Rose Tremain, 80, published her first novel in 1976 and has gone on to become one of her generation’s most admired talents, garnering numerous literary accolades along with a damehood in 2020. Her 17th novel, Absolutely and Forever, is a slender yet profound coming-of-age story whose heroine, Marianne, is raised in the home counties in the 1950s. When she meets floppy haired, artistic Simon, fateful consequences are set to accompany a potent sexual awakening. Tremain lives in Norfolk with her husband, the biographer Richard Holmes.
How did Absolutely and Forever begin for you?
I have for years been haunted by the life and destiny of a close, very beautiful school friend, who fell in love aged 15 and thought she saw the map of her future before she was hardly older than Shakespeare’s Juliet. And then that future was snatched away. The idea that a whole life can be determined by a catastrophe that happens in early youth is both fascinating and tragic. The story of Absolutely and Forever changes the shape of the original and Marianne is more like me than my beautiful friend, but it has its roots in her story.
There’s a sublimely compressed quality to the novel’s prose. Did it go through many drafts?
Because so much of this book was lived experience, I was following my own rule about narrating my own life: tell it in crisp, anecdotal form; don’t make a saga out of it. The human mind seldom remembers things in their entirety but in vivid, sometimes fiery flashes. If these flashes are strong enough and the text compressed to suit this way of telling the story, then the novel may not need much redrafting. Two drafts nailed it here.
London in the 1960s is evoked with such intensity. What do those of us who weren’t there get wrong about the era?
I don’t think you get it wrong at all. Many of us were selfish and wild, promiscuous and dangerously ambitious, but what interested me about this story was to create a protagonist who isn’t really part of this self-absorbed culture. Marianne, devoid of self-love, is kind where we were sometimes cruel, patient where we were often hot-tempered and disdainful.
What makes for “good” sex on the page?
I’ve said elsewhere that sex scenes in novels are like arias in opera: they have to move the story forwards or they probably shouldn’t be there. The sex scene in the Morris Minor between Simon and Marianne is quite brief and non-graphic, but it is the moment when Marianne knows that she will love Simon absolutely and for ever. It sets the whole thing in motion; it’s a big aria.
This is also a novel about friendship. Tell me about Marianne’s pal, Petronella.
With a very uncaring mother, I yearned for such a wise, guiding hand because my head was in a turmoil, trying to imagine a different future for myself from the one mapped out for me. I never had a friend like Petronella but this “guiding hand” came to me when I married my first husband, Jon Tremain. He – from a harsh, working-class background – saw the spoilt brat in me but also the imaginative striver. He put his faith in me.
Like Marianne, you worked on the agony aunt page of a women’s magazine. Did you enjoy it?
I found pleasure in the way that I landed the job. I went round all the magazines in or near Fleet Street with a little portfolio of stories and poems and begged all the editors to give me a job – any job. It was only intermittently interesting, but like Marianne, I loved my relationship to my huge office typewriter and the nearness of the Fleet Street presses, almost within earshot. I felt a little bit valued at last.
Has your approach to mining your own life for material changed over time?
I guess, as an author without a traumatic, impoverished or abusive past to validate its inclusion in my work, I’ve always thought that nothing very interesting could be written about it. But I think I may be wrong. A short autobiography of my childhood [Rosie, 2018] generated quite a bit of interest. It was this book which gave me the courage to write Absolutely and Forever. As the end of my life approaches , I feel that I want to hang on to the past – all muddled and full of conflicting emotions as it was – and not just let it fade, as though it never happened.
Of your many books, do you have a favourite?
My current favourite is Absolutely and Forever, because it’s still so present in my mind. But I carry on flirtations with almost all the others. I would say the ones I flirt with the most are Restoration, Music and Silence and The Gustav Sonata.
Those novels are all historical. What draws you to the past, and do you mind being thought of as a historical novelist?
The one great advantage in writing stories set in historical time is that the past is relatively stable compared with a present, which is ever-changing. Novels that attempt to capture a specific “now” may in fact be quaintly historical by the time they appear. I only mind being labelled in this way because so many historical novels are just empty stories and explore nothing, so I feel my work is being regarded as being shallow, which I truly don’t think it is.
You taught for many years on the University of East Anglia’s creative writing course. Was there any single piece of advice that you regularly gave your students?
I often told them to imagine they were writing a movie – to bring colour and light to a scene. I also told them that in order to take charge of the story, they had to make the reader long for certain things and be afraid of others; reader indifference is fatal.
In 1992, you wrote a novel, Sacred Country, with a transgender protagonist. Is it a viewpoint you’d have been permitted to adopt today, do you think?
This is a huge subject. At its heart are two suspect judgments. One, that the insistent self is paramount and, two, that the imagination no longer has value. If these continue to hold sway then the novel will cease to exist; there will only be memoirs masquerading as fiction. And, yes, whatever happened to empathy?
You’ve been with Richard Holmes for more than 30 years. What’s your secret?
Living with a writer is difficult: we all need a huge amount of solitary time, or our whole project will go down. From the start, Richard and I totally honoured this for each other. And then there’s humour. Richard and I laugh at the same things. Sometimes it’s an ironic amusement and sometimes an unstoppable giggle.
Is there a book you return to again and again?
Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, her superb exploration of the life of Marilyn Monroe, perfectly demonstrates how fiction can make the real more real and give the past long-lasting relevance. I’ve read it about seven times.
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
Salman Rushdie’s Knife is shockingly good.
Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain is published in paperback by Vintage (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
