Now I'm a believer - Zoë Heller interview

Published on Friday 12 September 2008 16:16

She may be ashamed of the candour of her 1980s columns, but with a third book under her belt, Zoë Heller has discovered her true worth as a novelist, she tells Claire Prentice

Once upon a time, Zo Heller made her living writing about looking for love in New York. In a series of confessional columns in the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Times Magazine, she spilled the beans about her chaotic love life, emotional crises and even in one memorable column, the state of her knickers. Now the onetime confessional journalist has segued into a new life as a mother, Booker Prize shortlisted novelist, and temporary resident of the Bahamas.

First the islands. Heller has spent the past year living in the sun-drenched archipelago with her screenwriter husband Larry Konner, and daughters Frankie and Louella, nine and four. "One of the great things about being a freelance writer is that you can write from anywhere and this is a great place to write," says Heller. "Besides, I love the heat."

But though Heller is currently physically separated from her adopted New York home, and her Tribeca apartment is rented out while she soaks up the sun for another year, her new novel The Believers is a quintessential Big Apple story. It is set in Greenwich Village – once the edgy haunt of bohemians, but more recently gentrified by the arrival of rich professionals and yummy mummies – among the kind of extended, chaotic, squabbling intellectual family beloved of Woody Allen, Meg Wolitzer and Jonathan Franzen.

The Believers follows the Litvinoffs, a family of secular Jewish intellectuals headed by ageing radicals Joel and Audrey. When Joel, a charismatic left-wing lawyer, becomes seriously ill, his wife discovers that her husband has a history of infidelity, rocking their relationship to its roots. Meanwhile, their adopted son Lenny is on drugs, their hospital social worker daughter Karla is drawn to a man whose politics she detests, and her disillusioned socialist sister Rosa is surprised to find herself succumbing to the Jewish faith her parents and grandparents turned their backs on.

As the Litvinoffs fight each other and their demons, their most cherished beliefs are turned upside down. "I wanted to write about family, the liberal intelligentsia and believing, whether in politics, religion or the kind of person you are. I'm fascinated by why people carry on believing even when cracks show up in whatever it is they believe in," says the 43-year-old.

"I had just read an article about scientists locating 'the belief gene' and whether or not such a gene exists. It seemed metaphorically true to me."

The Litvinoffs were inspired by a family Heller knows in Manhattan, but though she is a shrewd observer of people and their foibles, she stresses that she is not a "social spy". "I don't go around thinking of everyone I meet as material for my fiction. That would be awful. But I've known families like the Litvinoffs, with a romantic notion of themselves, who are politically and morally pompous."

There are pretty clear comparisons between her new book and Heller's own life (as a columnist she wrote about her overpowering Audrey-like mother; her Jewish screenwriter father Lukas wrote The Dirty Dozen and Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, and Heller's Jewish husband, like Joel, is older than her). But Heller claims not to have written a cross between a family romance and a roman clef. The youngest of four children, north London-born Heller studied at Oxford before going on to Columbia University in New York, where she found to her delight that American men were more relaxed about sex than the buttoned-up British boys to whom she was used.

It provided great copy for her confessional column. After following their feisty, self-deprecating heroine through a string of unsuccessful relationships, Heller's readers were introduced to Konner. A screenwriter some 15 years older than her, he was living in LA with his teenage daughter and initially refused to commit. For what seemed like months the relationship went back and forth in print. But then, reader, Heller married him.

The Believers is Heller's third novel. Her first, Everything You Know, was, in the author's words, "shat on from a great height" by her journalistic peers, but her second, the chilling Notes On A Scandal, which explored the relationship between a female teacher and an underage pupil, was nominated for the Booker Prize and turned into a movie starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

It's not surprising that a writer who mines her own experience for fiction should, as the mother of two young daughters, find herself writing about family. "For me it is the reverse of the Cyril Connolly dictum about the pram in the hall being the enemy of promise," she says. "The pram in the hall has been very good to me. It took me an age to write my first book because I was constantly distracted by the business of being single, looking for love and organising a social life. Marriage and kids and routine have taken away a lot of the extraneous stuff, freed up an awful lot of mental energy and made me more industrious."

Given her love-hate relationship with the British press, Heller, who admitted that as a 25-year-old journalist she would be reduced to tears if one of her articles was spiked, is understandably nervous about the publication of her third novel. "I do pore over reviews and feel upset by bad ones and cheered up by good ones," she says, "but I have my own idea of when I have succeeded or failed. I didn't feel my first book was as bad as critics in the UK did or that my second book was as good as they did. I've discovered my own inner core of judgment and confidence, which is important for a writer."

She has enjoyed resurfacing into the limelight to promote The Believers after a lengthy period of solitary confinement, though the publicity machine has brought unwelcome reminders of her time as a columnist. "After a period of isolation it is fun to talk about yourself, but after a while it becomes exhausting and embarrassing."

Before walking down the bay to collect Frankie and Louella from school, Heller has to make a short film to promote The Believers on Amazon. "It's the most embarrassing thing," she says. "I'm making it on my laptop with Larry's help and I can see myself on screen while we're filming. There's a continuity problem with my hair."

Looking back on her younger self, she says she misses the buzz of being on staff at a newspaper, though she is glad she no longer has to share her innermost thoughts to earn a living. "I regret the candour and the 1980s hairstyles and feel embarrassed about some of the things I wrote in my column. I'm just hoping that my daughters don't discover them. At the moment they are thankfully showing no interest at all."

• The Believers by Zo Heller is published by Penguin Fig Tree on September 25