For a while during 1996 it seemed everyone was transfixed by This Life. A weekly BBC drama detailing the lives, loves, drug habits and breakfast habits of a group of twentysomething solicitors, it was required viewing if you were a twentysomething or a thirtysomething with nostalgia. Its writer, Amy Jenkins, was hailed as a genius for creating characters such as Milly, Anna and Myles who had real angst, real problems and who worked real hard. Which seems fitting somehow because in real life, rather than This Life, Amy Jenkins seems to have real angst, real problems and is really hard work.
I arrive for our interview about her first novel, Honeymoon, with a photographer. It's standard procedure, but Jenkins insists she will not have her picture taken - she has not been warned, there are no proper lights or studio, and it's in a public place. The photographer retires with the publicist to try to sort out the situation, and the interview starts. Some 20 minutes later, after a conversation with her London publisher by mobile phone, Jenkins disappears altogether.
It's a shame really because the interview was just getting good. Like Egg in This Life, Jenkins trained as a solicitor (in the University of London) but left after practising for only a year. "I realised that it was only going to get more interesting, and better paid so I thought I'd better leave while it was still easy."
Her introduction to the film world was fairly arbitrary - when jobbing director Danny Boyle (pre-Shallow Grave and Trainspotting) needed somebody to advise him on the rave scene for an episode of Inspector Morse, a producer friend recommended Jenkins who was, by her own admission, "partying a lot". A working relationship developed; Jenkins got the all-important encouragement, introductions and, eventually, an agent.
When producer Tony Garnett was looking for a writer for a series about twentysomethings, Jenkins was asked to put together a proposal, and This Life was born. "Tony and I were in agreement about a number of things. We wanted the series to take things like sex and drugs and race for granted, like they are in real life, and not as issues which is how they were in so many dramas." The series was an immediate hit, and Jenkins was hailed as the voice of her generation, a title she never felt comfortable with. Nevertheless, when word got out that Jenkins had completed a chapter of a novel, the success of the series and the media image of Jenkins ensured that a bidding war ensued.
Hodder was the first to come in with an offer of £500,000 sterling for two books, a deal it eventually secured for £600,000. Honeymoon is the result - a much-hyped first novel about a girl called Honey who ends up spending her honeymoon with a man she met and fell in love with over one night some eight years previously rather than with her new husband.
The reviews have been mixed to say the least, although Jenkins has recently claimed that she does not read reviews, and since the film rights have already been sold on for more than $500,000, perhaps her sanguine attitude is understandable. Although Honeymoon is a fairly light read with a narrative voice that begins to grate rather quickly, the concept behind the book - that there is an idea of romance fostered by films and books which is dangerously impossible to attain in reality - is interesting.
But first there is the matter of getting Jenkins back to the table. She is located in the toilets and after much negotiating through closed doors, she agrees to continue with the interview and do the photo. Some 20 minutes later she arrives back and, with little grace, sits back down. Pressed on the ideas behind Honeymoon, she says at first that all she wanted to write was a rollicking romantic novel, but then talks eloquently and fluently about the "deeply ingrained and destructive belief in the illusion of romance" in our society.
"So much emphasis is placed on finding Mr Right, but I really believe that that is not to do with finding the right man, it's because we haven't met ourselves. There's a huge fear of intimacy and relationships because they are such hard work and there's so little support. If you think about it, most books and films end at the point when people get together."
She believes that, for a woman, much of the success or failure of a relationship depends on the relationship she had with her father. "That's the first intimacy you ever have with a man . . . If you were always trying to win your father's love as a child, you will unconsciously always think you have to win a man's love."
Jenkins's own father was "pretty unavailable" when she was a child: "Work was everything to him and even as a child you can sense that." She herself has no partner at present.
Jenkins's petulance during the interview is difficult to interpret. A dislike of cameras is completely understandable, but she had agreed to this publicity tour and has a novel and a forthcoming film, Elephant Juice (which she also co-produced) to promote. Yet such an un-diplomatic response seems self-destructive rather than rebellious or thoughtless. Perhaps the key lies in the phrase she repeated several times - "I don't do that". You get the feeling that what Amy Jenkins doesn't want to do, she just doesn't do.
