Meg Rosoff

So it was people like Antonia White and Elizabeth Taylor.

And I mean, there were hundreds of them.

And I bought them literally by their dark blue spines.

And I read them pretty much by the pound.

And

very much stories of coming of age, stories of marriage, unhappy marriages, women coming into their own, women having terrible affairs with the wrong people.

And they almost all blur into kind of one in my head.

But they were incredibly influential in my eventual decision to write a kind of domestic novel, which is

considered to be a lesser literary form.

You know, the real novels are the ones that American men write about a decade or, you know, the zeitgeist or something.

But what I'm interested in is the family relationships, you know, what happens over the course of the summer.

And so I think those Virago books sort of confirmed to me that

this was a valid art form.

I mean, one of the great writers of that kind of art form is Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was married to Kingsley Amis and always, you know, making him dinner and, you know, doing dinner parties so that, you know, he could have his very calm and lovely writing life.

But in fact, I think she was the better writer.

And she wrote a series of books about a family called the Cazalets

which if anyone hasn't read, I mean, they are utter heaven.

There are five of them about this long extended English family starting from before World War II and going up into the 50s and 60s.

And she also wrote a novel called The Long View, which is the story of a marriage told backwards, which I'm convinced that Harold Pinter stole from her because he was sort of in their circle.

And it's an absolutely terrifyingly good novel.