Author Interview

Bestselling author Joanna Trollope talks to Hannah Stephenson about her new novel Mum & Dad

Bestselling novelist Joanna Trollope has a knack for having her finger on the pulse of pressing social dilemmas.

“All my novels are reflections of what I think is a great universal preoccupation at the time. I try to tap into the zeitgeist of whatever’s going on, a particular dilemma that is affecting a lot of people at the time,” agrees the writer.

Joanna has tackled topics ranging from affairs, blended families and adoption, to parenting and marital breakdown in her many novels, including The Rector’s Wife, Marrying The

Mistress, Other People’s Children and Second Honeymoon.

Her books were once dubbed ‘Aga sagas’ – an uncomplimentary nod to their middle-class domestic settings and a label which justifiably irks the author. Far from being cosy, her novels can be pretty dark.

“That was a very unfortunate phrase and I think it’s done me a lot of damage,” she says sternly. “It was so patronising to the readers too. Human life has got darker.”

The turmoil and ups and downs her characters face are in stark contrast to the relative calm in her own ordered, uncluttered life today.

“I think I’ve probably mellowed,” says the author, who was awarded a CBE for services to literature in 2019. “I’ve become more detached. Earlier in life, I felt it was up to me to make the world happy, and now I feel there’s nothing I can do about an awful lot of it. You can just step back. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.”

Joanna, 76, lives happily alone in London.

Her latest book, Mum & Dad, addresses the sandwich generation – middle-aged people who are looking after their children and also their elderly parents.

It sees three siblings (and their various partners and children) come together at their parent’s home in Gibraltar after their father has a stroke, to work out how they are going to look after their mother and keep the father’s wine business going.

The children each have their own dilemmas. There’s mother-of-three Katie, a solicitor and main breadwinner of her family, who is in a troubled marriage and has a daughter who’s self-harming; son Jake, the slick organiser who’s a bit too smug for his own good; and son Sebastian, whose glass is always half empty and who resents his brother Jake’s controlfreak nature.

“I don’t worry about getting older – so far. I feel incredibly blessed to have a creative industry in my life.

“I remember seeing PD James about two months before she died - she was 94 when she died – and she was in the middle of another Adam Dalgliesh even then. One can go on writing forever.

“To me, the whole point of having earned a certain amount is that I can pay for my independence. I come from a horribly long-lived family of women.”

● Mum & Dad by Joanna Trollope is published by Macmillan on March 5, priced £18.99.