Mavis Cheek never set out to be a writer. It might come as shock that this wittiest of feminist novelists in fact had her heart set on marriage and babies as a career.
But when she was told she would probably never be able to conceive she enrolled for a degree in her late twenties, reading history of art, English literature and the history of Western civilisation. ‘How fantastic — and they paid me for it. Well, they gave me a grant,” she says, still apparently amazed at her good fortune all those years ago.
The girl from a desperately poor home, who had left school at 16 with no qualifications, at last found a place to satisfy the intellectual voraciousness so evident in her novels. And when ‘by some extraordinary miracle” she found herself pregnant while taking her finals, she realised she had to find a job she could do from home, while looking after her child. ‘I was very hyped up with Descartes and Proust so I thought ‘I’ll be a writer.’”
She gave herself until her daughter Bella was eight to get published, and vowed that if she wasn’t, she’d give it up and ‘get a proper job”, a prospect she was rather dreading as she was extremely well educated but unskilled. ‘So I couldn’t be a secretary, thank God! I certainly couldn’t do anything that involved adding up, though I probably would have been able to stack shelves.”
Her first attempt, a dire tale of an older man’s passion for a young woman, was rejected, but it got her a meeting with an agent who asked ‘Why don’t you write a book like you talk?” She was somewhat deflated. ‘Until that point I’d decided I was pushing out the boundaries of 20th- century fiction, of course. There was Virginia Woolf, there was James Joyce and there was Mavis Cheek,” she says wryly.
Once she’d been given permission to write a funny book, she found her real writing voice (which is very similar to her speaking voice — simultaneously gentle and incisive, with unerring comic timing and delivery that often forces shouts of surprised laughter from listeners) and won the John Menzies prize for her first novel Pause between Acts. It was accepted by the publishers the year her daughter turned eight. ‘What a miracle!” she exclaims. And what if she hadn’t fulfilled her dream of being a writer? ‘I might have hit the bottle,” she chuckles. ‘I might have been a rich man’s darling.”
Having been brought up by a single mother (her father ‘was a bigamist and left”) and having a grandmother who raised 10 children mostly on her own, Cheek comes from ‘a very strong matriarchal line” and says she is only just coming to understand how much hard work and determination her mother had put into keeping the family together.
Unsurprisingly, many of her heroines are clever, competent women out in the world on their own for one reason or another, dealing with the hostility that unattached women of a certain age, particularly intelligent ones, arouse. One of Cheek’s characters likens this response to the modern equivalent of witchcraft, in which our ‘society still wishes to protect itself from the free woman, the loose cannon, the wronged women who will not lie down and take it. Especially if she is anything over 30 and therefore beginning the road to wisdom.”
Having been in on the ground floor during the women’s movement during the 1970s, Cheek, an unapologetic feminist, now finds she is somewhat baffled by young women who disavow feminism while enjoying its fruits. ‘I never know what to say to women who say ‘I’m not a feminist, but —’ What does that mean?” She also gives short shrift to the notion of post-feminism, a term that one of her characters defines as ‘Keep Your Bra and Burn Your Brain”.
Cheek ventures into territory where few writers would dare to tread, and she does it with such hilarious results that I for one am baffled that she doesn’t have a greater reputation as a comic genius. I tell her how I was floored with hysterical laughter by a scene in Sleeping Beauties, involving an inept beautician, a Brazilian wax, and a client’s tampon. Of course such candour has its drawbacks: ‘After it came out my agent said rather sadly: ‘You know they’ll never be able to film this.’” She assures me the anecdote is entirely true, part of the research she did involved having lots of treatments in lots of beauty parlours (‘I want you to imagine the tax man’s face when I put in a huge list of expenses under ‘research’.”)
I venture to ask whether she is to chick-lit what Ursula le Guin was to JK Rowling: someone who did the genre first and did it remarkably better: ‘Hen-lit in my case, dear,” she shoots back crisply. ‘Chick-lit is ditzy, it’s lime green, it’s pink and fluffy, it’s got a pair of very silly feet turned inwards dangling over a bath or something … When it’s well written it’s quite fun, but I’m not sure it’s moved us on one iota.” She reminds me that she’s been around long enough to have seen other genres come and go, ‘like the S&F [shopping and fucking] novels, the Shirley Conrans and so on. It’s now the yummy-mummy novel, and sooner or later it’ll be the hip-replacement novel and then they’ll start all over again, I suppose.”
Yesterday’s Houses continues the semi-autobiographical trajectory, which she began in The Sex Life of My Aunt. One of the reasons she wrote it was to remind herself ‘how far we have come and the danger of going back”. Each chapter represents a house that the heroine (aka Cheek), who longed for a beautiful bathroom, had lived in. She feared the critics would slam the theme as silly and girly. No one did but Cheek was prepared. ‘I had my ammo. I found out that when Virginia Woolf made money out of Mrs Dalloway the very first thing she did was put a bathroom into Monk’s House. And when Marie Curie won a Nobel prize, first thing she did? Put a bathroom into her house. True!” she exclaims.
Luxuriating in a warm bath has a special significance for Cheek and she proclaims herself partial to men who bath and read fiction, preferably at the same time. ‘Men who say ‘I never read fiction’ and who have very quick showers, well, you worry about the speed of their, er, showers,” she explains with a mischievous gleam in her eye.
Cheek says that while she pinches herself daily because she has such a great job, it is still a job. She sits down and writes for at least four hours a day: ‘I do see it very seriously as a job. People ask what the abiding spirit is that makes me write and I always say ‘the mortgage’.”