Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A novelist whose fifth book 'Restoration' was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a feature film.
On the island
Eight records
Joanna MacGregor, London Symphony Orchestra, Carl Davis
Well, my first record is Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Um this sort of takes me back to a time in my childhood when I was at boarding school.
And so suddenly having been pent up in my boarding school, I found myself in in Paris, aged eighteen.
Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104
Mstislav Rostropovich, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa
And the first time I heard this piece of music was in Dubrovnik. We stumbled on a music festival.
I seem to have known, played, loved this record all my life, and I probably still will love it when I'm very old.
The Parley of Instruments, Peter Holman
I think this kind of love affair that I have with the seventeenth century isn't finished yet
Making the Best of a Bad Situation
It takes me back to a period of my life which was in in many ways difficult and and yet in many ways I think very important.
Dance Me to the End of LoveFavourite
I've I've always loved Leonard Cohen. There might have been several that I could have could have chosen.
Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622
Mark van de Wiel, Chetham's Chamber Orchestra, Julian Clayton
Listening to how music is constructed. And particularly something which is as exquisitely constructed as Mozart, can teach the writer quite a lot, actually, about tempo and light and shade and and mood
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:16Whatever happened to the adage that you have to experience something in order to be able to write about it?
I think I've never started with that premise. I don't know why, probably it's incredibly foolhardy. But I think um that even with my first book, when I look back now, I think there's a lot of myself in that book, but I wasn't really aware of putting myself in that book at the time.
Presenter asks
2:13Are you avoiding yourself then, perhaps, in doing what you do?
I don't think I'm exactly avoiding myself because I think, um, as I say, I think I am there in the books, displaced, disguised. Um, sometimes i I'm in a different gem.
Presenter asks
3:32Why does it have to be you in the first person? Why can't you write it with that sort of authorial [distant voice]?
It's assumed to be a terribly dangerous thing to do for me, a woman, for instance, to be writing as a man or as a as a as a young adolescent boy. But when you you set out on a novel, the possibilities are immense. They're sort of um terrifyingly boundless. And what the decision to see something from one sensibility only enables you to do is to is to channel various decisions that you make at the beginning so that you're constrained, if you like, but it's a fruitful constraint.
The keepsakes
The book
Stephen Hawking
I've tried to read several times … it's the sort of book where I think I've understood a quasar or black hole for about five minutes, and then in the next ten I've forgotten it again … Perhaps by the end if it took a long time to be rescued I would have understood something amazing.
Presenter asks
5:22I said, Rose Tremaine, that you wrote to fill a vacuum created by your father's leaving home. Was it just like that, cause and effect?
Yeah. I think that uh certain things happened in in my life all in that one year until I was ten. ... when I was 10, going on 11, various things happened, of which the most devastating was the fact that my father left. But also, that house where we lived was sold, and my mother moved, and I was sent to a boarding school. So, sort of in a stroke, I lost my father and the house that I was used to, and my friends. And I just started writing.
Presenter asks
7:20Did you see your father afterwards? I mean, did you go on having a relationship with him?
That's one of the sad things in my life, that I haven't really had a relationship with him. And I had been very fond of him as a child. ... my father effectively sort of disappeared from my life. ... I think perhaps what it's done in me and what it does in many people is that ... in order to sort of please or um call back the lost parent. It ma it turns you into somebody who who strives a great deal, who sets herself or himself very high goals. And I think it's done that to me.
Presenter asks
14:03Why did it take so long [to publish your first novel]?
I think the idea of the novel, the just the the sheer size of it, was was daunting to me in my twenties. I I just felt that I wasn't capable of any writing anything that big. I was continuing with with stor short stories.
“For me, there is it's part of the excitement and the consolation of being a writer. ... It is to imagine myself, to empathize with somebody who is probably quite distant from me in age or place or time.”
“In fact, it's the way I find peace when my life is going badly. It's a great refuge.”
“I think that in certain historical novels you feel that the author simply transcribed a lot of data onto his or her page. The research shows. ... I think first of all you need to do it and the second thing is that you need to forget it and then just bring back and change sort of alchemise the things you need.”
“Writers do need time, they need solitude, they need to be able to go and do whatever it is they need to be to go and do. And I think certainly this is the first relationship that I've had where these things have been totally accepted and understood.”