8 saturday review Saturday December 4 2021 | the timeswhat I’m writing now,’ they would say, ‘No,
no, no, don’t go there. You can’t do it, it’s
not authentic.’ The people who can write
those books are the people who have expe-
rienced it and nobody else is allowed to,
but how far does it go? I’ve often written inR
ose Tremain is one of
the country’s most cele-
brated and cherished
authors. Over more
than 40 years, she has
published 14 novels, five
short story collections
and a memoir. In 1983 she was chosen,
alongside Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Sal-
man Rushdie and Julian Barnes, as one of
Granta magazine’s best young British nov-
elists and since then her career has gone
from strength to strength. She has won
multiple awards, is a fellow of the Royalinterview
I’m told, ‘Don’t make it up any
The novelist Rose Tremain says writing from the imagination has
become unacceptable. She tells Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson
about the problem with publishing and her recovery from cancer
Society of Literature and last year wore
Chanel as she was given a damehood by
the Queen for her services to writing.
Now 78, she still writes every day, shut-
ting herself away in a peaceful book-lined
study in the light and airy Georgian house
in Norwich that she shares with her hus-
band, the biographer Richard Holmes. She
has two desks. The first, overlooking the
sloping lawn that her grandchildren love
to roll down, is for thinking and scribbling
notes in longhand. The other, facing a wall,
has the computer where she writes. Yet
Tremain finds it increasingly difficult tochoose a theme. As a novelist she has
always used her imagination to create her
characters, whether it is the hedonistic
17th-century nobleman in Restoration or
the eastern European immigrant in The
Road Home. Her latest book, Lily: A Tale of
Revenge, is about a Victorian orphan.
Now, though, she feels it is becoming
unacceptable to “appropriate” somebody
else’s identity. “People are saying there is
something morally dubious about even
attempting that. It’s a bit crucifying, actu-
ally, for a writer like me,” she says. “I don’t
know where it leaves me because I’m not
going to start writing novels which are
about my own life. That’s just not what I
want to do. Maybe it’s saying to writers of
my generation, ‘Right, well you just be
quiet now. We don’t want to hear from you
any more.’ That’s quite depressing because
I feel that there is still possibly some good
work in me, but lots of avenues have been
completely cut off.”
Tremain pours the tea, even though she
hates it — she says it’s the only trait she
shared with her mother. “Towards the end
of her life my mother kept asking me, ‘Do
you love me, do you love me?’ And I’d say,‘Yes of course I do,’ but I never have and I
never will,” she says. Her father, Keith
Thomson, a frustrated playwright, walked
out when she was ten and created another
family and she and her sister were packed
off to boarding school. As a pupil Tremain
wrote books about clowns and mermaids
to escape from her miserable reality, but
wonders now whether even they are out of
bounds. “The thing that actually made me
feel creative was the belief that... the crea-
tive moment happened... between what I
knew and what I could imagine,” she says.
“Placing my mind in another imaginative
place or time was infinitely consoling.”
There is an empathy that comes from
early suffering and her skill has always
been to slip into another person’s shoes.
“Unless you can, it’s pretty doomed to try
to be a writer, isn’t it?” she says. “There’s a
whole debate about... whether we’re just
constrained to write about ourselves. But
it’s always seemed to me to be an absolute
base fundamental that imagining my way
into somebody else’s consciousness and
what makes them yearn, what makes them
happy, what makes them anxious — this
kind of projection into another soul’s being
and, in many cases, into people’s con-
sciousness who are very unlike me, a
different gender, a different age — has
always been what writing has been about.
Supposing Dickens had only written about
himself ?”
One of her novels, Sacred Country, pub-
lished in 1992, is about a girl who thinks
she’s a boy. Tremain says she is convinced
it would never be published now. “I’m sure
if I went to the publisher and said, ‘This isPlacing my mind in
another imaginative
place or time was
infinitely consoling
nothing sacred The
novelist Rose Tremain, 78