Describe yourself in a sentence.
Oversensitive optimist in perpetual but unsuccessful assertiveness training, who swings between frivolity (in things she ought to take seriously) and gravitas (in the things she does take quite seriously — her writing, her postgraduate teaching and her children).
Describe your book in a sentence.
Someone said it was like “André Brink writes Sex and the City“, but I prefer to think of it as the story of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances — dealing with their own life issues while their nation lurches through its transition.
What was the originating idea?
I wanted to give a picture of a time and a place — Joburg, in its wildness and warmth, and South Africa in the intensity of its transition.
Describe the writing of the book. How long did it take?
A helluva long time — about four years all in. It’s my third, but the first to be written since being published, so it suffered from a kind of psychological “second book syndrome”. I must have rewritten or edited six or seven times. Probably because of that, I think it’s my best. I researched mainly by stealing pieces of other people’s lives.
Do you write by hand, or use a typewriter or computer?
I can’t think unless I’m staring at a screen. (Too many years in newsrooms.)
What is the purpose of fiction?
To tell a story in which we might glimpse something of ourselves — and to feel what it’s like to be someone else, in a different place and time, and with a different world view. Writing should be a seeking to understand rather than a way of grabbing readers by the lapels and forcing them to understand what we think we already know. It’s an exploration — of time, of place and of the choices that make people what they are.