Isabel Wolff

Isabel Wolff was born in Warwickshire, read English at Cambridge and after spells in the theatre and in advertising, she got a job at the BBC. She worked for 12 years at the BBC World Service radio where she was a producer and reporter in the Features department and in Current Affairs. She also wrote freelance articles for magazines and newspapers such as ‘The Spectator’, ‘The Evening Standard’, ‘The Independent’ and ‘The Daily Telegraph’ who, in 1997, commissioned her to write a comic, girl-about-town column, Tiffany Trott. Within a month of the first column appearing she had been signed up by HarperCollins to turn Tiffany’s adventures into a book. ‘Ghostwritten’ is her latest and tenth book.

1. Your latest book ‘Ghostwritten’ is about Jenni, who is a ghost writer. The job suits her well as she prefers to take refuge in other people’s memories than to dwell on her own. Jenni takes on an exciting new commission – the memoirs of an elderly Dutchwoman, Klara. As a child in the Second World War, Klara was interned in a camp on Java during the Japanese occupation – she has an extraordinary story of survival to tell. And as Jenni and Klara get to know each other, Jenni begins to do much more than shed light on a neglected part of history. She is being forced to examine her own devastating memories, too. With Klara’s help, perhaps this is finally the moment where she will be able to lay the ghosts of her own past to rest? What inspired you to write this type of story Isabel?
   Some readers may think it’s a bit of a departure for me, but in fact it’s part of a progression. My earlier novels such as ‘The Making of Minty Malone’ and ‘Rescuing Rose’ are contemporary romantic comedies, but with ‘A Vintage Affair’ (2009) and ‘The Very Picture of You’ I began to write novels set in the present and past. When I’m planning a novel I always start by deciding what the heroine does for a living, because from that everything else will flow. So when I decided that the heroine of novel number 10 would be a ghost-writer I had to decide what the story that she ghost writes was going to be. I wanted it to be a wartime memoir, but not about the war in Europe, which has been written about so much; I decided that it would be about the war in the Far East instead. The main event for anyone living in that region was of course the Japanese occupation. The captured Allied soldiers were used as slave labour on the Thai Burma railroad, or forced to build airstrips or even work down mines. But the women and children were all interned in prison camps and so I decided that this would be a story of internment – a story about a child, her mother and little brother, struggling to survive I chose Java because there were a great many camps there; they were also, by and large, the worst.
2. To the readers of the blog, that may not be familiar with you or your writing, can tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into writing?
   I was a radio journalist with the BBC World Service and wrote freelance articles for many newspapers and magazines. My first novel, a comedy called ‘The Trials of Tiffany Trott’ grew out of a girl about town column that I had in the Daily Telegraph. This led to several more novels, all contemporary romantic comedies that were big bestsellers. Then I began to move into semi-historical novels, and ‘Ghostwritten’ continues that process of change. I’ve published ten novels in the past fifteen years, and they’ve been translated into 30 languages, selling five million copies. Reviewers and readers have commented on their blend of humour and pathos, and many reader are enjoying my move towards storylines with a historical element.
3. Out of the many books that you have read over the years, which one would you have liked to have said “I wrote that”?
   Oh, there are quite a few – not that I think that I could have written ‘A Fine Balance’ by Rohinton Mistry, which is a modern masterpiece about India under Mrs Gandhi, or Anthony Trollope’s ‘The Way We Live Now’, but these are the kind of books I most admire. I do remember, years, ago, reading a book called ‘The Tennis Party’ by one Madeleine Wickham, and admiring its lightness and wit and wishing that I’d written it myself! Two years later I wrote ‘The Trial of Tiffany Trott’ and was thrilled because Marian Keyes said that she wished she’d written that herself. The truth is that a novel comes out of someone’s individual psychology and soul – it’s a reflection of who we are, how we view the world, and the moral judgements that we make. So we can only write our own book – no-one else’s – because it comes out of our very self.
4. What was the first story you ever wrote?
   The first published story I wrote was ‘The Trials of Tiffany Trott’. I hadn’t written a novel before that; I wanted to, but never thought I’d be able to afford to stop working for six months to try. But the Tiffany Trott column was seen by an editor at HarperCollins who loved it and asked me to turn it into a novel – so I did, and that was the start of my fiction-writing career.
5. When not writing, what do you like to do in your spare time?
   I don’t have very much spare time because I have young children and there’s a lot to do with organising their day to day lives and their weekend activities, all of which I hugely enjoy. We also have a black cocker spaniel puppy who needs quite a bit of attention and walking, so that fills up a lot of non-writing hours. But I see my friends as often as I can, and play tennis and go swimming. I love going to author events because it’s always such a pleasure to talk to other writers.
6. I always thought the opening lines to “The Lovely Bones” was quite memorable, are there any opening lines to books that stuck out to you?
   There are so many fabulous opening lines, like Tolstoy’s opening to ‘Anna Karenina’ about all unhappy families being alike in their own way, or Austen’s epigrammatic start to ‘Pride and Prejudice’ about a single man in possession of a large fortune being in want of a wife. Personally I like the start of ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut, which begins, ‘All this happened, more or less.’ It’s brilliant because we know from the off that the narrator is unreliable. And the beginning of Jane Eyre is wonderful – ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’ – with those few words we’re taken straight into the world of the book. But my all-time favourite has to be the beginning of ‘The Crow Road’ by Ian Banks. ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded.’
7. Was there ever a book that you read, that didn’t live up to the hype that surrounded it and left you disappointed?
   I recently read ‘Stoner’ which has been a huge posthumous success for its author, John Williams. It’s about the life of an American academic – his struggles with college politics and his various disappointments with family life. I enjoyed it, and wasn’t sorry that I’d read it, but I didn’t think it the masterpiece that so many claim it to be.
8. What has been the highlight of your career so far?
   There are two or three – becoming a Sunday Times bestseller, seeing ‘The Trials of Tiffany Trott’ sell a million copies in France, and learning that ‘A Vintage Affair’, which is about a vintage dress shop, had been chosen by 100 individual Barnes and Noble book shop staff to be the ‘Main Selection’ title in the B&N Recommends programme in 2010. The novel has now been translated into 25 languages, and has been reprinted in the US 12 times.
9. If you were stranded on a desert island, which three books would you bring with you to pass the time?
   ‘The English Hymnal’ so that I could belt out ‘(S)He Who Would Valiant Be’ and other inspiring hymns, to give myself courage.
   ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare’ which would keep me educated, entertained and inspired for the rest of my time there.
   ‘A Town Like Alice’ by Nevil Shute, because Jean Paget’s bravery and strength in the face of real suffering in wartime Malaya would inspire me to be brave and strong too.
10. What area do you suggest a budding writer should concentrate on to further their abilities?
    I think the most important thing for anyone when setting out to write a novel is to have a strong, compelling plot that the readers will lose themselves in. To do this you have to employ analytical skills because in my view a novel is really a matter of problem-solving. Who are the main characters and who, or what, connects them in a way that doesn’t rely on coincidence? What, credibly, can happen to these characters during the life of the book and how will they change? From whose point of view is the story to be told? How can the different elements be made to mesh together in a satisfying way? So I think that budding writer should concentrate on this – the mechanics of their story – rather than on developing a beautiful prose style.
11. When sitting down to write, what is the one item you need beside you?
    Our dog, Alfie. He’s a black cocker spaniel and we’ve only had him a few months, but he comes and sleeps by my desk while I’m working, and I love to have him there, snoring gently.
12. And finally Isabel, do you have any projects or releases on the horizon which you would like to share with the readers of the website?
    The main event is of course the release of ‘Ghostwritten’ which I’m very excited about, but I’m also starting work on my next novel, which will be set in India.

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