CHARLOTTE STROUD INTERVIEW

Substack Portfolio: Charlotte Stroud Interview

ESCAPE FROM SUBURBIA

Charlotte Stroud grew up in a home without books but has built a profile as a serious magazine journalist to watch.  She tells HOLLY BRINSFORD and CHRIS INGE about the bouquets and bruises along the way.

There is rich irony in a journalist interviewing another journalist.  The imagination serves up an image of two boxers in a ring who have studied each other’s methods, know the strengths and probe for the weaknesses, a feint here, a dart there, that will create a revelatory opening.  But this is not a fight, nor even an interview chasing revelations, and I’m constrained by something called a Vocational Module to use the exchange gently, to seek tips on writing and ideas for improvement.

Though I have spent years in the field, I concede there is need and room for both.  There is also Holly, my classmate, who has never interviewed before and must have an equal tilt at our “victim”, Charlotte Stroud.

Charlotte writes beautifully constructed think-pieces for the likes of The New Statesman and The London Magazine.  She also reviews books and teaches while simultaneously striving to be mother to an active five-year old boy and two step-teens.  Because of all the above, we Zoom rather than talk directly, something that always robs an interview of nuance and rapport.

Still.  We start, as one should, with background because there is always something in it, acknowledged or separately discovered and interrogated, that determines what you do in life and, often, how well.  So, Charlotte?

“Suburbia,” she says, surprising us because contributors to pillars of the political Left like the ‘Statesman are surely meant to have gritty working-class credentials.  Nothing gritty or stereotypically working-class about Charlotte.  In fact, she is the antidote to grittiness: properly blonde, well-dressed and well south of 40 with a Zoom backdrop of chunky hardbacks.  Not chick-lit and definitely not suburbia.

In fact the ‘burbs were mentioned as the spur and deficit that triggered an early regime as ‘auto-didact’, imbibing the books her home lacked, smashing an English degree and going on effortlessly to a Masters.  She describes herself as ‘self-propelled’ – essential in a freelance – and explains her current journalistic ties as stemming from her ‘dislike of snobbishness’ and being ‘adversarial and contrarian’.

Still, when she told her English teacher what she wanted to do ‘she told me I was far too nice to be a journalist.  I thought I might be an academic and was studying for a PhD until Covid – then, I had a baby and lost faith.

‘I had no confidence in my writing to begin with – it took a friend to say something I had written was fantastic’.  Plenty she has written since has drawn praise (in fact her editor at the ‘Statesman asked her to write a regular column: she turned him down saying she didn’t have enough ‘staunch opinions’).  But there have been some uncomfortable moments: a piece on J.B. Priestley for The London Magazine provoked only an illiterate ‘Who he?’, and a rant in the ‘Statesman about angst-ridden “cool girl novelists” provoked the opposite, a hurricane of protest on social media.  She was bruised by the reaction but not wholly put off crusades: she recently wrote a piece deploring the pusillanimity of Roald Dahl’s publishers for purging words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’ from his children’s books which was well received.

So what next?  More of the same?  Well, yes, up to a point.  ‘I don’t want to be a hack.  I like to write on my own terms and when I’m in the mood.  I’m currently writing a piece for The London Magazine about walking the same field every day (it was inspired by a poem by D.H. Lawrence called “The Secret Earth”).’

Holly, herself a mother of five, wanted to know how Charlotte squared the forbidding circle of mother, marriage and literary effort.  A momentary grit of perfect white teeth.  She manages, she says, adding somewhat surprisingly that Covid proved ‘almost a blessing’, with enforced isolation deepening the family bond and creating extra space and time for writing and thinking.  It was then, for instance, that she decided to give up on the PhD.

She would gist some of her nascent dissertation for a piece on A.S. Byatt, a particular hero of hers for being ‘a reality novelist’, the antidote, you would imagine, to all those ‘cool girl  novelists’ and one in urgent need of replicants to pick up the torch: ‘Hilary Mantel, but she’s dead too…Tessa Hadley, though she doesn’t write novels of ideas…Zadie Smith, yes…’ she tails off.

Reviews are part of her portfolio, but a minefield. ‘I was given this second book by a young author (name suppressed) and within a few pages I hated it – I thought it was the worst thing I had ever read.  I panned it and got a note back from the commissioning editor saying they couldn’t publish it.  I discovered there’s this unwritten rule that you don’t trash young writers.’

Even though, on the back of this, she learned what a small, closed world publishing was, full of mutual back-scratching to keep the good reviews coming and sales rising, she wants to have a go herself.

‘I would really like to write a novel.  I have lots of notebooks and scribbles but I get distracted…I must have stern words with myself.  Women have this thing about writing a novel at my sort of age (34)…I take heart from Penelope Fitzgerald, who was a childhood prodigy, gained a First at Oxford, but then married a drunk and lost the best years of her life.  Still, she published in her 60s and won the Booker in her 70s’.

Thank you, Charlotte.  I am 78 and Holly has only just entered her 40s.  (966 words)