For the late-blooming, quietly bestselling author, inhabiting her characters is crucial. And so in her new novel, Free Love, she becomes a middle-aged woman in 1960s London who abandons her family for a much younger man…
Tessa Hadley walks into the sitting room of a hotel in London’s West End that is a pleasant mixture of Christmassy, deserted and library-quiet – a welcome side-effect of the pandemic. At 65, she has an eager, intelligent, girlish face and an elegant angularity (I’ve not seen her handwriting but would bet on forward-sloping italics). She is wearing a long string of red beads against a white sweater that is reminiscent of her character Alice’s fashion advice in her 2015 novel, The Past: “you should go for this understated thing, that the French women do”.
I feel, from the minute we meet, as if Hadley were a friend unaccountably not seen for years, and, as swiftly, recognise this as an explicable illusion because, like all her admiring readers, I have met her through her beautifully written, quietly bestselling novels, including The Past and Late in the Day (2019) – and now through her bold new book, Free Love. It is not that her writing is autobiographical, more that she has the gift for bringing everything she has, sees and knows to the characters she creates. As soon as she is sitting down, we order a pot of Ceylon tea for two – our excuse, we agree with relief, for shedding our face masks. There is so much to talk about, I say.
