From Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to Philip Roth and Claire Bloom – novelist Charlotte Mendelson on the seething envy within famous partnerships
Why would anyone be interested in authors? It’s not as if they’re a charismatic, or even good-looking, breed. I mean that lovingly. Having spent my life in books, publishing, editing, reviewing, teaching and writing them, I can exclusively reveal that most of the writers I’ve met are exactly as you’d expect; formerly Indoor Children, socially awkward little weirdos who, with diligence and too much time alone, become thin-skinned pasty show-offs, prone to backache, voracious for praise. If we’d been attractive, confident teenagers, we’d have spent our free time taking drugs and snogging, not fancying Keats and reading Orwell at lunch.
OK, that was me. But creative types do attract curiosity. We want to know not only how and where they work (Book Event Question no 1: “Do you write with a pen?”), but what they’re like as parents, lovers, friends: writers behaving badly. Marriages, too, are fascinating to the nosy. There is little more gripping than a really molecular insight into how a relationship works, or fails; the public flirtations, the discreet acts of cruelty. So what could be more delicious than the secrets of one artist married to another?
