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Tim Lott is a west London based writer whose
career took off in 1996 after he published his first book The
Scent of Dried Roses, a memoir that movingly deals with his
mother's death and his own depression.
In 1999 he published White City Blue, a poignant
and funny novel about male friendship and growing up, as seen through
the eyes of Frankie Blue, a yuppie estate agent in the 90's. With
this novel he won the Whitbread First Novel Award.
He has just finished his second novel, as yet untitled,
which will be published next year, and is also working on a number
of film and TV projects.
A long time resident of Notting Hill, My Village
met up with him to talk about his work.
As well as looking at issues like friendship
and personal history, White City Blues is also incredibly funny.
Do you purposely blend darkness and
comedy in your books?
"Life is both pathetic and incredibly funny.
That is what life looks like to me. I am incapable of writing any
other way.
In publishing funnily enough, people are quite uncomfortable
about books that are both funny and sad. I think they don't know
quite where to put them on the shelves.
Even Nick Hornby is marketed primarily as a comic
writer when he's really much more than that. It's easier to corral
writers into particular camps."
You worked as a journalist for many years. How
did you make the move to being a full time writer?
"I always wanted to be a writer but for years
I didn't think that I was good enough to do it really. I knew that
it would be very challenging and lonely and all those things and
wasn't sure how I would get on. In the end, journalism lost interest
in me. I didn't feel I was getting very far.
Someone came to me after I wrote a piece about my
mother for Esquire and said do you want to write this memoir. The
novel was an accident too, because I was actually writing a book
about Tony Blair at the time and it kind of fell to bits. I thought
that as they had paid me to write a book I'd better give them something,
so I wrote a novel, which became White City Blue.
I think I became a writer because I had failed at
everything else really. I just got bullied into it by life."
It must take courage to embrace the unexpected
…
"Life is always a strange mixture of the planned
and the unplanned. The Scent of Dried Roses was the foundation
of my writing career and so I suppose would never have written that
book if my mother hadn't died.
You can never tell from the perspective you are
at whether something is actually good or bad. The consequences of
any single event just keep going in so many different directions.
A wonderful thing could happen to you and ten years later you look
back and see that it's fucked up your whole life. The past appears
differently each time I look back at it.
Of course I wish that I could be that philosophical
when my car gets clamped ..."
In another interview you were asked what your
motto would be, and you answered 'Always burn your bridges, be ruthless
with the past'. Explain …
"What we do with our past is to turn it into
a kind of myth, some kind of ideal place where everything was perfect.
I've learned from experience that when you lose something you have
got to cut it off, and not hang onto it. And if you need to break
up with somebody, just do it, don't hang around. Any other course
of action would be terrible, going back, coming forward …
I think you have to be ruthless with your past because
any other course of action would be disastrous. The past will be
ruthless with you if you're not ruthless with it."
Describe your relationship with Notting Hill?
"On the whole I'm a real advocate of the area.
Because it's got the focal point of the market its one of the few
places in London where you can still bump into people.
I've lived here since 1983 but I've been around
the area since I was a little kid. My father was a greengrocer in
Notting Hill Gate and when I was young I used to work in his shop.
I still eat in restaurants where I used to deliver vegetables when
I was 14.
It's a cliché to say it but there has been a real
change in the area over the last few years. I think you can trace
it to the Notting Hill movie really. There seems to be a different
type of people moving in.
I went into Bali Sugar on New Years Eve and that's
a place where I have been going for years, and suddenly I felt really
out of place. I was dressed fairly smartly but the people in there
were so well turned out it was incredible. They so were all so rich.
I don't know why that bothers me but it does somehow."
Both your books are set in West London. Do you
consider yourself a West London writer?
"It could be laziness really. I don't have
to do research if I set my books here. But it doesn't really matter
that much, it's the people who I am writing about who are important.
My new novel is set in west London and in Milton Keynes so I am
gradually moving away.
The book starts off set in a Fulham council estate
and it's really a look at the 80's from the perspective of a normal
guy, a kind of worm's eye view of a decade when there was huge social
change taking place. I chose Milton Keynes because anonymous soulless
places like that somehow represent that time for me.
It was the first time when mobility became huge
and people were moving around a lot. A huge number of people from
London moved to places like Milton Keynes in an attempt to leave
the inner cities, only to discover they were now living somewhere
that was even grimmer. The book is a tragedy really, much darker
than White City Blues but still with humorous moments of course."
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