‘Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.’ Logan Pearsall Smith
In the winter of 1992–1993 my girlfriend, Kate, and I went to live in La Casella, an isolated farmhouse some forty miles south-east of Siena. It was a good place to write, and I had the vague but oddly compelling feeling I always have when it’s time to start work on a new novel. I was relieved to be out of London, partly because I wanted to avoid another grim English winter, and partly because I wanted to forget all about the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1993’, which was to be announced early in the New Year. By a strange coincidence, I had been staying in the same house exactly ten years before, when the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1983’ had been announced, and I had devoured that issue of Granta, eager to acquaint myself with a new generation of writers, writers whom I hoped one day to emulate. This time, though, I qualified: I had published two novels – Dreams of Leaving and The Five Gates of Hell – and I was not yet forty. People who moved in literary circles had told me that I might be on the list – some had even said I should be on the list – whereupon I would usually smile or shrug. I may have affected a certain indifference, but deep down, of course, I was desperate to be on the list. At the same time I felt fatalistic about the whole thing: I fully expected to be passed over, and I had no intention of being in London when that happened.
It was a great winter. Kate read novels and cooked goulash and went for long walks through the Tuscan countryside. I wrote. Some of our favourite people came to stay and we sat up late, drinking bottle after bottle of the colonel’s red wine (he charged three thousand lire for two litres). One of the house rules was that I shouldn’t be interrupted during working hours – unless, of course, there was some kind of emergency. I don’t think we had any emergencies that winter, though, so I wasn’t disturbed at all – not, that is, until a certain afternoon in early March. It must have been cold in the house that day because Kate had decided to light a fire. While tearing up strips of newspaper – neighbours would often pass papers on to us, though we rarely read them – her eye fell on a small black-and-white photograph of me. She scanned the article. The ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1993’ had been announced the week before. She ran upstairs with the paper and burst into my room.
‘You’ve been chosen,’ she said. ‘You’re on the list.’
I turned to face her.
‘You’re one of the Best Young British Novelists,’ she said.
‘Really? Let me see.’ My heart was racing.
We scanned the list of writers, but my name wasn’t there. We scanned the list again. There was no mention of me at all.
‘But your picture’s here,’ Kate said, her finger poised over one of the black-and-white mug shots. ‘Look.’
We both looked. It wasn’t me. It was Jeanette Winterson.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said at last. She had turned away from me. She was facing into the corner of the room.
In retrospect, I suppose the photo did look vaguely like me – or like a version of me anyway (there must have been a time when Jeanette and I had a similar haircut, or perhaps we narrowed our eyes in the same way when we were looking into the sun). I stared and stared at the picture, as if the closeness of the resemblance could somehow lessen the hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said again, then she went downstairs.
It was humiliating for both of us, of course – for Kate because she had mistaken Jeanette for me, and because she had raised my hopes only to dash them seconds later, but it was humiliating for me too – especially for me – because I had responded with such eagerness, such desperation, with such incontinent desire, all my ambition and longing exposed; I felt like someone who had been disembowelled and then left to stare dumbly at the brightly-coloured mess of his own intestines.
The days that followed were difficult. There was only one consolation that I could think of. The next time they chose the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists’, in 2003,1 would be too old. I would never have to go through this again.