Joanna Trollope
‘I had a minibreakdown after my divorce’
B arely a minute into our conversation, author Joanna Trollope makes it clear how much she deplores a public catfight. “There’s a kind of ‘yummy, yummy, how exciting!’ attitude,” she sighs, “which seems a little childish.”
So it must have been disheartening, to say the least, when Trollope found herself unwittingly embroiled in, if not exactly a catfight, then certainly a minor skirmishwith-claws.
Last week, the 73-year-old author made headlines after she appeared to berate Harry Potter creator JK Rowling for her use of Twitter, decrying Rowling’s, and other writers’, “insatiable need and desire to be out there all the time” – a need, she said, that is “entirely driven by their ego”.
To ensure her disapproval hit home, she added that “creating this mass following and tweeting several times a day is like wanting to be Cheryl Cole or Kim Kardashian. It’s a ludicrous aspiration [for a writer].” Naturally, her words were seized upon by many – presumably spoiling for some kind of social media spat between the twoof course, writers given (impossible,that Trollope doesn’t do Twitter).
“I feel that for Jo [Rowling] and for anyone who wants to be on Twitter, it’s absolutely fine, and I want you to emphasise that I’m not in the least critical of anybody who uses it,” she says firmly today. “I just say that I don’t. I think for her it’s different because her readership is comprised of children, young adults and adults and “I they’re remember fascinated saying byto a it. man once: ‘How can you be incredibly unintelligent about loading the dishwasher when you’re such a bright person?’ And he said: ‘Because it bores me.’ I think the same is true of me and social media. “I’m rather bored by Twitter, and I’d prefer to have a conversation with somebody. Obviously, it would be very useful for me [as a writer] to be fascinated by it, but I’m not,” she says. “The aim of my novels isn’t to tell people what to think or to tell them how I think, it’s to get the conversation going.” And Trollope certainly has a knack for that. A few years ago, she caused a stir when she admitted that, “past the age of 60, fidelity doesn’t matter”. After her second divorce, she dated Jason Kouchak, a musician some 23 years her junior and, though the couple never lived together, the relationship lasted more than 15 years. “I got comments from people all the time about it,” she says, “but it was nothing to do with anybody except the two of us. I see the same happening now with the Macrons [the French president-elect Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, who is 24 years his senior]. “We are obsessed with the men conventionsshall be strong,of society the – womenthat shall be pretty and the age gap shall be conventional – and it’s all so wearying and old-fashioned,” she says. “As long as it suits a particular couple to be in a certain configuration, then good luck to them, I say.” Yet society does appear to be unusually obsessed by age-gap relationships. “Yawn, yawn,” she says. “I’m much more interested in the result of the elections than the Macrons’ age difference.” Asked whether younger men are better able to handle successful women, she replies: “No – I think it’s got nothing to do with age. It’s got to do with personality and nothing else at all.”
Despite the cut-glass vowels and the “Aga saga” label continually bestowed on her novels – a term she probably regards with even more disdain than “Twitter feud” – Trollope has, as fellow novelist Fay Weldon once remarked, a “gift for putting her finger on the problem of the times”. Her bestselling books, which include Marrying the Mistress, A Village Affair and The Other Family, eschew cosiness for a gimleteyed, and at times subversive, look at modern life.
In July, she will appear at the Curious Arts Festival in Hampshire (“like a music festival with books added – it’s like being a rock star!”), and part of her discussion will be her latest novel, City of Friends, which features a quartet of women very much in love – not necessarily with their spouses, but with their jobs.
“I don’t think there’s another novel about women and work, which is extraordinary when you think what a large part of our identity it is,” she says.
Prior to becoming a writer, Trollope had a job at the Foreign Office, “at a time when it was quite rare for women to work,” she says. “What I remember were the tremendous opportunities for friendship. The girl I shared an office with was almost like a sister, and the women I spoke to [as research] for City of Friends were all very supportive of one another. But I’m very much of the Madeleine Albright school of thinking, that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.”
To that end, she is an admirer of Prime Minister Theresa May – both are grammar school- and Oxfordeducated. “She looks as if she’s very fulfilled at the moment, doesn’t she?” says Trollope. “She’s got a very hard task ahead of her with Brexit, but I don’t think she’s afraid and her aim is just to quietly get on with it. She doesn’t do showy things on the whole. I admire any dedicated, hardworking, soberly living grown-up who just gets on with the job.”
It’s a description that could have been tailor-made for Trollope herself. The daughter of a painter and a building society manager (her father, Arthur, was a distant relative of 19th-century novelist Anthony Trollope), she managed to juggle a career as a teacher while writing and raising her two daughters, Louise, 43, and Antonia, 40, by first husband, City banker David Potter. Their marriage lasted 18 years, after which she wed TV dramatist Ian Curteis, who was a key figure in shaping the Joanna Trollope we know today – persuading her away from the historical novels she had begun writing and towards the contemporary style for which she is now known.
That marriage ended, after 15 years, just as Trollope was gaining success. “And I think that was an element [in the breakdown] of both marriages,” she admits. “It was quite difficult, but they were of their generation. If they’d been brought up in a different way, who knows if they would have found it a bit easier.”
Hugely accomplished and rigorously self-sufficient (she recently hinted that if she were to suffer from dementia, she would opt for assisted suicide rather than “moving in with my daughters and making their lives a nuisance”), she gives off the air of being thoroughly in control. Therefore, it came as a surprise that when her second marriage disintegrated, Trollope had what she describes as a “mini-breakdown”, leaving her at times “absolutely sodden” with her own tears.
Was it difficult to admit, especially to herself, that she was having problems? “No, it wasn’t, actually,” she replies. “It was a relief – because you have to tell people that life isn’t all plain sailing.
“But while candour is a very good thing, you don’t want to go on and on about whatever agony you’re going through. It’s like carrying around a sandwich board that says, ‘I am in pain because this happened’, and you can’t ever grow or advance. You get bored with being at the bottom of the pit.
“I don’t define myself eternally by my lowest moments, because I think that’s a grave mistake. But there have been times when you feel despair and you have to tell people it’s happened in order to say it’s not always going to be that way.”
Though she appears more glamorous with every passing year, Trollope is currently single – “and very happily single, too”, she insists.
Given her recent headlinegenerating brush with social media, perhaps she’d give online dating a try?
“Well, now, really…” she laughs. “What do you think?”