Liverpool-born journalist Linda Grant talks to Rosita Boland about a tale of 'decay, regeneration and survival' set in Grant's hometown 'My mother was one of six and she married one of six, and she was the last one to survive of them all. It seemed as if families were machines for making myths. I think this is true of all emigrant families'
Linda Grant is proud of the fact that during her years as a features writer with the Guardian none of her articles ever resurfaced in the paper's infamously sizable daily Corrections and Clarifications column. The column's tone invariably seems cheerfully resigned to the fact that the writers and sub-editors often get things wrong. Getting her facts right is important to Grant, whose novels are set against particular historical contexts, where there is little latitude for mistakes.
Still Here, set mainly in the Jewish community of Liverpool, is Grant's latest novel. Her last, When I Lived in Modern Times, was set in Tel Aviv during the closing years of the British mandate, and won the £30,000 Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000. Most memorably, there was Remind Me Who I Am, Again, a powerful and moving family memoir on the disintegration of her mother's memory through Multi-infarct dementia (which is horribly like Alzheimer's).
After two years spent writing Still Here, Grant will be away for most of the rest of the year, on tour through Britain, the US, Canada and Australia. There is a bit of ritual moaning about touring from the sofa of Grant's fifth-floor room in the Shelbourne Hotel, with its astonishing views over the Green, the Sugarloaf and the Dublin mountains.
Writers always moan about touring; the toll it takes on their personal lives, etc., etc. "I've money in the bank, but there's nothing coming in now," she says. "I had lunch with my agent and he told me that I should view the publicity as being part of the time spent writing the book. So I feel better about it now."
Apart from the de rigueur tour moan, Grant is the good interviewee you'd expect an experienced journalist to be. She listens carefully to questions, doesn't waffle, gets your name right, and takes time to think when she needs to, unfazed by the fact that a potentially unnerving temporary silence is sometimes part of the preparation for an answer. She is also professional enough not to flinch when I ask her that question, which she must know is pre-written in every journalist's notebook: the plagiarism accusation.
Days after When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize in June 2000, Grant was accused of plagiarising from 17 passages from a 1997 book entitled Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918-1948.
The author, New England academic Joshua Sherman, made a formal complaint to publisher Granta, and the media reported the entire saga with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Sherman alleged that Grant had based some of her characters' dialogue on real-life letters and diaries as recorded in his book, without attributing him as a source.
For a writer, plagiarism is probably the nastiest and most damaging word in the language, and Grant responded with a riposte in the Guardian.
"Writing about the past, particularly the recent past, presents a novelist with taxing dilemmas . . . Telling downright lies isn't the problem: it is telling the truth that gets you into trouble . . . contrary to any assertions, it was not Sherman's words that appear in my book but those of the writers whose letters and diaries, collected in a public archive at Oxford University, which he himself quotes. This is called primary material . . . when novelists wish to be in partnership with history, it will always be a stormy relationship."
Sherman's book has since been acknowledged in editions of the novel. Grant will not answer any questions about the whole thing, saying simply: "We came to an agreement between us that we will never talk to the press about it again."
Understandably, writers always want to talk about their latest book, but her memoir still demands attention. This is partly due to its subject matter and partly to the easy fluidity of Grant's non-fiction prose, which is clear, honest and uncompromising, underwritten as it is with personal experience.
Remind Me Who I Am, Again started out as an idea for a feature in the Guardian about the dire state of social services in Britain. "I suggested it and it was commissioned and when I wrote it, it came out much more personal than I intended," she says. "I was writing about my experience about having to decide to place my mother in care. I decided not to publish it. I left it for several months and then went back and looked at it. I showed it to my sister, and she said she was OK about it."
The piece was eventually published, and despite her anxiety about a negative response, Grant was "inundated with incredibly supportive letters" from readers who had had similar experiences when placing parents in nursing care.
The day after its appearance, she was phoned both by her agent and by a publisher, who each told her there was a book in it.
"I had been trying to write a novel set in Jewish Liverpool, but it wasn't working [Grant is Jewish and from Liverpool]. Then I thought about writing a family memoir. My mother was one of six and she married one of six, and she was the last one to survive of them all. It seemed as if families were machines for making myths. I think this is true of all emigrant families.
"Liverpool is such a mixed place. Growing up there, you were defined by not being Catholic or Protestant. People always asked what school you went to. It's still a ritual question." There were some 6,000 people in the Jewish community when Grant was growing up, but she says she never felt part of a minority community.
"My father had a business making shampoo. Other Jewish families were jewellers or furriers. Business was part of our lives. It was only when I left Liverpool that I really became aware of the English middle classes, and that I had a separate identity from that."
Still Here is set in contemporary Liverpool's Jewish community. "It's about survival and endurance at all kinds of levels," she says. "It focuses on the theme of decay, regeneration and survival."
The protagonists are both Jewish. Alix Rebick is 49, single and rich from a family patent on a "miracle" face cream for women. Joseph Shields, an American architect whose marriage is in trouble, builds modernist hotels in international cities: Liverpool is his unlikely choice for his next project. His vision is that the hotel will reinvent public perception of the city.
FACE cream to arrest ageing; a hotel built on reclaimed wasteland; a family trying to reclaim the secrets of its pre-War past; Alix and Joseph's attempts to reclaim love through one another: the symbolism looms large in this forcefully written novel, which spits out sentences like pistol shots, demanding and rewarding the reader's attention.
Grant may like to get her facts right, but some outdated passages in the book will irritate Irish readers: the novel is supposed to be set in 2000. One Irish nurse, Mary O'Dwyer, says: "All my sisters in Limerick are on the Pill. Of course, they dare not tell our mother, for she's still old-fashioned in that respect, but the priest must guess and he says nothing."
For the last two years, as Grant has mostly concentrated on fiction writing, does she miss journalism?
"It's all writing, and that's the important thing," she says. "I don't miss deadlines and word counts, but I miss getting into the lives of complete strangers - inveigling my way into the houses of strangers and getting them to tell me things."
For Grant, journalism acted as a bridge to fiction. "I always felt at the end of an interview that I wished they'd said this or that or the other. And of course you can't do that as a journalist, add more! But you can as a writer. I loved the idea of journalism; that you leave the house and don't know what you're going to find. With fiction, you have to stay in your house and make it all happen yourself."
Still Here by Linda Grant is published by Little, Brown (£10.99 in the UK)