Helen Trinca

light you know so but having but then reading it and rereading it a few times I think I saw much more in it um so yes I guess I you know I did sort of really appreciate it more and I appreciated the um the gap between her I could see in her books how she's trying to work out in her later life some of the struggles that I think she had all her life about what life what what life is really about you know the meaning of life to put it in that sounds very cliched

But I think she was trying to work out some of those and she was trying to work it out through telling stories really that were, I suppose, on one hand, could just be seen as stories of romance or unrequited love or broken relationships.

But yeah, those are the big things, I guess.

So she nailed it.

I think it's very spare and it's very elegant.

She has a great capacity to set a scene without actually describing the scene.

So you get a sense of it immediately being there in a place and you can almost visualise it, which I think is very clever.

It's usually done through...

you know, a few words and then the dialogue.

So I think she's very good at that.

She's quite, there's quite a lot of fun and sort of irony in her books as well.

And she does that very lightly.

I love the way, one of the small things that she does brilliantly, her children are really

Interesting, the characters in her books, she's got several children in the books, and they're always pretty astute.

They probably are a bit older than their years, and she really values them.

And yet she had no children of her own, but she had a great sense of –

the importance of children in the world and a sense of giving them a sort of a dignity almost, which is also really, really lovely.

And she wasn't particularly, what's interesting is she's not particularly political.

So you can read those books, the London books I said in the 90s, but they seem very contemporary.

You know, they're not, they're timeless in that sense, I think.