- 1.Who are your favorite authors?
- Where to start?! Daphne du Maurier, Richard Ford, Gustave Flaubert... and that's just three picked from random.
- 2.Who has had a major influence on your writing?
- Reading Clive James's TV columns for the Observer as a teenager certainly inspired me as journalist.
- 3.Can you name at least one book that you never finished?
- Nearly everything by Martin Amis, post-Money.
- 4.What word or words do you always have trouble spelling?
- I'm pretty good at spelling, luckily, but 'onomatopoeia' usually gets me.
- 5.What three adjectives best describe you?
- Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy... I'm all of the seven dwarves, apart from Doc.
- 6.Which of your characters would you most like to be and why?
- None of them, really. There's quite enough of them in me already.
- 7.Which author would you invite to dinner?
- Well, I've just missed the boat on this one, sadly, but the late Nora Ephron would've been perfect.
- 8.Where do you write?
- In my study, at home
- 9.When do you write?
- Whenever I have to...
- 10.What makes you happy?
- Good weather, good food, good friends, good kids— not necessarily in that order!
- 11.What do you most fear?
- Anything horrible happening to my children.
- 12.What is your favorite vice?
- A big cold glass (OK, make that two...) of Leffe Blond
- 13.What is the quality you most like in yourself?
- Loyalty
- 14.What are the qualities you most like in your friends?
- Humour, warmth, honesty, kindness and loyalty.
- 15.Would you be lying if you said your works were not autobiographical?
- I've only written one novel so far and as that has a tiny bit of autobiography in it, I guess that'd be a yes!
- 16.What part of your personality do you detest?
- My impatience.
- 17.What is your favorite adjective?
- Tough one! Today I like 'louring'
- 18.What is your favorite book?
- Probably 'Rebecca'
- 19.What book would you read three times?
- I've read all Jane Austen's more than three times, so...
- 20.To whom would you award the Nobel Prize for Literature and why?
- As a practitioner of 'commercial women's fiction' I think I'll leave 'literary' to the Nobel committee
 Author Snapshots
20 Quick Questions
|
