Though there is a commonality of subject matter, each book has the kernel of a different idea at its start and heart.

With Coconut Chaos it was how one small act – in this case the taking of a coconut by Fletcher Christian from the pile on the quarterdeck of HMS Bounty on Monday 27 April 1789 – will have tangential ramifications that ripple through time.

For my first biography, Gluck, I saw a retrospective of her paintings one rainy lunchtime. YouWe, as she called it, a self-portrait of her head fused with that of her lover Nesta Obermer, intrigued me. Here was obsession, lesbian love, merged identity. Next day, out of the blue, a letter came from an editor at Pandora Press: she liked my reviews for City Limits. Was there a book I wanted to write? She’d give me a commission.

With Gertrude and Alice I played on the irony that the perfect marriage: loyalty, commitment, delight in each other til death do us part, was between two women. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, first met in Paris on Sunday 8 September 1907 and from that day on were never apart until Gertrude’s death on Saturday 27 July 1946.

In Greta and Cecil I was intrigued by narcissism: the film star Greta Garbo, the photographer Cecil Beaton and how their absorption in each other was a reflection of self.

Hypocrisy is the core of Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter. Mrs Keppel, as mistress of King Edward VII, was ‘La Favorita’ of Edwardian high society. Her daugher Violet Trefusis was ostracised, forced into a sham marriage and banished to Paris because of her stormy love affair with Vita Sackville-West.

In Selkirk’s Island, which won the Whitbread Biography Award, I hoped to stretch the boundaries of biography. The hero is the island not the man marooned there. I went to Crusoe Island to write this book.

Wild Girls was not my choice of title. I’d called my book about Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, with my own quasi-autobiographical interpolations, A Sapphic Idyll. The marketing men said no one would know what Sapphic meant, particularly the booksellers. They all knew what Girls meant. I still find it hard to say I’m the author of Wild Girls.

Private family matters

[ posted 21 May 2008 ]

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Culling

[ posted 29 April 2008 ]

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Easter Eggs

[ posted 23 March 2008 ]

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Coconut Chaos

Coconut Chaos was published in paperback by Phoenix on 24 April.

Shakespeare & Company’s third Paris literary festival

Thursday 12 June in a marquee in Park René-Viviani beside the bookshop. Jeanette Winterson and Diana Souhami ‘1928: Orlando, The Well of Loneliness, The Ladies Almanack’ and whatever else.

Gertrude Stein

I’ll be talking about Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice on 15 July at the Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the Lavender Library event at the London Literature Festival. The line up is:

Rupert Smith/John Rechy
Julian Clary/E.F.Benson
Stella Duffy/Patricia Highsmith
Andy Bell/tbc
David McAlmont/James Baldwin
Paul Burston/Pickles
Karen McLeod/Julia Darling
Me/Gertrude Stein

I’ve been told to make my presentation impactful and if I feel inclined to dress up in any way......

Edith Cavell

My next book will be a biography of the First World War nurse Edith Cavell, born 4 December 1865, daughter of the vicar of Swardeston in Norfolk, shot at dawn in Brussels on 12 October 1915 for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border.

The publisher (when I’ve written it) will be Quercus.

If anyone has information about Edith Cavell, or knows of letters from or to her, I’d be delighted to hear from them.

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