The Facts of Life (74 page)
Authors: Patrick Gale
Dangerous Pleasures
Patrick Gale
The subjects are wide–ranging and various – curious childhood loyalties, long–hidden memories, newly discovered joys, startling secrets, dislocated relationships, overwhelming, thrilling passions.
In prose which is vivid and fresh, Patrick Gale explores the subtle boundaries that shift between the fantastic and shockingly real. With characteristic insight and wit and with consummate ease, he draws the reader into lives both familiar and strange, revealing a world that shines with possibilities and will never fail to delight.
The Writing of
The Facts of Life
by Patrick Gale
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Q & A with Patrick Gale
What inspired you to start writing?
Reading, undoubtedly. I was blessed in coming from the sort of family where everyone read at meals and nobody ever told you off for preferring reading to being sociable. Writing emerged quite naturally from all the reading when I was still quite small, and again I was lucky in that I was encouraged but not too much so that I didn’t get self-conscious about it. I never thought it would become a career, though. I was trying to become an actor and writing was just something I did, a sort of itch to self-express …
When and where do you write?
I’m a daylight writer and tend to keep the same writing hours as my husband does farming ones. We get up early and, if I’ve a book on the go, I’ll start writing as soon as I’ve walked the dogs. In good weather the dog walk often becomes the writing session as I like writing outside and we have a lot of inspiring corners where I can settle, looking out to sea or hunkered in the long grass. We have very patient dogs …
There are many dramatic – often traumatic – twists and turns throughout this novel. Have you experienced life – changing events which have led you to write fiction with such intensity?
My life hasn’t been without its traumas but I think it’s more that I’m drawn to trauma in plots because I like the way it peels back the layers on a character. Whether my plots are serious or comic I suspect they all involve the central characters being tested or tried to some extent. I think there’s something fundamental about the experience of reading fiction that makes the vicarious enduring of a trial and an eventual sense of healing resolution deeply satisfying. But yes, I confess I have a weakness for old film melodramas and they have a way of influencing some of my plot twists, consciously so in
The Facts of Life
.
‘I confess I have a weakness for old film melodramas and they have a way of influencing some of my plot twists, consciously so in
The Facts of Life
’
And yet the books almost always end happily. Do you feel pulled towards writing a happy ending?
I don’t think endings need to be happy so much as right and satisfying. In a curious way I experience in writing a novel all the things I hope my reader will experience in reading it. I usually begin with a problem or a trauma and a clutch of characters, and the plot that grows from those characters will usually involve a working out and a resolution that may or may not be happy but will often feel healing. Reader and writer together need to feel they’ve emerged on the other side of the novel’s events with a broader sympathy or a better understanding. Without that a book just doesn’t feel like a full meal…
Would you categorise yourself as a romantic novelist?
If I hesitate to, it’s only because romantic fiction isn’t a genre where my work comfortably sits. But I am an incurable romantic, if that means believing in the power of love to heal and transform, and my novels are, repeatedly, about love and its effects, and love gone wrong and the effects of that. Perhaps I’m a love novelist. I think romantic novelists tend to focus on the getting of love – following the Austen pattern of plots that end in marriage-whereas I’m just as interested in the losing of love and in its rediscovery, late in marriage, in unromantic middle age or whatever.
‘I am an incurable romantic, if that means believing in the power of love to heal and transform’
Your characters often suffer from depression and mental illness, and in many cases we see the huge impact of their childhood on them, particularly their relationship with their parents. What is your view of psychotherapy and do you see fiction as a form of therapy – for the writer and for the reader?
Psychotherapy and its processes fascinate me and I often cite psychotherapist as the job I’d like if I had to stop writing. But I’d never dare undergo it myself in case it cured me of my hunger to write fiction. On one level my characters are like patients and my task is to help them find their own way out of their dilemmas. I think the best kind of novels are the ones that take the reader on an emotional journey similar to the psychotherapeutic one. We learn about ourselves through empathy with fictitious characters. I certainly know myself a lot better through my years of writing-almost too well sometimes …
How important is your sexuality to you as a novelist?
It was very important initially as it convinced me, in the arrogance of youth, that I had a unique insight on love and marriage, which in turn gave me the confidence to keep writing. I’m rather more realistic these days and I’m so very settled that I’d have to go and do some serious research if I was to write with any precision about contemporary gay life. I don’t think gay people are automatically blessed with such insights, for all the claims made in various shamanistic faiths about true vision only existing outside the circles of reproduction. I do think, though, that being gay and having had a childhood where I felt neither flesh nor fowl for several years really freed up my ability to try on the different genders for size. I’ve never felt like a woman in a man’s body, but relating to men sexually certainly gives me an area in which I can be confident of conveying something of the female experience. I’ve always had close women friends and I come from a family of strong women-those two things have probably helped my writing as much as my sexuality, but perhaps they’re all linked.
‘I may make my plots up, but the relationships I portray have to be based fairly closely on what I know’
Do you have a character with whom you empathise most strongly in this novel?
Time and again in my books there seem to be characters, often old, often female, who stand outside the novel’s central circuit of sexual or familial relationships. And I suspect these are my way of projecting myself into the narratives like a sort of chorus, albeit one with dubious wisdom. In
The Facts of Life
, it’s the enabling sexologist Dr Pertwee. But I also like the character of Sally, and still haven’t got over my shock when I realised I was killing her off so brutally.
Your exploration of family relationships-between parents and children and between siblings – is at the heart of all your novels. How often do you fictionalise your own experiences?
I think I do this all the time, and probably never more so than when I convince myself that I’m making something up. It would be impossible to write about relationships-not just familial ones-without using the relationships I have or have had as my points of comparison. I may make my plots up, but the relationships I portray have to be based fairly closely on what I know (and know intimately) to be the case.
Even though you often present unusual family set-ups in your novels, and show the power of overwhelming sexual desire, you seem to uphold marriage and commitment too. Do you have a strong conventional side?
Oh heavens, yes. Like a lot of keen gardeners, I suspect that I’m a spiritual Tory, for all that I’ve read the
Guardian
all my life. I come from an immensely rooted and conventional background. My father’s family lived in the house they built for five centuries. The three generations ending in his father were priests and my father could so nearly have been one too. Both my parents were deeply, privately Christian and had a daunting sense of duty. I rebelled against this for all of five years in my late teens and early twenties but deep down all I ever wanted to do was move to the country, marry a good upstanding chap and create a garden …
Can you talk a bit about the importance of music in your life?
I so nearly became a musician. I was a very musical child and sent to schools that specialised in it, to the point where I couldn’t conceive of doing anything else when I grew up. First acting and then writing blew that idea aside, thank God, but music remains my magnetic north. I work to music. Every book tends to be written to a cluster of pieces which haunt my car’s CD player or live on my laptop and I find this a really useful emotional shorthand for helping me resume work on a novel if I’ve had to break off from it for a week or two. I have music going round in my head whenever I’m walking or cooking or gardening to the extent that I really don’t see the point of getting an MP3 player. I also perform a fair bit. I play the cello in some local orchestras and in a string trio. I also sing (bass) and am the chair of the St Endellion Summer Festival in Cornwall-an annual semi-professional feast of classical music.
The importance of nature is a recurrent theme in your novels. Do you enjoy being outdoors?
I’m very outdoorsy and never cease to be thankful that I was able to marry a farmer and end up surrounded by fields and sky and clifftop walks and wonderfully dramatic beaches. I owe the outdoorsiness to my parents as they made us take long walks with them throughout my childhood and the habit has stuck. Not just walking, though. I’m really keen on botany and insects and birds and regularly drive the dogs crazy with boredom on walks because I keep stopping to look things up in guidebooks.
Patrick Gale in 1991 when
The Facts of Life
was first published.
BORN
Isle of Wight, 1962
EDUCATED
Winchester College; New College, Oxford
CAREER TO DATE
After brief periods as a singing waiter, a typist and an encyclopedia ghostwriter, among other jobs, Gale published his first two novels,
Ease
and
The Aerodynamics of Pork
, simultaneously in 1986. He has since written twelve novels, including
The Whole Day Through, Notes from an Exhibition
and
Rough Music; Caesar’s Wife
, a novella; and
Dangerous Pleasures
, a book of short stories.
LIVES
Cornwall
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Tales of the City
Armistead Maupin
The Bell
