The Spike

  • About
  • Style
  • Life
  • Books
  • Food
  • Beauty
  • Shop
  • Contact

Ask the Spike

Send your Question

Francesca Segal on The Spike

Screen Shot 2017-05-21 at 18.27.51

Francesca’s debut novel, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel award and her follow-up, The Awkward Age, was recently published. Buy it here.

The Awkward Age is set just round the corner from me in London and sets a microscope about a “blended” family where a step-brother and sister get on a bit too well. If you like an intelligent, polished and totally gripping domestic drama, you will go mental for this book.

1 When did the germ of the idea for The Awkward Age come to you?

I knew what I wanted to write next was a love story between a mother and a daughter. It’s such a beautiful, fraught, consuming passion,and I wanted to explore all the ways in which it is, and isn’t, like a romance. And then I read an article that mentioned the frequency with which teenage step-children have relationships with one another and I thought – sweet Jesus, that’s not easy. What a perfect sabotage to your parents’ newfound happiness – just assert this new happiness of your own. It was those two ideas that came together.
2 Where did having the twin (girls, born in 2015) fit in to the writing of it? Were you mid-writing it, before, after?
I was mid. I had a fantasy, or rather I was entirely convinced, that I would whiz off the book the night before I gave birth to them. I found out early on it was identical twins and so I knew I was having a C-section and had a date in the diary. I kept grandly announcing to my editor that she’d have the book 6pm the Friday before. I don’t know how she kept a straight face through it all. In the event, neither the babies nor the book played ball. It was a long way from ready. I went back to work very quickly, and had a long, hard year.
3 How do you focus on work with small kids?
Poorly, but doggedly. It is not a very interesting observation but nonetheless essential that good childcare is is absolutely the key. We have a wonderful nanny and that frees me emotionally, because when I have work to do, hearing giggles from downstairs is considerably more reassuring than worrying that they’re miserable. I wish I remember which novelist said it, but someone once said they ‘make a rag-rug of the minutes’ and now I remember that phrase so often. When I tried to google it obviously I just got a lot of instructions on how actually to make a rag rug. Who has time to make rag rugs? I used never to be able to work unless I had a clear four hours. Now, give me forty minutes and I am focussed like a ninja.
4 How do you feel *now* about the “pram in the hall” being the enemy of creativity as opposed to before you had kids. 
I loathe that phrase, and have always loathed it. I think exhaustion is a challenge to creativity, however, as is broken thought, and both of those are close correlates of the pram. But I also now understand in a way I never did how bloody lazy I was with my time before I had children – I had seas of it! Oceans of the stuff! And I squandered it.
5 Do you feel you made any judgment about the behaviour of anyone in TAA? My feeling was that you set it up and then just marvelled from a distance at their cock-ups… am I missing out on something? Is there a message here?
I had absolutely no intent to judge. I wanted to write a novel in which a lot of essentially kind, well-meaning people were busy doing their best, which sometimes involved making one another’s lives bloody difficult. That’s real life. It’s not for me to moralise.
6 Someone once said of Richard Yates that he “led his characters down dark alleys and then left them there”. In both TAA and The Innocents you rather pour people into a small room and then shout “Fire!” Both novels have a background of claustrophobia to them – is this intentional?
I think maybe that sense of claustrophobia in both books comes from my fascination with family. Families are basically what you describe – a group of people who may or may not have anything in common, cohabiting in a very small space. I didn’t even need to shout ‘fire’ – someone in that room was bound to start one.
7 Are those Valentino Rockstuds [which Francesca wore to her book party] comfortable?
YES. Yes. Go and get them immediately. As soon as my sister got engaged, my immediate thought was that I could now buy myself a pair. I wore them for the first time to the wedding and they were on my feet from noon until midnight and I had no need of Compede, flip-flops, or a podiatrist. I have now boxed ALL my other smart shoes and I wear these to absolutely everything.
8 What are you having for dinner tonight?
As a prelude, I will be eating wild organic salmon, grilled organic broccoli, and extortionately expensive organic blueberries, all of which have been squashed onto the mat beneath two highchairs. Later, my husband and I might order a pizza.
9 What was the last clothing purchase that you are excited about wearing?
Rockstuds, see above, but mostly a pair of leopard-print harem pants from H&M (£12.99) which I will never wear out of the house, but in which I will almost certainly write 98% of my next novel.
10 Complete this sentence: “My kids are…” enchanting and enervating.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Related

« Previous Post
Hollandaise »

Comments

  1. Cindy says

    May 21, 2017 at 9:23 pm

    Thank you, I love reading these kinds of stories, especially about making time to be creative amidst the push and shove of having children. I often think of that Larkin line (I know, I KNOW) about mothers being pushed to the side of their own lives, but my youngest starts nursery a few mornings in September and this has made me hopeful of making my own rag rug.

    Two other things: Sylvia Plath made an actual rag rug – she calls it an anger rug in her journals and Ted Hughes wrote a poem about it in Birthday Letters. (sorry for all the bleak poetry references; I’m actually quite cheerful) AND I knew step-siblings who got married. I remember clearly when I found out they were engaged saying something like “wait – his sister?!”, but of course all’s well that ends well and I didn’t say anything embarrassing at the wedding.

    I will look out for these books xx

    Reply
  2. Aaf says

    May 21, 2017 at 10:51 pm

    Thanks for this, from a mother/columnist/fellow focused ninja

    Reply
  3. Emily says

    May 22, 2017 at 8:43 am

    I love a blog that mentions Valentino Rockstuds and Richard Yates in the same article. Love the cover of this, and can’t wait to read it.

    Reply
  4. waternymph88 says

    May 22, 2017 at 8:06 pm

    I just had a look but they are sold out in my size 😭

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Copyright © 2022 · Design by Gatto

  • About
  • Style
  • Life
  • Books
  • Food
  • Beauty
  • Shop
  • Contact
 

Loading Comments...