I don’t want to be a burden to my children
JOANNA TROLLOPE’S 20TH NOVEL REVOLVES AROUND A GROUP OF SUCCESSFUL WOMEN – SOMETHING THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR FEELS VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT. SHE TALKS TO HANNAH STEPHENSON ABOUT FAMILY, AGEING AND SUPPORTING THE SISTERHOOD
BEST-SELLING author Joanna Trollope seems to have an extremely ordered life, from her elegant attire, perfectly sculpted hair and cut-glass accent, to her immaculate home in up-market Chelsea.
There’s no clutter and, apparently, no man. She has lived alone, through choice, for years.
There is, however, a large family in which she envelops herself regularly: two daughters, two stepsons and nine grandchildren aged between 18 and eight, who she sees frequently.
Joanna, 73, seems so fastidiously in control, perfectly poised and tidy-minded, yet her novels are filled with emotional chaos, as she tackles the contemporary problems of fractured families, adoption, affairs and myriad relationship and work issues.
“We are all swans in a sense,” muses the author, whose titles include The Rector’s Wife, Marrying The Mistress, Other People’s Children and Second Honeymoon. “We have this very thin veneer of educated, controlled, cultivated civilisation. Our lives are managed, yet underneath it’s like the last act of Hamlet. Everybody’s got a sick parent or a child who’s been bullied at school, or they’ve just been dumped or lost a job. Nobody is immune.”
Her novels were once dubbed ‘Aga sagas’, an uncomplimentary nod to their middle-class Home Counties domestic settings and a label which justifiably irks the author. They are, after all, well-crafted, astutely observed contemporary stories examining the dilemmas of modern life. There is nothing cosy about them.
Joanna’s 20th novel City Of Friends attests to that, focusing on four high flying businesswomen friends and all the dilemmas they face with family, colleagues and children – and an elderly mother with dementia thrown in the mix, a subject close to home.
“My father had dementia for about 15 years – it’s hideous,” she reveals. For a long time, her mother looked after him at home, until he became too ill for her to cope.
“Luckily I have a brother and sister to whom I’m very close, and we were contorted with anxiety and effort and strain and tension. It was a dreadful time,” Joanna admits.
Does she worry she’ll get dementia?
“It’s the one thing I would find very hard to cope with, but there’s very little one can do. I can just do what I can to make sure that there’s enough money to pay for whatever care I need to make sure the boys and girls don’t have to.”
She says she’s in favour of assisted suicide. “We’ve got to a point where we are medically extremely advanced, but we haven’t let our morality catch up with that. There’s a real and profound anxiety about not prolonging life, whatever the quality of that life is. It’s an understandable squeamishness.”
Being the organised person she is, her will is updated, a letter of wishes is in place, there’s a living will and she has given her daughters power of attorney.
Her biggest fear is becoming a burden on her children.
“I’m not worried about ageing but I do everything in my power to stay as independent as I can.
“I don’t want to be a nuisance to my daughters and stepsons. I do Pilates, I walk everywhere, I live in a tall, thin London house and I eat well.
“I’m stimulated and interested and busy.
“Even if I haven’t spoken to anybody all day because I’ve been working alone in my house, I know there’s an awful lot of life out there on the King’s Road, or I can go to the theatre or the cinema.”
Her novels keep her busy. In the latest, the four ambitious friends, who’ve shared joys and heartache since university, are now nearing their 50s and in high-flying careers.
But the group dynamics change when one gets sacked, and there follows a series of complications arising from betrayals, affecting both their professional and private lives, and threatening the future of the friendships.
“I wanted to explore women and work because in my generation, almost no women worked. I was quite rare.
“For my daughters’ generation, they all work, and for my granddaughters’ generation they expect to work.”
As research, she interviewed more than a dozen top businesswomen in the finance industry – traditionally a male bastion – in the City of London.
“Women don’t work the way men work, but they have the same feelings of legitimacy, validation and satisfaction from working. “Men are much better at compartmentalising. They do work, they do play and they don’t muddle up as a whole, but women make relationships wherever they go.
“Their private lives almost leak into the way they run their professional lives. They cannot be a different person merely because they are in an office.
“I was struck by what wonderfully sympathetic mentors these senior women are to their junior teams.
“So many of the women I interviewed said the one thing they didn’t want to hear from a female employee was that she was giving up because it’s her job to go home and look after the family.”
Joanna, a distant descendant of 19th century novelist Anthony Trollope, makes a good case for how work can preserve our sanity.
“Working did, and has, saved my sanity. I have always worked. When the girls were little, I taught parttime, but being in the creative industry, you can work for as long as you are commercially viable.”
Her life has not always been as ordered and tidy as it is now. Twice married and divorced, Joanna has two daughters from her first marriage to banker David Potter, and two stepsons from her second to TV dramatist Ian Curteis.
When that marriage broke down, she went through what she’s called a ‘mini-breakdown’ and a spell in therapy.
Did her successful career affect her relationships with men?
“You have to remember the generation I am,” says Joanna.
“Men of my generation found a successfully working wife a much harder thing to cope with than the modern generation does.”
She says she doesn’t have a partner currently, and remains tight-lipped about her personal life.
She stresses that a career is not for all women, but says we should all support each other.
“I believe that there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women,” Joanna concludes. “I can’t bear women not being good sisters to one another.”
City Of Friends by Joanna Trollope is published by Mantle on February 23, priced £18.99.