Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast. All right, this is going to be good, isn't it? I loved this book. Put that effing book down. You know, the Iliad and the Odyssey. She's a furious woman. I'm reading it and reading it and I'm going, oh no. So I thought I really have to hook the reader. It's taken up half my heart, you know.
The book actually put a hex on me. Hello, and welcome to another podcast extra edition of The Bookshelf with me, Kate Evans. This time, it's the American English writer, Meg Rosoff. She's lived in England for decades, but as you can hear, she's originally from the United States. She writes for children and young adults, as well as for anyone.
Her books include How I Live Now, Jonathan Unleashed, and her latest, The Great Godin'. The Great Garden is one of those the summer where everything change stories with a bit of a stranger comes to town or is it a golden stranger comes to town thrown in a character who bewitches everyone but there are plenty of books sitting behind and around this one as you'll hear.
Meg Rosoff, thank you so much for joining us on the bookshelf.
Oh, I'm so happy to be here, or almost here, halfway around the world here.
Now, congratulations on The Great Godin. And I must say, when I picked it up, I thought, well, this sounds as though it should be about a magician. And then by the time I finished reading it, I thought, well, maybe it is somebody who does a sort of rough and destructive magic on the people around him.
Well, yes, it's funny. I hadn't thought magician exactly, but I did think circus. And The Great Garden, to me, did sound a bit like a circus MC. And although that's not the main thrust of the book in any way, and in fact, the name probably came more from...
the great gatsby which is very presumptuous of me obviously but you know when you're thinking of titles you're looking at sort of certain resonances and and yes kit garden is a bit of a magician and a bit of a showman
Yes, and certainly a ringleader, a ringmaster. So it's summer, we're by the sea, there's this messy, happy family visiting a place that they've always loved and then everything changes.
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Chapter 2: What is the background of Meg Rosoff and her writing career?
That's how I would describe the book. But how would you describe it? What did you want to do with this book?
I... Listen, I spent my childhood, I grew up outside of Boston in the US, and I spent my childhood on Martha's Vineyard, which I don't know if Australians have heard of it, but nowadays it's considered a kind of playground of the rich and famous. But back in 1960, when my family first started going there, it was just this kind of scruffy, unknown, funny little backwater. And
my three sisters and I were just running wild there all the time. And it was such an important part of my life. It was sort of the formative moments. It seems as if all the formative moments of my life virtually until I went off to university took place during those summers. And as I grew older and there were you know, occasional boyfriends and things like that.
That was all happening during the summer. And then even when I was in my 20s, I would bring, you know, friends and boyfriends and people to the house there. So there was this sense of a kind of magical place. And then I moved to England permanently in 1989. And the first holiday that my husband and I had, we borrowed a house from some friends of friends.
again in a funny little scruffy little place on the sea. And I just suddenly thought this is like my childhood all over again. It was, you know, the thunderclap or whatever they call it, the coup de foudre, I think it is. And I decided I desperately had to spend more time on this coast.
And then the funny thing about the coast, and I'm looking out at it now, I'm looking out at the sea at the moment, is that an awful lot of English people, fishermen and fisherman families, migrated from the Suffolk coast to Cape Cod in the late 18th and early 19th century. So I really have made a kind of reverse migration to a place that is connected to the place of my childhood.
And then, of course, I brought my daughter up here and we've been surrounded with friends and have had the same kind of
crazy more drunken than my my family growing up but you know the big dinners and the kids running wild and and it's a i'd like to think of it as a collision between the me looking back on my youth and my and my childhood and my adolescence and then me in the moment living it again in a way and but from the viewpoint of a 60 something year old with a bit of extra added wisdom
Now, I can't remember what the question was and I probably didn't even answer it.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Meg Rosoff's latest novel, The Great Godden?
But anyway, that's sort of the, that's the location background.
And in terms of what you wanted to explore, so you've got the place and the summer. And then what else was it that, I mean, do you see this as a coming of age novel or a love story or the dramas of charisma?
Yeah.
It's all of those things. I mean, I don't think I'm ever really writing pure and simple love stories. I think I barely ever had one in my life, certainly never in my adolescence. So it's, you know, even when I'm writing adult books, I'm writing coming-of-age stories.
Because my theory, of course, is that adolescence starts at about 13 and goes on until, you know, a couple of minutes before you die. And it's those... It's that triple trajectory of who will love me, who am I, what will I do with my life that we think of as being related to adolescence. But in fact, it's their questions that recur throughout life.
So all my friends getting divorced in their 50s are asking those questions with a kind of urgency. that I remember from when I was 16, 17. Who am I? You know, they're changing careers. They're having sex with new people after being married for 30 years. And so that sense of transition, I think, and you might even call it the getting of wisdom, is the theme that I can't seem to get away from.
And so if you were to think of this book of yours, The Great Garden, sitting on a bookshelf, and the books that sit either beside or behind it, what would you place there?
Oh, well, probably the Bible and war and peace. You know, I want to be in good company. Well, yes, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think The Great Gatsby would have to be there, not because it was my favorite novel, but because there is that echo of doomed love. You know, it's not a love. I mean, it is a love story, The Great Gatsby, but it's a really perverted, twisted love story.
And nobody gets the girl in the end and nobody ends up happy. And on the other side, which would possibly be quite weird, there's an English writer of pony books called K.M. Payton. Now, I don't know if she's known in Australia, but she wrote a very famous book called Flambards. And it was made into a TV series. And she was very big on ponies and horse books.
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Chapter 4: How does Meg Rosoff describe the setting of her childhood summers?
quite a difficult decade for me. I don't know if most people admit to having a whole difficult decade, but I've had many of them. And the one thing that kept me going was every Saturday morning, I would sleep late, get up, walk down from my apartment in the East Village down to the Strand Bookstore, which advertised itself as having something like 55 miles of books. And I bought Virago
books, which were published in England by Carmen Khalil. And they were sort of forgotten classics, all by women, and mostly domestic novels. 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. So it's, you know, those novels by women, mainly. I mean, of course, I love Nabokov and Lolita. And, you know, I love strange, screwy, dark, odd books. But I would have to say it's those domestic novels that I love more than anything.
Because I had been going to ask you about whether you sort of had to read your way into moving countries and transitioning from living in America to England. But those books that you were reading in New York, those vintage classics, were overwhelmingly English literature then?
They were indeed. They were mostly English. There are people like Barbara Trapito. I mean, there are so many fabulous books. female writers who have always been ever so slightly undervalued, I think. And I'm also slightly obsessed with female explorers. So one of my great heroes in life was an English woman called Isabella Bird, who was a 19th century explorer. So there's a lot in my background.
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