sudden death of her son in 2006, that is what the writer and broadcaster Libby Purves has had to make do with. In the immediate aftermath, she used her journalistic discipline to transcribe the journals and notes her gifted boy had left behind and work them up into the book, The Silence At The Song’s End. Now she has returned to novel-writing, and the result is a unrestrained picture of grief that feels, at times, uncomfortably intimate.

Shadow Child tells the story of a middle-aged couple whose world is blasted apart when their only child, Tom, falls off a ladder on the eve of his 21st birthday and dies. The narrator is fifty year old Marion, who gave up journalism for a quiet accounting job near their Norfolk village and lives somewhat in the shadow of her husband, a presenter of science documentaries. She reacts to bereavement by coping well by day but falling apart at night; he by deciding to move to New Zealand.

A book like this could never be pleasant to read, and parts of Marion’s story are agonising: how can those little bones, made by drinking all those glasses of milk in pregnancy, now be nothing but ash? How can it be that her boy is not only dead at home, as she somehow thought, but everywhere? No, this is not a book for the fragile. In fact, it is difficult to know quite who it is for, apart from Purves herself, because just as the first half is a grim account of grief’s darkest days, the second part takes on a form which is in a sense even more tragic: fairy-tale wish-fulfilment.

It turns out that before Tom died he had donated sperm to a lesbian couple of his acquaintance, and few months after his funeral a lovely, Tom-like baby boy giggles and snuffles his way into Marion’s empty house and arms, providing “a raw new life, breaking silence” [sic]. A further improbable coincidence heralds the appearance of the baby’s long-lost uncle and a healing of the rift in Marion’s marriage, and everything comes together at Christmas time. The author of A Winter’s Tale couldn’t have done it better, or indeed with more awareness that the only sensible way for an artist to conclude such a badly shattered family romance is with a sprinkling of nonsense.

The narrative ups its pace in the second half, and there is some perceptive analysis of the different ways in which women can be gay (one lesbian mother is a feminist separatist of the old school, the other a burlesque performer with long blonde hair). But all roads lead to the overwhelming, heart-wrenching desire to wake the beloved dead. In her journalism, Purves writes with coolly considered good sense about her life and others’, but this is the raw crude: a deeply emotional, often disturbing, always lyrically written novel which makes a brave attempt to face down the terrible pain smouldering at its core.

The Sunday Telegraph - December 2008

Book of the Year: America, America by Ethan Canin

Ethan Canin’s fourth novel is a glorious - and timely - meditation on American politics, both party and social. Set in upstate New York and beginning in the 1960s, it tells of a poor, clever boy taken up by an influential family and given a job on a corrupt presidential campaign. Canin’s rich, plangent prose is extraordinary. As a work of art, and as a history lesson, America, America was a revelation.

The Times - December 2008

Review of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

You might recognise Alison Bechdel’s name because her graphic memoir, Fun Home, was the surprise hit of 2006, winning prizes and praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Or you might know her as the most skilled and intelligent female cartoonist of her generation, creator of the syndicated strip Dykes To Watch Out For. This beautifully drawn, long-running soap-opera about American lesbians has previously been collected in such mini-volumes as Spawn of the Dykes to Watch Out For (in which Toni and Clarice become mothers) and Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (where Lois experiments with drag) and now, finally, the whole lot is available in one handsome book.

The strip is radical because it’s about the way lesbians really live. Not all man-hating and head-shaving, but quite a bit of shopping, gossiping, child-rearing and fun-having, and this is what makes it so palatable to non-lesbians. Although palatable is an understatement – to read some is to embark on an immediate and desperate hunt for more. Quite simply, her characters and the town they live in, with its independent bookshop, silly vegan restaurant, housing co-op and university, are addictive. I started on the strips 15 years ago as a teenage lesbian manqué, and now I watch my very sensible lawyer husband stay up until two in the morning unable to stop reading them. And that’s not because there’s anything there that might be titillating to straight men. Far from it. The Dykes’ sex lives are as fraught with tiredness, boredom, incompatibility and infidelity as the next person’s. And when they do get it on, the chances are things will come to an abrupt halt when one of their children walks in.

You see, lesbians are normal. Even Stuart, the partner of bisexual-lesbian Sparrow is, in his way, an ordinary member of the tribe. He’s not the only man in Dykes but the main characters are, of course, women, and they’ve been together through thick and thin, weathering all the changes that not only the gay scene but the world at large has been through since the strip began in the 1980s.

As much as this imagined community is a refuge for many of Bechdel’s readers, it is anything but escapist. Everyone in it is concerned with current affairs (and no, they’re not all Democrats), and the one who has emerged as the protagonist, Mo, is so tortured by the wrongs of American foreign policy, the environment, women’s rights, carnivorism and a whole lot else besides, that even her super-cerebral Professor girlfriend, Sydney, has to tell her to shut up sometimes (especially when she’s busy preparing a paper on “The Phallus Unzipped: Clinton’s Dick and the Detumescence of Oppositional Subjectivity” (1998) or “Critical Foreplay and the Seduction of Theory” (2007)). And as it comes right up to 2008, there’s plenty of Obamamania too.

Dykes is so much more than a comic strip. It is a lovingly crafted archive of the seismic changes that have been wrought in Western society over the last two decades. Wars, elections and battles for equal rights have been fought on its pages. The homogenisation of the high street is writ large in the closure of Madwimmin books in the face of competition from “Buns n Noodle” and “medusa.com”. Yet through it all, the support and good humour of a pack of friends and lovers who have known each other since college holds everything together. These women – Mo, Lois, Ginger, Sparrow, Toni and Clarice – are real American heroines. They are kind, thoughtful, flawed, funny, fat, thin, black, white, sexy, tired, happy, sad, healthy, sick people trying to do their best in a brave new world. They are true pioneers and so is their incomparable creator. No one comes close to Alison Bechdel and any chronicler of women’s lives, gay or straight, would be a fool to try.

Read Alison Bechdel’s blog and see the strips at www.dykestowatchoutfor.com

The Times - May 2009

Review of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubrasvka Ugresic trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac, Celia Hawkesworth and Mark Thompson

You remember Baba Yaga. She’s that aggressive old crone whose woodland shack stands on chicken’s feet and has human hands for door-handles and severed heads for gateposts. Sometimes she has a daughter (sometimes many, sometimes none) but one thing that never changes is her grotesque appearance: huge, pendulous breasts and massive beak-like nose give her the look of womanhood dissipated, distended and perverted. Every so often, in the Slavic stories of the 18th and 19th centuries which brought her out of myth and refined her into legend, a passing knight comes asking for food and warmth. The woman in her can’t help but oblige; but even this she makes foul, serving up soup swimming with children’s fingers and spittle.

For Canongate’s Myths series, the ,much-translated and multi-prize-winning novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugresic has crafted a three-part reading of this hideously compelling figure which illuminates and obscures its subject in equal measure. Parts One and Two are interlinked stories set in present day Croatia, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, concerning four old women all wrestling with the witch-stigma of old age, while trying to keep their bodies, minds and chattels in a fit state to present to the public.

The first story, “Go there – I Know Not Where – and Bring Me Back a Thing I Lack”, concerns a tall, beaky old woman with a wig and an obsessive interest in housekeeping. She has a daughter, a writer about to leave for Sofia to take part in a literary symposium called “Golden Pen of the Balkans”(although she is quick to emphasise how much loathes folklorists and their earnest analyses of fairy-tales), who tries in vain to keep her mother’s life meaningful and fun death encroaches. The two women dance around the subject of mortality while the annual murmuration of starlings makes its presence felt on her balcony in New Zagreb.

The second section, “Ask Me No Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies”, named, like the first, after one of the riddles traditionally set by Baba Yaga to her visitors, is a more ribald affair. It centres around three elderly ladies taking a “trip of a lifetime” to a post-communist spa resort (now an over-priced Wellness Centre). Kukla and Beba are nominally looking after the oldest of their party, the foul-mouthed, clever, suicidal Pupa, who insists on keeping both feet lodged firmly in a single, over-sized furry boot, even when in the swimming pool. The younger women reluctantly try out one absurd cosmetic therapy after another but feel increasingly dejected over the state of their old bodies. When one of the three dies, the other two decide, on a whim, to buy a huge wooden egg from the Easter window-display of a local craft centre, fill it with ice and pack their friend in until they can get her body home. Add to the mix a secret child, a foundling and a foolish young man cursed with a permanent erection, plus abundant images of eggs and birds (and paintings of eggs and birds, and remembered stories about eggs and birds) and you have a concoction of babayagology which would be quite perplexing were it not for the third section of the book, which decodes it all.

Part Three is an essay by anagrammatic folklorist, Dr Aba Bagay, analysing the previous two stories’ various manifestations of the Baba Yaga myth. Important images like feet, noses, dolls, brooms and even combs and baths are highlighted and refined to provide an even clearer lens through which to view the eternally shocking image of the housewife gone bad. For that is what old Baba Yaga is: an excommunicated, dissident version of woman who reeks of dying but never dies. And the birds that surround her, we learn, mean sex. Pecking, feather-ruffling, egg-making sex.

Dugrasic’s re-telling may be blisteringly post-modern in its execution but at its heart is a human warmth and even a silliness which infuses it with the sweet magic of story-telling. As the antic couplets at the end of each chapter remind us: “While life is often gloomy and cheerless, the tale runs on, bright and fearless!”.

Sunday Telegraph - February 2009

Review of All the Nice Girls by Joan Bakewell

Joan Bakewell is the cleverest, sexiest 75 year old in Britain and although she has never before written a novel, her two volumes of memoir showed the same mixture of sensitivity and hard-headedness that have won her acclaim as a journalist.

So you might be forgiven for expecting her first foray into fiction to be rather more like Josephine Hart’s Damage, say, than Angela Brazil’s The Jolliest Term on Record. But although her debut is set in a very real Second World War and turns on the hard life-choices faced a group of young women on the brink of sexual liberation, there is no denying that a profusion of Muriels and Beryls and sturdy thighs in gymslips sets a particular tone from which it is hard to wrest a truly modern novel. And a modern novel is what is being attempted here: there is an incisive study of gender politics in All the Nice Girls screaming to get out.

The setting is a northern grammar school at a very exciting time: the girls are to “adopt” a ship from the Merchant Navy. It is hard to believe that the government encouraged under-age girls to be “twinned” with seamen penfriends who would visit them when in dock, but it happened at Bakewell’s own school. When Captain Josh Percival of SS Treverran visits Ashworth Grammar with a couple of his dashing crew, the girls can’t believe their luck. Equally but secretly besotted is their tough headmistress, Miss Maitland (soon to be “My darling Cynthia” to the rugged Captain Josh). Professions of love are made, but when the ship sails off again from Liverpool it is into disaster. Not everyone will be coming back. Factor in to this an accidental pregnancy, air raids, a secret German and a disapproving school councillor, and you have a sense of just how complex and dramatic life on the home front could be.

Amongst all this there are chapters set in the present day in which an elderly woman, Millie, and her grown-up daughter struggle with a mysterious disease that may or may not be congenital, and a box of war-time relics which links them, somehow, to the Ship Adoption Scheme. If this sounds rather awkwardly jemmied in, well, it is. There is simply too much going on here for 300 pages of large print to contain. However, Bakewell’s writing comes alive when she is describing life on SS Treverran: the scene where she is torpedoed is a masterpiece of chilling, searing realism. Perhaps thrillers are where her talents lie? Happily, she seems to have more than enough energy and drive to show us. This, you sense, was just the warm-up act.

The Times - February 2009

Review of Mr Toppitt by Charles Elton

The world of Mr Toppit is exactly like ours, except that the biggest-selling, most obsessed-over and franchised-to-the-hilt children’s books in the English language are not the Harry Potter stories but The Hayseed Chronicles. These delicately illustrated, fairy-tale-dark tales revolve around a boy called Luke Hayseed who lives in a big house next to an ominous forest called Darkwoods. A menacing character called Mr Toppit lives in those woods and although he never appears, he leaves unwelcome signs for Luke, reminding him he’s being watched, judged and found wanting. One day, Hayseed fans agree, he will finally appear and do something, who knows what, to the boy. But when the books’ creator, Arthur Hayman, is fatally struck by a truck one hot summer’s day Soho in the 1980s, the series comes to an abrupt halt and a readership is left hanging.

The Hayseed industry goes into overdrive. Film, television, toy and game producers set about cashing in on a territory which, like Narnia or Middle Earth, plays to the desire for a return to the old, mystic morality of the English greenwood. Except in Arthur Hayman’s case, the stories were set unmistakably in his own house in Dorset, and starred a thinly disguised version of his son, Luke. Even the illustrations make it obvious that Luke is Luke. And throughout the real Luke’s boyhood this has, of course, been a maddening cross to bear.

There are strong echoes throughout of the autobiography of Christopher Milne, the real-life Christopher Robin who was pursued all his life by raving Pooh fans and conflicted feelings about his father. Indeed, Milne’s memoirs The Enchanted Places and The Path Through The Trees (both of which titles would do quite well for this novel, in fact) tell a story almost identical to Luke’s: the mother-hating, the big house and the realisation, after his famous father’s death, that he knew him hardly at all. But if those books were the inspiration for this one, we find a wholly new voice in Luke, in whose witty, bemused voice much of Charles Elton’s brilliantly observed novel is told.

It covers the time from the day of his father’s death to the moment, a decade later, when a tragic scene in the real-life Darkwoods confirms that the legacy of Arthur’s books is a heavy one indeed. Arthur’s widow is a spiky, vodka-swilling menace and his daughter – Luke’s beloved, druggy sister Rachael – has never been reality’s friend. Add to this unhappy troupe the memory of a lost child; an obese Californian who randomly chances upon the family and makes a fortune out of them with her cable TV shows; the war-damaged German-Jewish illustrator who obsessively records every newspaper article about the increasingly tabloid-friendly Haymans; the Soho characters from Arthur’s days as a script-writer who re-appear to poke at old wounds and the hordes of tourists who traipse over their lawn every weekend, and you have one hot mess of a family romance.

Some of the best satirical scenes come when Luke – now eighteen – is flown out to Los Angeles to stay with the talk show host, Laurie, who has been instrumental in making the books such huge sellers in America. She desperately wants him to be the sensitive, sad little boy in the books and indeed to go on her show to prove it. Luke, more interested in getting stoned with the pool-boy, emphatically does not want to be on her program, and his refusal is met by universal bemusement at the notion that anyone could possibly not wish to appear on television. And he is equally perplexed the after-life of his father’s books in America, where the “product” has been diluted and distended into weird meta-permutations like The Hayseed Karma and Hayseed Reflections.

This is Elton’s first novel, but even if you knew nothing of his previous careers as a literary agent, editor and television producer you would sense that this is the work of a man who has not only observed the behaviour of media people very closely, but understood the way a satisfying story is built. As a result, Mr Toppit is miles ahead of most fiction debuts and makes an engrossing, moving and perceptive read. Its taut narrative and daring emotional palate shift effortlessly between the dark days of childhood, the grit of pre-digital Soho and the over-exposed nonsense of contemporary LA. It’s quite a ride.

The Times - January 2008

How to Write a Mills & Boon Novel

There comes a moment in every unpublished novelist's life when she wonders, is it time? Time to change her name to Valerie Lafayette, take to bed with a box of chocs, a dreamy smile and a big pink notebook and begin her career as a romantic novelist for Mills & Boon.

And why should she be ashamed to admit this? Perhaps because Harlequin Mills & Boon, which celebrates its century this month, is considered by most to be pretty much the lowest form of novelising.

But this is the publisher that launched P.G.Wodehouse and Jack London. An M&B is bought in the UK every few seconds and its books are devoured by millions of women the world over. Plus, it allows readers to stipulate the kind of stories they want and supplies tailor-made multipacks of books to their homes - usually four a month. How democratic can you get?

The readers and writers of romance are, of course, women. And herein lies the politics. Critics argue that supplying conventional love stories to non-literary readers is not the best way to empower them. That the writers of such titles as The Playboy's Plain Jane are reinforcing an outmoded version of femininity and oppressing their sisters. Others just think the writing's bad. But they probably haven't read one recently.

Kim Young and Tessa Shapcott, senior editors of Mills & Boon's Romance series, are visibly riled by these “patronising” views. When I meet these two warm, friendly (and decidedly romantic-looking, with their tumbling tresses, pink jackets and flowing skirts) ladies at their HQ in Richmond, they present a united front against those who seek to tell their readers what not to read.

“It's like the Gothic romance boom of the 18th century,” says Tessa, “with everyone getting in a twist about what women should be reading. We have a unique understanding of how women operate emotionally. Our writers tap into thoughts you don't admit to having. And the fact is, you can think like that. You can! And you won't die!”

She also points out that their millions of readers are not stupid. They are simply women who want to escape to somewhere lovely. “Escapism is absolutely key. You can take risks, too - writing about child loss or illness, for example. But there's always a happy ending.”

If you've never read a Mills & Boon, you may not know that they do no read like Roy Lichtenstein cartoon bubbles. Nor are their heroines weak, humourless Barbie dolls. The Millionaire Tycoon's English Rose, for example, stars a blind woman who runs her own PR company and has many a witty observation to make about attitudes to disability in the workplace and the bedroom.

So I was emboldened to have a go. Choosing the right genre is crucial if I am actually to enjoy writing it (as I must if I expect anyone to enjoy reading it). “Medical” was a no-no (how can anyone find hospitals alluring? I'm loath to touch so much as a doorknob in those places these days, let alone a man). “Blaze” - the explicitly sexy series - was out, too. To sit at my desk thinking up new euphemisms for erections is not my idea of a relaxing afternoon. “Modern” takes us into a world of A-list glamour, and I'm not sure I have the credentials. Historical was tempting, but in the end I decided to go for good old-fashioned “Romance”. The real deal. Books in this series concentrate on the interior obstacles to love, rather than exterior ones. They are about feeling emotions, not each other.

But there are rules I must adhere to if my story is to make the grade. The hero, for example, can have a few endearing imperfections, but could not have a murder conviction or occasionally use cocaine. “Yes, he has to be perfect,” says Kim. “The one you deserve. Immediately you see him you fall in love with him.”

Ah, him.

With trepidation, I present my opening chapter and synopsis to my prospective editors. My story, The Oligarch, His Wife, Their Yacht and His Lover, is about Lucy, a twentysomething from a country village who goes out to stay with her retired parents on an idyllic Greek island. The previous summer she had had a wonderful romance, with a local lad, Costas, but the affair had ended badly after he disgraced himself with a local good-time girl, claiming temporary insanity caused by a batch of dodgy ouzo. But morally robust Lucy refuses to take him back. Swearing off romance for the summer, Chapter 1 opens with her staring out to sea from her bal-cony, vowing to let no man turn her head as long as she is on the island ... “At that moment, several miles out to sea, Nikolai Alexievich swept his thick black hair out of his icy blue eyes, leant on the polished oak rail of his massive yacht and trained his binoculars the balcony of a little pink house on the shore. ‘Darling,” he called to his wife in Russian, “we're going ashore - there's a little property I want to add to my portfolio ...'”

My instructors liked my scene setting (I'd furnished the balcony with some nice geraniums in terracotta pots, and Nikolai's binoculars with a crystal monogram). But I'd made two schoolgirl errors: my characterisation of Nikolai as a philanderer and unscrupulous businessman (he goes on to ruin the island with a new super-yacht marina for his coarse billionaire mates) is, well, a bit racist. Point taken. And I certainly can't have “something stirring under the crisp white linen of his monogrammed robe” when he sees Lucy in her bikini. “But I meant his heart!” I half-heartedly profess, before being reminded that in the Romance series, sex takes place strictly behind closed doors.

Finally, Tessa told me a thing or two about female character development: “She's on a journey - there might be moments when you think ‘No! What are you doing!' But ultimately she's going to do good. And show, don't tell. We don't want long passages of introspection.”

Heading home from my day at Romance HQ, I feel cheered by democratic literary sisterhood that Mills & Boon espouses. And, making up love stories is fun. And after three or four years, they tell me, you can expect to earn a nice living from it. With their policy of encouraging promising authors to branch out into mainstream publishing, I'm wondering: could this be a whole new way forward for me as a writer? Will I, as they suggested I should, write some more of my story and send it back to them? Watch this space ...

Tips for aspiring romance writers:

• Many Mills & Boon books have an aspirational, international location. So have fun choosing a location, but don't get bogged down in local politics. And don't drown the reader in facts - you're not writing a travelogue.
• Base your story on universal emotional truths. Not just love and death, but renewal, justice, truth, strength, contentment, passion and tenderness.
• Tie in these truths with the desires that are common to most women: unconditional love, safety, affluence and success.
• Make your characters resonant and believable as well as aspirational. Have them communicate with plentiful dialogue, and motivate their actions soundly.
• Be very careful to conform to the sexual mores of your chosen series - nipples at dawn are not right for Romance but for Blaze, they're a prerequisite.
• Who is driving your story? Make sure the conflict always comes from the main characters and their emotions - not from the supporting cast. But remember: conflict isn't a continual argument between the hero and heroine!
• Layer the drama with highs and lows, advance and retreat. There should be more internal than external drama between the hero and heroine - devices such as unexpected pregnancies (“secret babies” in M&B speak) are good. They're a way of creating sustainable conflict that is emotional for the couple yet easy for readers to relate to.
• To develop your heroine convincingly, feed her backstory through the action of the book, avoiding “chunking” - shoving in lengthy chunks of interior monologue.
• Last, but not least... have fun!

The Times - January 2009

Review of The Last Bachelor by Jay McInerney

A put-upon husband agrees to share the marital bed with a pot-bellied pig; a serial gold-digger almost nets her richest man yet but slips up over some Cartier cufflinks; the secret girlfriend of a handsome presidential candidate hides away in a remote lake-house, excluded from the campaign of her married lover until a well-known political blogger turns up at the door. And in the title story, a wealthy Casanova from Tennessee, famous for his good looks and expensive appetites, stuns his friends by announcing his engagement.

The thread that unites all the stories in McInerney’s second collection of short fiction is infidelity, and each cheater’s tale is modulated to explore a different fault-line in American society: because the other thing that this book is emphatically about is class. As is made plain when the narrator of The Waiter, trying to chat up a Waspy girl who would cut him dead if she knew of his job, suddenly realises that “there is a class system in America, even if some of us bottom-dwellers didn’t realise it”.

Reading the book in a country where it is the upper classes that are most likely to deny the existence of the hierarchy, this is just one of the surprising truths about his homeland that McInerney reveals. Another comes from his sensitivity to the difference between Southerner and Yankee as it plays out across the boardrooms, bedrooms and cocaine-covered coffee tables of Manhattan. In the title story, the sexy confidence of the bachelor comes from a sense of identity born of his southern blood, which “distinguished him from the mass of rootless Yankees”. In The Debutante’s Return, a Nashville-born New Yorker finds comfort in the “ritual politesse” of Tennessee, despite its “innate Southern consciousness of loss and nostalgia”.

There is perhaps less about post-9/11 New York than you might imagine, although what there is is a keening, biting lament for a city that will never be seen whole again. In The March, an anti-war protester sees one of the policemen she helped in the aftermath of the attacks brutalising young people in the crowd. But McInerney has moved on, his scope widened.

From the tragi-comedy of manners about the pot-bellied pig, to the thriller-like tautness of the gold-digger’s tale, it seems that all human and literary life is here. Very occasionally a bit of writerly trickery gets in the way (like refusing to acknowledge the existence of mobile phones in a story which depends solely on someone’s need to make and receive private calls. Why?). But for the most part this book is as stylish, sexy, sad and complicatedly American its eponymous hero.

The Financial Times - January 2008

Defining Moment: Lytton Strachey Opens the Floodgates

Sexual intercourse may have begun for some in 1963, but for the residents of 29 Fitzroy Square, Bloomsbury, it came a good deal sooner. Almost six decades before Philip Larkin wrote his famous line, Virginia Woolf had fled the oppressive rooms of her father's house into some light and airy ones of her own, close to her sister and brother-in-law - Vanessa and Clive Bell. Their embryonic Bloomsbury Group was all for testing the intellectual, artistic and domestic boundaries that had defined previous generations, but even these forward-thinking souls still adhered to old-fashioned notions of politeness in conversation. They may have loved in triangles, but their attitude to low talk was decidedly square.

It was in 1907 that one word from one man saw these shackles unceremoniously shrugged off. The man was writer Lytton Strachey and the word, according to Woolf, was "semen".

Or to be exact, "Semen?" Strachey had just entered a room where Virginia and her sister sat and, pointing to a mark on Vanessa's dress, casually and explicitly enquired as to its origin. Woolf's first thought was, "Can one really say it?"; but then, a moment later, "everyone burst out laughing" and a new age was born. The age of anything goes. As she puts it in her autobiographical Moments of Being: "All barriers of reticence and reserve went down.

A flood of sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation..."

Today, we can look back on a century of seminal media moments from Ezra Pound defining the new poetics in terms of an "up-jut of sperm", to bodily fluids-as-art courtesy of Marcel Duchamp and Gilbert & George, and 1998's American double whammy of There's Something About Mary and the saga of that blue dress. Strachey's remark may have been a joke, but he showed that insouciance can go a long way.

The Financial Times - March 2008

Review of Daphne by Justine Picardie

You need not be a self-confessed du Maurier-obsessive like Justine Picardie to enjoy this vivid journey through Daphne’s troubled later years. With a marriage wracked by affairs on both sides, Daphne retreats to her writing hut to plan a biography of Branwell Bronte. But through correspondence with Symmington, a Bronte scholar with a dark past, she becomes drawn in to a tantalising literary mystery. Picardie gives the story a contemporary edge by framing it as the research project of a naïve young academic, whose marriage to an older man is haunted by his Rebecca of a first wife. Effortlessly overlaying today’s London, Yorkshire and Cornwall with their 1950s incarnations, this absorbing novel draws you in to its fraught but passionate world as thoroughly as one of Daphne’s own.

The Financial Times - March 2008

Reveiw of The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block

To write really intelligent, insightful fiction about Alzheimer’s is not within the capabilities of most authors in their early twenties. But Block, a science prodigy and now a blisteringly good debut novelist, is exceptional. His hero is the teenage son of a woman with early-onset dementia. Knowing that the inherited disease may one day come for him, he decides to arm himself with as much neurological and genealogical knowledge as possible, and despite his mother’s secrecy over her upbringing, he helps her take one last journey to reconnect with who she really is. The redemptive qualities of storytelling have never been so gloriously displayed as in this astonishing first book, which confirms Block as one of the great, fresh talents of 2008.

The Financial Times - October 2007

Review of No Way Home: A Cuban Dancer's Story by Carlos Acosta

The life of the ballet dancer Carlos Acosta has all the hallmarks of a bestseller: rags to riches, romance, family tragedy and a unique insight into growing up poor in Cuba in the 1980s.

Acosta was a bad boy in the making when his eccentric father forced him to attend a dance school in Havana. From a family background blighted by poverty and mental illness but bound by a fierce love, this talented dancer leapt his way out of Cuba and on to high-profile stages across the world, culminating in his sell-out performances in 2004 of Tocororo at London's Sadler's Wells.

In No Way Home, Acosta's voice is instantly likeable, and you follow his discovery of the trappings of the west and his quest to make his name at the Royal Ballet with a mixture of wonder, respect and, crucially, affection.