Mireille Juchau

So I think you mentioned, Kate, the derision with which two of her memoirs were received.

which sort of was outsized compared to what other writers have copped when they've written about their personal lives.

You think of Nascar and many others.

She really, really was savaged really unfairly.

And so it's sort of quite satisfying to see that she's kind of moved past that, what she saw as creative death after Aftermath.

Yeah, she said she didn't write for... In one review it said she claimed not to have written for three years after that was published, but the reviewer had carefully gone and researched the time between the release of the last novel and the release of Outline and said really it was only 18 months.

But she called it creative death.

So as a writer, it's really thrilling to see that someone has kind of overcome that obstacle and to produce something far finer than her previous work.

They're all narrated by an invisible narrator whose name is mentioned once in each of the three novels.

Her name is Faye.

And during the course of the three novels, she travels to different locations.

In Outline, she travels to Greece.

In Transit, she's mostly in London renovating a house.

In Kudos, she's travelling to a variety of writers' festivals and events at which she is interviewed.

So what we see in the novels, and including Kudos, is a woman who, rather than tell us very much about her own life, concentrates on the stories of others, both women and men.

And through that process, by being a kind of largely invisible narrator, we're allowed to get a glimpse of these kind of quite epic stories of women

Marriage and divorce, loss and sorrow, the kind of forces that can deform or shape women's lives.

So her preoccupation is with what happens to women in the aftermath of crisis often.

She has a very kind of witty take on things.

So in Kudos, we get a lot of material about the sort of ludicrous scenarios that occur at writers' festivals.