Stephanie Calman
Insights from the the author of the recently published ‘How (Not) to Murder Your Mother’
I grew up with two freelance artist parents and the idea that it is completely normal to earn your living from the thoughts that come out of your head. Whether written or drawn, it was instilled in us that these thoughts are valuable. Originality was prized above all, and copying – or God forbid, colouring in, was regarded by my parents with horror. We just accepted it. Other people’s parents went out to work and came back at certain times, but we didn’t think we were the odd ones.
Then, every now and then, I’m talking to someone I don’t know and I realise how strange my life must seem. On the other hand, I think how strange it is to work for someone else, and have a set time you have to start, set times for lunch and so on. I’ve had proper jobs – waitress, typist, shop assistant – but I don’t like working to other people’s rules and don’t fit in well to corporate culture.
When people ask how you become a writer they have the idea that it’s about being qualified in some way, such as having an English degree. But whereas an artist generally needs to go to art school, writing is a great deal about temperament. I’m pretty gregarious, but I’ve learned how to sit in a room, alone, with a blank screen until words appear. Talent comes into it, if you’re lucky, but it’s more about being able to stand that blankness. It can induce a kind of terror, and beyond the terror is where the good stuff happens.
The other thing that seems to unite almost all writers is being fascinated by what makes other people tick. Recently I was at the BBC to do a radio interview, and Lynda La Plante was there with her minder. I went in to the studio first, and said something like,
“All right if I leave my bag?”
And she said, “Yeah: we’ll go through it!”
She said it with a sort of glee that only a writer would.
I get into conversations with people all the time, at bus stops, queues in shops, wherever. A few weeks ago I started talking to a woman next to me in William Rose, the butcher’s in East Dulwich. We discovered her son was about to start at the same school as mine, so I asked if she wanted to come round and get some of his old uniform. When she came round I gave her coffee in a mug with one of my father’s cartoons on it. She drank a bit of it, then suddenly stopped.
“I was working at St Thomas’s the night they brought him in,” she said.
She was a nurse, he had died of a heart attack at the cinema, and we both felt how extraordinary it was that fourteen years later, there she was, sitting in my kitchen.
Or look at Thomas Keneally, going into a shop in LA to buy a briefcase and being led by the owner into the back room to hear his story, and then all the way back to Nazi Germany and Schindler’s List. You’d never look at buying a briefcase the same way again.
I am of course fantastically nosy, though not, I hope, to the point of intrusion. When I worked on a Fleet Street gossip column I was useless, because I hated pestering people who didn’t want to talk. I lasted two weeks; now I wouldn’t even make it to the end of the day. I prefer to draw people out. I also do this thing of being involved and separate at the same time. Nadine Gordimer called it a ‘monstrous detachment’. You stand outside quite intimate and personal experiences and describe them as if they’re happening to someone else.
My father and stepmother had a very stormy marriage and I wrote down one of their arguments once, when I was 11. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the notes at that stage, but I noticed that when written down they stopped being quite so awful and became funny. That, I suppose, is when I became a writer. Trying to get to the bottom of things, and trying to get a bit of control over them through writing. That principle runs through everything I do.
