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Plains FM/Women on air set a cracking pace with Anita Amirrezvani, their first author visit for 2008, and maintained it with their second, Linda Grant.
I’ve always liked Grant; not only is she a clever and entertaining speaker and a writer of good fiction and non-fiction books but she also writes for Vogue, she has an amusing blog and she takes clothes and make-up seriously. After all you “can’t have depths without surfaces”, as she says on her blog.
The clothes on their backs is Grant’s latest novel and it’s about the significance of clothes, among other things. How they define us, how they give us protection and confidence, how they are the last thing to go – “I was left with the clothes on my back”.
To a family who arrived in Britain from Russia and Poland with no place in the entrenched class system, as Grant’s did, appearances mattered because everything was based on how you looked. Maxims like “only the rich can afford cheap shoes” and “there’s only one thing worse than being skint and that’s looking skint” entered family lore.
Grant generally alternates novels with non-fiction, using the latter to clear her mind of the residue left by all the things she was thinking about while writing her novels. It’s not surprising then that her next work will be a non-fiction work about clothes and why they matter.
Blogging began as a way to comment on fashion as an enthusiastic amateur, just for a month or so, but hits from all around the world lead to the realisation that there are a lot of highly intelligent and well-read women out there who are interested in clothes and who like to talk about Chanel as well as the Constitution.
The most torrid blog discussion came out of a small remark about how women over the age of 40 shouldn’t wear leather jackets for fear of looking like mutton dressed as lamb. I personally hate that phrase with a passion, so I too would have waded into all the questions that flooded in regarding just what is permissible after 40, or 50. When do you have to stop showing your arms? Or wearing short skirts?
All in all this was a very entertaining evening and it really whetted the appetitite for the novel and for more author visits from Plains FM/Women on air.
Linda Grant’s authors who care about clothes:
Marcel Proust - “he’s all frocks”
George Eliot - page one of Middlemarch is entirely devoted to a description of Dorothea Brooke’s dress
Linda Grant’s author who does not care about clothes:
Jane Austen - she never describes clothes, surprising considering how many balls her characters attend
