Meg Rosoff

A novel about the power of friendship and love, How I Live Now is an astonishing debut that will keep you gripped from first page to last. It was a very deserving winner of  the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.

Synopsis:
Daisy is sent from New York to England to spend a summer with cousins she has never met. As a dreamy English summer progresses, Daisy she finds herself caught in a timeless bubble. It seems like the perfect summer. But their lives are about to explode.

Meg Rosoff was born in Boston, USA. She has worked in publishing, public relations and most recently advertising but thinks the best job in the world would be head gardener for Regents Park. Meg lives in Highbury, North London.

Interview with the author

What inspired you to write How I Live Now?

The death of my youngest sister from cancer in 2001 made me realise quite powerfully that life doesn’t necessarily wait for you to get around to things at your own pace, so I bit the bullet and sat down to see if I could write a novel. I took a two month leave of absence from my advertising job, and wrote what I considered a practice novel, just to see if I could keep a plot moving, make convincing characters, etc. That book helped me get an agent, and it was my agent who told me to write another. The second book was How I Live Now.

How long did it take you to write and did you write it in one go?

How I Live Now  was one of those rare novels that just pours out. Once I established Daisy’s voice in my head, it felt as if I were taking dictation. I wrote every night after work, after my four-year-old was in bed, and I finished it in about three months. The book that was published was remarkably similar to the first draught, with a few exceptions – Edmond in the first draught was only 12 and I expanded the ending. I was quite pleased at the idea of writing four books a year. Unfortunately, my second novel (Just In Case) took closer to two years to write.

Why did you decide to use a young narrator?

I have a friend who says ‘writing reveals what interests you’ and I’ve always been interested in the transition from youth to adult, confusion to clarity, innocence to experience – it’s a time of intense passion, incredible discovery and change – comedy and tragedy all mixed together.

How did you manage to tap into the mind of a teenager so effectively?

I didn’t even began to emerge from my own adolescence until I was in my forties. And maybe not even then.

This novel is often described as a 'cross-over' novel, appealing to both
children and adults. Who did you write the book for?

If I’m completely honest, I’d have to say I wrote the book for my agent – she had just taken me on (with some reluctance I felt, given how unproven I was) and I was desperate not to let her regret the decision. She told me to forget about an audience and just write the best book possible, which is what I tried to do.

The depiction of war in the book is very striking and extremely realistic - was it hard to imagine a world set in the future? What made you write about war in this way?

I wrote How I Live Now in the run-up to the Iraq war and talk of war was everywhere in London. My art director at work – whose sister is a policeman – kept telling me I was mad to take the tube because we were all going to be blown to smithereens any day now.  Another friend, a surgeon, told us that the NHS was so sure of an attack on a particular weekend, that they had booked hundreds of hotel rooms in London to accommodate the wounded. It didn’t really matter how much was true and how much rumour, the feeling was of incipient catastrophe. I’ve also always been an avid reader of WWI books – Robert Graves in particular – and in WW2, the Nazis occupied the Channel Islands and sent its Jews to death camps. So it seemed effortless to imagine a situation where Britain was occupied – not by another country’s army perhaps, but by a loosely organised band of passionate political ideologues.

It seems you came to writing relatively late in life - has it always been a dream of yours?

I wrote my first novel at 44 but have always been a big writer – once thought I’d be quite happy making my living as the village scribe. All the jobs I had (in publishing, politics, PR, advertising) were writing jobs, and despite my feelings about my motley career(s), each one helped develop writing skills. I don’t regret starting late, I had a lot to figure out before I could get started. In some ways I think it’s helpful not to have led the life of a novelist – my past life was more ‘in the world’ than it is now.

What did it feel like when you found out you were going to be published?

Thrilling. It meant I could finally quit a job of my own volition (I was sacked repeatedly throughout my advertising career – for insubordination, lack of team spirit, and about 100 other crimes against marketing) and write books for a living.  Not a day I’ll forget in a hurry.

Could you recommend 2 books for our readers?

I’m a huge fan of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis I and 2, offering much-needed insight into the society and recent history of Iran.

A friend gave me The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson (Margaret Atwood’s husband), and it’s a treasure – full of wonderful writing (Aeschylus, Melville, Isaiah Berlin, Murakami).  And above and beyond the wonderful content, I can’t remember when I’ve seen a more beautifully designed and illustrated book.