Talking  with  Kate

Kate Muir: down to earth, approachable and funny

Interviewing Kate Muir is a delight. She's down to earth, approachable and funny.

The conversation veers easily from weekday suppers to open heart surgery and, refreshingly, isn't one of those women who perpetuates the myth that you can be the perfect domestic goddess while also juggling work and the general stresses of modern life.

West  Coast

Reflecting, perhaps, the fact that the couple have a home just off the Finchley Road in north London and a house on the Scottish coast, Kate's new novel, West Coast, is set in the capital and north of the border.

It's the story of a little boy, Fergus McFarlane, growing up in a fishing port in Scotland.

"His father dies when he's eight," Kate tells me.

"His mum was a teenage mother, so essentially she's a not very grown-up person raising a child alone. Fergus goes through all sorts of crime and trouble until eventually he becomes an artist.

"He changes class and he changes country when he moves to London.

"So the book is about the incredible ambition of a fatherless person.

 

"I  look  at  what  it  means  to  have  to  deal  with  being  in  love  with  someone  from  a  completely  different  background.  There  are  a  lot  of  issues  they  both  have  to  overcome."

 

"There's a lot of love in West Coast. It begins when Fergus falls in love with his mother and becomes incredibly attached to her. She remarries when he's 10 and he doesn't really like his stepfather.

"Later in life, he falls in love with a woman called Athene.

"She comes from a multi-Aga owning family with a very grand house. He's working-class Scottish, so I look at what it means to have to deal with being in love with someone from a completely different background.

"There are a lot of issues they both have to overcome.

"I got the idea in a really odd way. I went to interview Gordon Ramsay. He told me he'd work until midnight, jog home, make love to his wife, get up at six and then do it all over again.

"My character is nothing like him, but I wanted to write about moving from Scotland to London and I'm very interested in what makes a man ambitious. It's also about the importance of place."

Kate - who writes a weekly column for The Times and has worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, New York and Washington - is originally from Scotland, although she and her husband author, the Times journalist Ben Macintyre, have called a number of other countries home; she understands well the trials of uprooting a life.

Time out: Kate enjoying the outdoors at her home in north London

"I grew up in Glasgow, but I don't have an accent. I used to, though - no one understood me when I first came to London.

"We'd lived in London and France and had been rootless people for 12 years. My children were born in France and America.

"We always went back to Scotland for our holidays, though, which has been very important to my children - they consider it a home. My husband's parents had a house in Scotland, although he grew up in Oxfordshire.

"I have an Aga in Scotland. It's been in my husband's family for 25 years. We use it a lot - for drying gym shoes and coats and we often leave stews in the bottom oven. I love it.

"We go up to Scotland most school holidays. I love the space up there. The children spend hours building tree houses and running wild, things they can't do at home in London."

Kate - who took a law degree at Glasgow University before going on to do a postgraduate diploma in journalism at Cardiff University - has a delightfully down-to-earth approach to writing. 
 

"I  love  writing.  I  like  going  off  into  an  imaginary  world.  It's  a  great  life  for  women  with  children."

 

"I wrote my first novel about 10 years ago. I threw away a couple of starts, but then it changed when I had a child.

"I knew I was never going to be James Joyce and once I knew I didn't have to write something that would change the world, it was very liberating.

"I prefer writing fiction to non-fiction, as I can disappear into another world. I go to the British Library and write there.

"West Coast was a very difficult book for me to write. I was getting up at 5am, sitting in a sleeping bag with just my fingers sticking out, as I didn't want to put the heating on.

"My children are very good. If I tell them to leave me alone, they do. I don't think they really think about what I do, but, if we're in an airport and they see my books in a shop, they always put them to the front.

"I love writing. I like going off into an imaginary world. It's a great life for women with children. My husband is enormously helpful - he edited my last book, which was fantastic."

It can't be easy in a house with two writers; I imagine it can be quite stressful if they're both on a deadline. Kate and Ben, though, have a solution for this - they take turns in writing.

"It's quite up and down - either he's writing or I'm writing - and one of us is in crisis. If we wrote together the kids would starve, the dog would die and the bills would go unpaid."

Her  next  book

Kate - who has written two previous novels, Suffragette City (1999) and the hugely praised Left Bank (2006), as well as two non-fiction works, Arms and the Woman (1992) and The Insider's Guide to Paris - has taken on a daunting challenge for her next book, although she's relishing the research on a subject that few would dare tackle.

Research: Kate's next book is about heart transplants

"I'm currently researching my next book, which is about heart transplant patients. I'm off to Papworth Hospital soon to watch open heart surgery.

"It's really nice to have something to research. I've been reading a study of 300 transplant patients to find out how people feel with an organ from someone else.

"It's interesting because there are people who suddenly discover a huge liking for hazelnut spread, having hated it before, or people who've discovered a passion for a new language or type of music."

Kate's pragmatic approach stretches to home life too.

While she enjoys cooking when she has the time, she's not one of those women who feel they have to create five-course dinners every night or feel a rush of guilt if they order a take-away rather than cooking everything from scratch.

"I do love cooking and do it a lot when we're in Scotland where we have the Aga. I cook a lot with the children and there's fantastic seafood up there.

"During the week I do a lot of quick cooking as I don't really have much time. It would be miserable trying to fricassée vegetables everyday."

The  food  in  West  Coast

The food in the early chapters of West Coast is as unpretentious as that in Kate's kitchen -  and all the more colourful for it.

"There's lots of food in West Coast. Most of it's bad '70s-style food, like Vesta boil-in-the-bag curry and fish fingers and chips. When my character moves to London he learns about real food."
 
As I leave Kate, I can't help feeling rather in awe.

She has the courage to tackle difficult subjects in her books and the self-belief to live life her way in whichever country she's calling home. A lesson, I think for all of us.

 

Further  information

'West Coast' by Kate Muir is published by Headline Review.

To purchase a copy of her book visit Amazon online.