Interview with Penelope Lively:

The Photograph is about retrieval of memory and the catastrophic effect that past events can have on the present. The past is a recurring theme in many of your novels,  both those for adults and children, why does it fascinate you so much?

The operation of memory has indeed been a recurring theme in my fiction, and I think the main reason is that I am always finding new ways in which to think about it, and to use it in a novel. Anyone’s life is a confusion of past and present – we are who and what we are now, but we are always conscious of the people we have been before, our earlier selves. I have wanted to write about the ways in which people are burdened by the past, or seek to re-invent it, or to forget it. I’m also interested in the way  that memory works- the way in which it is never linear, never chronological, but exists in the mind like a handful of slides, which surface in this random and unpredictable way. Moon Tiger in particular is concerned with the operation of memory.

Can you tell us what was the inspiration for The Photograph?

During the last few years I have had to close down and empty two family homes – one of my own and one that had been that of my grandmother and aunt for seventy years. An ocean of paper, there seemed to be – cupboards and drawers full of letters, documents, files, newspaper cuttings, bills….The process made me think about the way in which such things can lie around like time-bombs, evidence of something forgotten or unknown. I can’t say that there were any time-bombs in either or the family homes, but I began to imagine circumstances in which a person might stumble across some piece of paper that would change lives, and eventually these imaginings became The Photograph.

This novel is much bleaker than your earlier fiction. Elaine, the professional woman who from the outside has everything, one gets the impression, is unhappy or has no time to be happy. Kath, her sister, despite being beautiful, seems also to be someone who never found happiness. Both these women have lifestyles/physical attributes that others might crave, but it has not brought them happiness. What was the reasoning behind this, and do you think The Photograph is bleaker than much of your other work?

Is it so bleak? I don’t entirely feel that it is. Admittedly Kath is a somewhat tragic figure, and there is a good deal of discontent around, but there is also a lot of humour, I hope. I wanted to write about people who appear to be fulfilled and comfortable, but whose lives are much more complex than that. In Kath’s case, I was interested in the way in which the life of an exceptionally attractive woman can be skewed by her looks, sometimes in a disastrous way. And her sister Elaine is indeed successful but is also disturbed about the past and frequently exasperated with her feckless husband. And of course the past turns out to be not quite what everyone had thought. Nothing is ever quite as it seems, that is perhaps the theme of the novel, and a truism that has always fascinated me as a novelist.

You’ve been writing fiction for over 20 years. Do you find there is a difference between your critical reception now and when you were first published?

Dear me – this is a difficult one. I think the short answer would be – no, not much. Like any writer, I have had both good and bad reviews; you have to learn to live with the occasional knife in the back. Mostly, critics have been kindly – but I have to say that the responses I value hugely are the ones that only I see: readers’ letters. A reviewer has to review the book (I’m one myself); the reader chooses to do so.

Can you tell us what you are working on at the moment?

I am now at the age when you wonder why on earth you have ended up as the person you are, doing what you do, having spent your life as you have, rather than all the other outcomes that there might have been – the paths you never took. So I am writing a sort of anti-memoir, a fictional account of the directions that my life might have taken at various crucial points – different episodes featuring the people I might have been with, the child I might have had, the person I might have become. It is called CONFABULATION.

Please could you recommend 2 books to our readers, in print and in paperback please, with a brief sentence of explanation about why you like them so much.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is one of the greatest of all memoirs, its vivid language conjuring up St Petersburg before the Russian Revolution, the world of Russian exiles in the early part of the last century.

William Golding’s The Inheritors is a novel that I go back to time and again, when I want to remind myself what great fictions can do. He creates prehistory – the arrival of Homo Sapiens into the world of the Neanderthalers, one of the most powerful stories going, and one of the saddest.


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