Why I will never fall in love again
Her characters often find love later in life, but Joanna Trollope tells Celia Walden that’s not why she’s dating again
Joanna Trollope has started dating again. The bestselling novelist admits this with an impatience bordering on exasperation. “Yes, I do date, but…” She doesn’t find it much fun? “Well – no. I mean I have an enormous spectrum of friends, a lot of whom are men, but I would say that the men whose company I enjoy most are those who aren’t expecting anything from me – men who just want to go to a concert or the ballet.”
Well we all like a GBF, but doesn’t Trollope – who is twice divorced and has been single for 20 years – want to fall in love again?
“No!” yelps the 74-year-old, looking around the Goring Hotel bar as though in search of someone who could confirm what an absurd notion this is. “Absolutely not.” Why? “It’s pointless.”
But so many of her books – her latest, An Unsuitable Match, included – are about love second or third time around? “I know, but the idea just doesn’t turn me on. Sorry. Not at my advanced age.”
And perhaps that’s why so many single women do have coteries of gay friends, she laughs. “Because it’s peaceful. And because they notice what you’re wearing.”
You wouldn’t so much notice what Trollope is wearing – a boxy leather M&S jacket, black palazzo trousers and little white plimsolls that she’s appalled to hear are “on trend” – as how good she looks.
Tall and slender, the Gloucestershire-born author has the kind of French-style elegance that indicates inner discipline.
You look at her and picture an ordered study and desk with a lined A4 pad – all 21 of her books have been written longhand, and while she’s fetishistic about the pad, the pen “could be something I’ve nicked from a hotel”.
You picture a regimented fridge and a writing schedule that’s rigorously stuck to.
That kind of woman could be brisk to meet, but Trollope is warm and curious – asking so many questions about the logistics of my life as a working mother that it feels like I’m the one being interviewed.
Because as any fan will know, what really fascinates the author of Marrying the Mistress, A Village Affair and The Other Family isn’t Agas, lifestyle porn or any other patronising label you care to slap on her, but societal and familial conventions – and what happens when life throws them up in the air.
This should make the period of flux we’re in the midst of great fodder (Fay Weldon once said Trollope’s biggest gift was “putting her finger on the problem of the times”) but Trollope admits to finding a lot of today’s gender and identity issues bewildering.
“I know we’re all supposed to be very gender fluid at the moment, but for my generation this is quite unhelpful – and very confusing. Because if you can redefine your identity every morning…”
I agree that the idea of defying box ticking – by finding ever more niche boxes to tick – doesn’t make much sense. But presumably it’s all to support the cult of individuality: let everyone be who they want to be?
“Because individuality is the thing, isn’t it?” Trollope winces. “And yet we’re sending out such mixed messages, because on the one hand we’re telling women ‘you must be yourself ’ and on the other we’re saying: ‘You must look exactly like everybody else’.
“I mean this whole Zoella thing is extraordinary,” she goes on, referring to the British beauty vlogger who has 10.7million Instagram followers.
“Young girls are covering themselves in layers of make-up when they’ve got beautiful skin. And of course, girls have always done
‘Sexism was in the air we breathed! We learnt to be very elusive’
that but it’s so extreme now because of social media – and they all end up looking exactly the same: like someone from Love Island. Which is very unfortunate and sad.”
Such lack of independent thought might well be baffling to the Oxfordeducated fifth-generation niece of Anthony Trollope, who made her own way into the Foreign Office before becoming a full-time writer.
She refuses to toe the line on most of the issues du jour, insisting she’s never suffered from ageism – “in fact things have got better for me as I’ve got older” – but will concede that as a woman she was frequently dismissed early on.
“Sexism was in the air we breathed! We were the second sex; we were brought up to be the second sex. But we learnt to be very elusive. We just skirted around the problem.
“We shut up, we bided our time and we found another route. Which in the modern aggressive #Metoo style would be seen as a way of copping out – but it was a way of surviving,” she explains with a side smile, “and achieving one’s own ends.”
Both of her marriages – the first to David Potter, a banker with whom she has two daughters, Louise and Antonia, and the second to Ian Curteis, a television dramatist – floundered in part because of those achievements, she feels.
“Because both men were the generation they were, I would say they felt threatened by my success. Men do find that hard. And society may be creaking towards a new definition of manhood, but men judge each other, don’t they?”
They still judge and dismiss women too, Trollope says – particularly in the “narrow and introverted” literary world. “But the literary establishment has always been very dismissive of me,” she shrugs. “I get reviewed in a particularly dismissive way, and I think it’s not being intellectually right.”
A gurgle of laughter escapes her at the absurdity of this.
“And sounding the way I do. Also all the review pages are non-fiction books written and reviewed by men, when women are by far the biggest book buyers. And I think that’s a mistake because book pages shouldn’t be about snobbery but encouraging everyone to read.”
Trollope is more annoyed than aggrieved by this. She has the horror of whingeing characteristic of her generation and has no time either for the current breed of feminists who expend time and energy fighting male terms of endearment and wolfwhistling (“I don’t mind any of it. It’s human connection”) or those who, like Kim Kardashian, put out topless images of themselves in the name of female empowerment.
“Well, it’s pathetic, isn’t it? She’ll learn, poor girl.” I doubt that.
“But what’s going to become of her when that formidable mother is no more? She’ll just become a superannuated once-gorgeousperson, won’t she?”
But at least not a victim? “Yes, that current vogue for victimhood isn’t awfully attractive,” she sighs.
“It’s part of individualism, I suppose, or a way of making yourself significant. Because nobody wants to feel that they have passed this way through this vale of tears and that nobody has noticed. That’s unbearable – particularly in an irreligious age.
“So it’s very necessary to be noticeable and that means in a minority of some kind. Still it’ll all be back,” she rallies, bright eyed and optimistic again, “being able to flirt and so on. When I think of what Madison Avenue was like back in the Fifties and Sixties: it was outrageous!”
And I bet the women gave as good as they got? “Oh, they did! But now it’s seen as ‘you’ve given into the opposition’ if you play that game, and that’s dull because it’s so humourless, and not very sophisticated either – just rather immature – but I promise it’ll pass.”
You wouldn’t expect a woman as strident as Trollope to have many regrets – and she doesn’t.
“Would I have done lots of things differently? Of course. But don’t
‘When I think of Madison Avenue in the Fifties and Sixties: it was outrageous!’
stagger through life carrying your regrets around like a sandwich board. It’s being human, isn’t it? I think we need to start celebrating stoicism, endurance, restraint and reticence again.”
Didn’t psychotherapy put an end to those things? “Well fine, let it all out – but not forever. Let it all out, get over it and move on.”
I’m already thinking Trollope should be sent out as a motivational missionary for millennials when her next sentence seals the deal: “I suppose what I really want to say,” she explains, her head lolling forward with the obviosity of it: “is just grow up?”