Eternal youth

Novelist Meg Rosoff, author of the novel What I Was. (Random House Canada)

Like some offspring of the literary gods, Meg Rosoff appeared in 2004 with a fully formed voice, despite having only just published her debut novel. That novel was a young adult book titled How I Live Now. Set in a near-future England occupied by homegrown terrorist forces, it features a teenaged American anorexic sent to stay with a gang of oddball British cousins. At turns bleak, erotic and blackly funny, How I Live Now, much like Mark Haddon’s 2003 bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, quickly found an audience beyond adolescent readers. It won several awards in the United Kingdom and was shortlisted for both the Orange and Costa (formerly Whitbread) prizes. Inevitably, Rosoff was offered a movie deal and the film adaptation is scheduled to begin production this fall.

Rosoff was already in her mid-forties when she took up writing. As if to prove her late-blooming success was no fluke, she immediately fired off two more stellar novels. Just in Case (2006) focused on a depressed 15-year-old playing a game of hide-and-seek with fate. What I Was, which was recently released in Canada, is less showy than her previous work but even more satisfying: Set on Britain’s ruin-strewn south-east coast in the 1960s, it’s a platonic love story between a lonely schoolboy and a mysterious orphan.

Now 51, Rosoff is the first to admit that she might be overcompensating. Not for time lost, though she says she “pretty much loathed every minute” of the 15 years she spent working in advertising; nor does she have any regrets about becoming a writer later in life.

“It’s possible that under different circumstances I might have tried writing books in my 20s,” she says, “but I know what they would have been. I’ve read those books: they’re all about nice Jewish girls who grew up in the suburbs and move to New York. I wouldn’t have been able to get beyond that, because I didn’t have the clarity about the world yet to get beyond myself.”

Instead, what drives Rosoff is the time she may not have left. She began to write after her youngest sister died of breast cancer at the age of 39. Just as How I Live Now was released, Rosoff was diagnosed with the disease herself. Her sister’s death and her own diagnosis “put everything into perspective.”

Rosoff is in remission now, and sitting at her Canadian publisher’s Toronto office during an early February snowstorm, her cellphone buzzing incessantly, she is matter of fact about her condition. “I have this feeling that any minute now, it could dry up,” she says. “You see it with other authors who write one good book, then nothing. Partly, it’s my Puritan work ethic, which makes it difficult to relax. But mainly, I feel a clock ticking. I’m just not always sure if it’s a sense of mortality or a fear of my talent running out.”

It’s somber talk for someone with such easy warmth — “Oh, I really like you,” she announces at one point during our conversation — and who has lived such a seemingly carefree life. Rosoff was raised in a non-observant Jewish family in suburban Boston, where her father was a professor at the medical school at Harvard. In an act of rebellion, Rosoff dropped out of that same university and set off to London in the 1970s. Her boho style — cropped hair, angular Prada glasses and head-to-toe black clothing — still bears traces of her punk-era self. Eventually, Rosoff went back to America to finish her degree, only to return to England several years later. She and her artist husband live in North London and have a 10-year-old daughter.

(Random House Canada)

The unnamed protagonist of What I Was shares Rosoff’s unease with middle-class respectability. An unremarkable student at a mediocre boarding school that “specialized in architectural sadism,” he dreads the diminished expectations of his future: “minor job, minor wife, minor life.” An accidental meeting with a beguiling, self-contained boy named Finn, who lives alone in a fishing shack, offers him the possibility of escape from his conformist parents and the macho bullying of his classmates.

“The book is really about gender,” says Rosoff, who grew up as a tomboy at odds with ’60s ideals of femininity. “He’s not a proper boy. He’s not athletic, he’s not good looking, he’s not academic. He doesn’t fit in. And when he falls in love with Finn, he’s falling in love with his Platonic ideal of what a boy should be. It’s a selfish kind of love, an immature love, because he doesn’t really see who Finn is. But I don’t think that’s restricted to teenagers. I’m sure if I found myself on the dating market tomorrow, I’d behave in all kinds of foolish ways. Falling in love makes idiots of people.”

In the tradition of much great youth fiction (see: Huck Finn, Harry Potter, Lyra Belacqua, Dorothy Gale), parents are, for the most part, absent in Rosoff’s books — they’re either dead, living far away, or otherwise distracted. That choice is deliberate, says Rosoff.

“To be honest, I just don’t care about writing about the relationship between children and parents. I’m more interested in writing about people’s relationship to the world. And teenagers are narcissistic. Their lives are defined by the area around themselves. As a parent — my daughter is only 10 years old, but I don’t think it’s different with kids of any age — my job is to facilitate my daughter’s experience of the world. It’s not a relationship of equals, where my life and my interests are as important as hers. In our relationship, they’re not and I don’t mind that at all. I always think the best parents are slightly invisible. They let kids get on with it, and they don’t get in the way.”

Rosoff likes writing about teenagers because it’s “such an extreme and intense time of life.” But she draws as much from contemporary concerns as she does from her own adolescence. “I put a lot of adult themes in my novels,” she says. “A lot of the issues they wrestle with are the same [ones that] I do.”

She points to Just In Case, in which she borrowed from her own mid-life crisis about mortality to tell the story of a troubled, possibly mentally ill teenaged boy attempting to evade what he’s certain is a fate-mandated early demise. 

“I don’t believe in destiny,” Rosoff says. “I hate all that talk about thinking of money coming to you and then it will come to you. And, of course, having had cancer, the thing I really hate is when people say to me, ‘Oh, you must have kept things really bottled up. That’s why you got sick.’ I want to kill them. It’s just such crap. The implication is, ‘I’ve led a better life than you, therefore I haven’t had cancer.’ It’s complete rubbish. On the other hand, I do agree with Thomas Hardy, who said, ‘Character is fate.’ I think a certain amount of optimism gives you an optimistic life. I’m also very superstitious. I think that Just in Case addresses that: what do we do with all our contradictions?”

What I Was is published by Doubleday Canada and is in stores now.

Rachel Giese is a Toronto writer.

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