Faber & Faber

A few questions with Lucy Wadham, whose new book The Secret Life of France is published in July 2009.

Follow Lucy on her blog - www.secretlifeoffrance.com.

At school I was terrible at ...

Maths.

When I was a child my favourite book was ...

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (which was full of Maths).

I started writing when / because ...

I started writing at 16, when my parents left England for Australia. I moved in with my elder sister and her boyfriend and began to produce very gloomy short stories, featuring a great deal of rain, peripheral teenage sex and acute observations about the multiformity of kitchen stains. Why did I do this? To appease my emergent tendency to try and build sentences out of every new experience.

The hardest part of writing a novel is ...

For me, finishing. Not only is it hard to leave the imaginary world and the characters within it, it is hard technically for me to wind things up without betraying my initial ambition for the story. I have a tendency to fear the ending, and the unconscious desire to botch it (by having them all die in a hideous car crash) as if to do so is to elude inevitable failure by simply not trying hard enough.

I work best when ...

My children are out.

I wish I’d written ...

Anna Karenina.

The fictional character I most identify with is ...

Anna Karenina

The greatest influence on my writing career has been ...

Faber and Faber (I’m not stupid).

If I wasn’t a writer I would ...

Be a transplant surgeon or a country and western singer.

The most underrated writer is ...

Andre Dubus.

My favourite short story is ...

‘A Perfect day for Bananafish’ by J. D. Salinger.

The most evocative piece of sports writing I’ve ever read is ...

Sorry. Dunno. (Is it very sexist of me to think that this questionnaire is geared towards blokes?)

The most romantic piece of writing I’ve ever read is ...

The love scene between the 36-year-old exorcist, Cayetano Delaura and his 12-year-old subject, Sierva Maria in Garcia Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons. (And the ‘fiacre scene’ in Madame Bovary).

My favourite bookshop is ...

Shakespeare and Company, Paris, France.

My favourite festival experience is ...

Still waiting for a festival experience.

My literary five-a-side football team would include ...

If they were writing and not playing football: Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Leon Tolstoy, Gustave Flaubert and Cormac McCarthy.

The finest and most disappointing film adaptation are ...

The finest would be Kubrick’s Lolita and the worst would be Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the hands of Philip Kaufman and Daniel Day Lewis.

If I listen to music when I write I usually put on ...

Never, ever do that.

I am kept awake at night by ...

Snoring (my own), children, or fear of death.

My guiltiest pleasure is ...

Masturbation of course.

My favourite all-time TV show has to be ...

Deadwood. (HBO’s drama series set in a lawless gold prospecting town in 1870s America).

If I could go back in time I would ...

Be a divorced heiress in early 18th-century France.

The thing that would most improve my life is ...

A little more childcare and a little more book sales.