Meet Tessa Hadley
I WAS BORN IN BRISTOL, ENGLAND, in 1956. My father was a schoolteacher (he’s also very musical and still plays the jazz trumpet); my mother gave up her dressmaking business (gratefully, she says) and stayed at home to look after me and my younger brother. For next to nothing, they bought one of the old Georgian houses nobody wanted in those days—five stories tall, with a leaky roof and an unsafe wrought-iron balcony on the front, also an assortment of sitting tenants. I was shy, bookish, skinny, freckled, hopeless at games. I promoted myself to adult books in the local library at quite an early age and read lots of them without understanding much of what was going on—it all seeps in to the sum of one’s knowledge somewhere. I was happy at junior school; miserable at secondary school, which was all girls and very driven academically. I wanted to be left alone, and I didn’t want to belong to anybody’s tribe. In an act of courage that surprises me retrospectively (I was still shy), I left that pushy school and went to the ordinary state one, where my brother was, and was much happier. There, to start with, were boys, who were different and wittier and fascinating.
I studied English at Cambridge (oh dear, another tribe), which had its good moments but didn’t convince me that academic ways of reading literature were close enough to the real experience of reading (or writing—I was guessing then). So I wasn’t tempted to try to prolong my life in academia: probably I took some of its luxuries of thought and time too much for granted, assuming they’d always be there for me. Then, after a brief, doomed idealistic ineffective flurry as a schoolteacher, I had babies and stayed at home. Even walking up and down at night with a crying baby on my shoulder, I thought: “This is better than facing the classroom tomorrow.” I liked the sort of semi-solitude you get, bringing up children.
I read lots—always imagining there were other people elsewhere who’d read so much more (there were, of course), which is a great spur. And I did write. Shamefacedly, badly, tainted with failure and falsity; with moments of power and joy and long hours of despair, wondering why it mattered so much, and why I couldn’t be decently happy without it. I wrote at least three, maybe four (I’ve forgotten) bad novels in these years. Solitude is good but I think I was too solitary. I needed to rub up against the audience I was writing for; I didn’t have any living sense of them.
My husband was a schoolteacher, and then trained teachers (now in his retirement, he’s unleashed his passion for theater and directs and acts for a good group here in Cardiff, Wales, where we’ve lived for thirty years). We have three sons; the eldest is thirty now, the youngest nineteen, the middle one is married to a girl from Ohio. Two are political and love history, like their father; the youngest likes poetry and writes songs. I also have three stepsons and six step-grandchildren, and all the lovely young women that come attached to all those boys. It’s impossible to write without mawkishness, or efforts of expression equivalent to the hard work of literature itself, how much one feels about these marvels of relationship, these precious surprises of personality and talent and charm.
In my late thirties, I went back to university—about time, I think, because I was so ready (belatedly) for making myself a life in the outside world. I’m sure my daughters-in-law can’t imagine a retreat so complete and dull-seeming as those years of shopping and cooking and cleaning and waiting in the school playground. They’re right, probably. Though there’s something to be said for all that slow, invisible work the mind does when it isn’t buoyed along by anything outside. And there are lessons you learn, too, knowing you’re weak and unimportant and socially invisible—these lessons ought to keep you sane and clean and unillusioned. Anyway, I went back to university and began to teach and write, and loved the teaching hugely (I still do), and wrote my book about Henry James, then worked my way around, gradually, to writing a few stories I wasn’t ashamed of. When you do finally make your way into the writing personality that is your real one, it’s such a relief (however small that personality might be, however partial). It’s like wandering around for years and years in a writing wilderness and then letting yourself in at last to your own house with your own key.
I could write short stories before I managed a novel. So I had the idea of writing a novel by writing a series of short stories about the same characters and in chronological order, then putting them end to end. It isn’t really cheating. It solves two problems. First, if each “chapter” is structured as tightly as if it were a free-standing short story, then you won’t risk the slack passages the novel is prone to due to sheer length. Second, it helps solve the problem of needing to find an overarching grand theme of discovery or revelation to pull your novel together. The writer is tempted into finding an “explanation” for a life, some hidden clue or secret that will release its truth. Of course, the good novels don’t do this. But it’s a temptation.
I published a story-novel, Accidents in the Home, in 2002. And then I wrote Everything Will Be All Right, which was woven partly of stories connected to my own family—but only partly, and loosely. I published The Master Bedroom in 2007—my least episodic novel up to that point (it even has a secret!). And all this time I was also writing short stories, and published a collection of these, Sunstroke, also in 2007. Writing makes me very happy. Or perhaps I could put it more negatively. All those years I couldn’t do it, and had no reason to think I would ever be able to do it, writing was a painful, awful absence in my life. I can’t quite explain this rationally. I love paintings, but it’s never hurt me that I can’t paint for toffee. Which bit of myself, and when, elected to need to write, in order to be me—and through what mental process? I used to feel (this is disturbing) that life itself wasn’t quite real, unless I could write about it in fiction. Now that I am writing, and being read (most important), that mild insanity has dropped out of sight. I have a fear, of course, of its returning, if ever writing failed.
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