Getting Dressed
Writer Deborah Moggach on her junk-shop clothes and skinny genes
Deborah Moggach doesn’t give a fig for fashion and doesn’t care much about clothes. But she usually has a very clear picture of what women characters in her books are wearing. ‘Men are more difficult – their clothes don’t betray as much.’
Phoebe is one of the protagonists in Moggach’s gripping new book, The Carer, which has just zoomed to the top of the bestseller list. Phoebe lives, like her creator, on the Welsh border (though Moggach, a north Londoner through and through, also has a place in Kentish Town).
‘Phoebe wears what women there wear. They tend to be arty and paint hares and sheep, and wear lots of scarves. They don’t shave their legs and they have lightly reddened skin flayed by the elements because they are always outside, painting, and they have frizzy hair because it is always raining or damp in Wales.’
Moggach identifies with the frizzy hair. ‘My hair was always a mess because of the gardening – I do masses of gardening – and I always just let it be a mess. But, since I turned 70 last year, I try to have it blow-dried. There are a couple of Iranians in a hair salon just down from my house in London and they somehow manage to make it sleek and shiny. I get it coloured, but I go to different people for this. I am not loyal – last time I went to Mane in Leominster and I liked what they did.’
Moggach – pronounced ‘like loch with an a’, she says – is the name of her first husband. She has written 19 novels and many award-winning screen adaptations and teleplays. She was awarded the OBE last year and has myriad fans (including me).
She became famous because of the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was adapted – by another writer – from her novel These Foolish Things. She has compared this to someone rifling through your knicker drawer when you are out. Still she thought the film had a good heart and peerless performances and ‘if I had any criticisms, they jolly soon died away’. Moggach writes on a laptop wherever she happens to be. Her parents were both writers, and her daughter Lottie’s first book, Kiss Me First, was turned into a series by Channel 4 and Netflix last year. In a devastating family trauma, Moggach’s mother was sent to prison at the age of 60 for allegedly helping a friend to die. Moggach, a patron of Dignity in Dying, has never written about her mother’s experience. ‘I always felt it was her story and I shouldn’t take it from her.’ Moggach’s grandmother lived with the family when she and her three sisters were growing up. ‘She had a sewing machine and made her own clothes, and so did we. When I was 13, I used to draw and design them as well; I LOVED clothes when I was a teenager. Later, I became a bit of a hippy in long droopy skirts and necklaces. And then somehow, in the last 20 years or so, I lost all interest in clothes, partly because the shops I liked – Monsoon for instance – started going off in different directions. Then East, which I loved, closed and now I HATE shopping. ‘On my street in Presteigne, there is a junk shop where the owner hangs out clothes – in rain or shine – and you take them and put money in a box. I have bought two coats, a Boden one and
a faux leopard from her, a pair of bright blue, suede shoes and a summer dress which was unsuccessful because it was a bit too small.
‘One of the 8,000 horrible things about getting older is that you get sensitive around your middle. You don’t want to wear tight waistbands.
‘If I happen to see something – like the tunic I am wearing, which was in a shop window in Barcelona – then I buy it. I get lovely, stretchy, velvet leggings in Presteigne from Bronwen, who runs a small business from home, and I always wear boots by Ache which in spite of their name are the most comfortable in the world. I buy them from Galeries Lafayette in Paris, and when they wear out I get a new pair and use the old ones to garden in.’
Moggach is as tall and slim as a model (‘stringy’, she says). She credits this, like her writing, to her genes. She doesn’t diet and smokes two cigarettes a day – with a coffee in the morning and a couple or three glasses of wine in the evening.
Her skincare is basic – Astral from Boots; lipstick from Rimmel. She walks a lot, and swims regularly – a favourite place is the Ladies’ Bathing Pond on Hampstead Heath, where she’s swum for half a century. As she writes in At the Pond, published this summer, swimming there has ‘been one of the wonders of my life. Slipping into its waters is slipping into bliss.’