Every silver lining has its cloud. Meg Rosoff’s first novel, How I Live Now,
had no sooner been bought for six figures after a bidding war on both sides
of the Atlantic than she discovered that she had breast cancer.
She was in hospital in July having her first session of chemotherapy when
flowers and cards flooded in congratulating her on publishing what has been
the most remarkable debut of the year.
The book has gone on to win The Guardian fiction prize, was last week
shortlisted for the Whitbread best children’s novel and is hotly tipped to
win the Whitbread book of the year.
Second only to the Man Booker in pre-eminence, the Whitbread prize is awarded
to “the most enjoyable book of the year” and has a habit of overturning
expectations.
Philip Pullman became the first children’s author to win it for The Amber
Spy-Glass two years ago. Last year Mark Haddon became the second, with The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and this year Rosoff looks
likely to make it the third in a row.
However, while Rosoff is delighted, the triumph is overshadowed by the disease
which has already killed one of her four sisters.
“I had six months of feeling deliriously happy that my novel was being
published and I was able to quit my job in advertising, which is such a
great moment and everybody’s dream, and in those six months of excitement I
missed my annual mammogram,” she says dryly.
“Then they found it. Two of my sisters have had a particularly aggressive form
of the cancer. You don’t get a prognosis about whether you’re going to live.
I’m halfway through my chemotherapy and with each dose it gets worse. It
doesn’t hurt but you feel nauseated the week after so that even cranberry
juice makes you feel sick because it’s the same colour as the medication.
“There’s no doubt now that it’s inherited from both parents. I have a
geneticist friend and he said, ‘You’re an Ashkenazi Jew, so you’re
hard-wired for intelligence, depression and breast cancer’.”
The irony of her situation is underscored by the fact that How I Live Now,
written in what Haddon describes as “a magical and utterly faultless voice”,
is a profound meditation on death and bereavement, wrapped up in a
compellingly topical narrative.
The brilliance of How I Live Now is that it strikes at the nerve in us all
about the threat of terrorism. It is set at a time when London is being
bombed by terrorists and invaded by “the Enemy”.
Rosoff’s heroine, the angry, anorexic 15-year-old Daisy, has been sent from
New York to England to stay in the countryside with her aunt and four
cousins. She falls blissfully in love with all of them, particularly the
14-year-old Edmond, and an idyll of near-incestuous underage sex ensues when
Daisy’s aunt flies off to negotiate in peace talks abroad.
Daisy’s pin-sharp observations of her cousins and of English country life make
it seem like a version of Dodie Smith’s classic, I Capture the Castle.
However, as she warns us, “it would be so much easier to tell this story if
it were all about a chaste and perfect love at an Extreme Time in History.
But let’s face it, that would be a load of crap”.
The chaos in London at first seems remote. Daisy says in one of the novel’s
most memorable lines: “No matter how much you put on a sad expression and
talked about how awful it was that all those people were killed and what
about Democracy and the Future of Our Great Nation the fact that none of us
kids said out loud was that WE DIDN’T REALLY CARE. Most of the people who
got killed were either old like our parents so they’d had good lives
already, or people who worked in banks and were pretty boring anyway, or
other people we didn’t know.”
What follows is harsh and heartbreaking. The selfish, incurious teenager is
forced to discover her own capacity to care when, separated from Edmond and
the boys, she finds herself solely responsible for Piper, her youngest
cousin. The two lost and starving girls have to find their way home, making
an epic journey across the English countryside.
“I was dying, of course, but then we all are,” Daisy remarks in a voice which
flips between irony and anguish in the twitch of a sentence. “Every day, in
perfect increments, I was dying of loss.”
Her 48-year-old creator says that she drew on her teenage self for parts of
Daisy, and one thing they patently share is courage.
Rosoff has covered her bald head, formerly adorned by thick springy dark hair,
with a Vermeer-style scarf. Wearing beautiful earrings and no make-up on her
pale face, she is the incarnation of the witty, New Yorker-reading American
expatriate. Despite the horrors of her illness she is devoid of self-pity.
“I’m not a worrier. When people rang up and said, ‘What a tragedy, your family
is so unlucky’, I said that I expected it. You don’t get through life
without something terrifying happening.”
Daisy may talk like a character out of Friends or The Princess Diaries, but
she is forced to confront and survive things that no child, or indeed
anyone, expects to live through.
“I refuse to be frightened and I hate the whole culture of fear that is making
people afraid to travel on the Tube,” Rosoff says.
“There’s been a lot of criticism over Daisy’s casual remark that “seven or
70,000 people died’, but it’s the way people feel — it doesn’t affect People
Like Us. Americans have always had this inborn sense that war always happens
somewhere else to other people. One of my real goals in the novel was to
show how there are no People Like Us any more.”
The daughter of a Harvard professor of medical science, Rosoff grew up in the
heartland of American academic excellence and herself went to Harvard before
coming to England at 19 to study art.
Like Daisy she has always felt that Britain is her spiritual home. Now married
to an English painter, with an eight-year-old daughter and living in north
London, she spent the next 20 years as an advertising copywriter, claiming
that she was “a complete failure and never held down a job for more than two
years”, writing commercials for products such as Persil.
When she began to write her first novel in slack periods at work and at home
in the evenings, she could not believe the freedom that it allowed her. She
loved it.
“I didn’t know anything about writing a novel although I’ve been a fanatical
reader all my life,” she says in her soft, hesitant voice. “I was used to
writing what I thought were brilliant ads and then having a test-panel of
housewives say they didn’t like them.
“I only came up with the story in the taxi on my way to see my agent and I
asked her whether I was allowed to write in the first person. She said, ‘You
don’t have to think about your audience. There are no rules. Just write a
terrific book and someone will read it’.”
Now in its fifth reprint it has become another “crossover” book that has grown
by word of mouth into a bestseller.
What has surprised her is that elderly people, who remember the second world
war, love it as much as teenagers. Obsessed with the first world war
herself, she used details from both world wars — how, for instance, all
signposts and railway station signs were removed — to paint the scenes
through which Daisy and Piper struggle. The Nazi occupation of the Channel
Islands was another source.
So were the half-joking north London dinner parties last year in which people
would discuss whose cottage in Wales they would flee to in the event of a
dirty bomb going off, before concluding that they would all be killed before
they could go anywhere.
“It’s partly being Jewish, and partly being an American living over here, but
I was shocked by how close England came to being occupied in the second
world war and how little that has sunk in. I wrote the novel in three
months, between January and March of last year, just before the invasion of
Iraq; there was that atmosphere around.”
Rosoff describes the teenagers in her book as “weird, lateral-thinking
children, changelings”. They survive through luck, an intimate knowledge of
plants and wild-life and bloody-mindedness, but are changed for life.
“Children are endowed with rare and subtle talents,” she says, “and our
faults are sometimes more useful in life than our so-called ‘good’
qualities.”
The grief and black humour that reverberate through How I Live Now are
unmistakably authentic: Rosoff says now that she “wrote about things I
didn’t know I knew”.
Rosoff was with her sister Debbie as she was dying; she flew to America a few
weeks after September 11, 2001 to find her sister, like Edmond in the novel,
unable to speak. Now, when going through her own bone scans and
chemotherapy, she cries “because this was what Debbie was going through and
I didn’t know how it felt”.
Yet she did: and it is because she makes us laugh and cry through her
characters’ suffering that she has written something that strikes at the
heart of how we live now.
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff is published by Penguin, £10.99
Jasper Gerard is away
