Interview: Fay Weldon, author

WHAT'S the difference between quirky and downright bonkers? Writer Fay Weldon walks the tightrope between the two precariously at times, falling one way then the other, but always climbing back on and tra la la-ing her way forward. She's a very cheerful woman. On the surface anyway, though it's hard to tell, at times, if there's a rather resolute acceptance underneath that easy laugh, because what else could you replace acceptance with except despair?

She's witty, with a writer's capacity for exaggeration and expansive statements, which makes her very good company, and at least she knows when she's talking rubbish. When discussing the extreme ways young men behave, for example, Weldon says debt calms them down and al Qaeda should all be given mortgages. Mortgages and cots, I say. Well, she replies, being fathers doesn't seem to make a difference. Being in debt does. Why? "I don't know. I just made it up now. I'm a fiction writer aren't I? These are not considered views, just today's views."

The trouble is, people always ask her questions, and she always answers them, then gets held responsible for whatever random things popped into her head at the time. She's always described as "feminist writer Fay Weldon" but her new book, Kehua, shows women behaving every bit as badly as men and anyway, at 78 she now claims to feel sorry for men. She's also supposed to have said she knows what people are thinking but I don't really think she meant it in a bonkers way, just that she can read people well, which is true.

Kehua is very funny because she has such a searing understanding of human foibles. Indeed, she's quite disconcerting in person because she looks at you with glittering eyes, one of which is half-closed, and they hold such sceptical amusement it's like she's looking right through you, smiling at what she sees. Then she says something ludicrous in quite a deadpan way but when you laugh she does too, with relish, and you think, my goodness, if I hadn't cracked how far would she have gone with that madness?

Kehua is the story of family behaviour being repeated through the generations and about the way past ghosts haunt the present (Kehua are Maori ghosts who lead the departed home). It has a delightfully eccentric narrator who is writing the tale in her basement and Weldon doesn't bother to disguise the fact that it's her. She really was writing in her basement and she really did become a bit obsessed by ghosts in her old house.

Now she'd quite like to live in a new bungalow because it's a bit disturbing once you become aware of all the old English servants who have passed up and down the worn stairs from the basement. She's quite sensitive like that. For instance, she's decided she wants to get rid of all the books in her house. "I don't want any more because they line the walls and oppress you with thoughts and ideas and you can't really pay them proper attention," she says.

Weldon was brought up by English parents in New Zealand and has a very English, refined accent but never felt part of the mainstream of either culture, which may account for her willingness to be controversial. (There's a telling section in her autobiography in which she says her university education at St Andrews taught her to say extreme things in the full expectation that someone would say something equally extreme back and they could meet somewhere in the middle. But people don't bother conversing much now so they are either outraged by her positions or they smile and ask behind their hands if she's mad.)

She says immoderate things, like rape isn't the worst thing that can happen to a woman. One assumes she just means death is worse, but still … Then there is this very strange strand in Kehua, concerning incest through several generations, that implies men and their daughters and step-daughters are sexually interested in each other, almost as a matter of course. I wonder if this is because Weldon's parents split up when she was young and she felt the absence of her father quite keenly. She had four sons but no daughters so admits to little personal experience of fathers and daughters.

"I hardly ever saw my father," she says, "so you never gain the art of flirting. You never gain the art of manipulating people, manipulating men." She seriously thinks all women flirt with their fathers? "Haven't you noticed?" No. "Do you have a daughter?" Yes. "Doesn't she annoy you by flirting with her father all the time?" No. "I know people who are terribly annoyed with their daughters because they are so competitive." But she's glad my daughter isn't like that. She's probably really nice and non-competitive and that's lovely. Weldon does that quite a lot when you try to pin her down: simply laughs graciously and removes herself from potential conflict. She says at one point that women are very evil if they marry for status and money. But she admits she married her first husband for security! "Quite right, so I did," she says immediately.

Does she care that she's irritated feminists in recent years? Oh, it's other people who are out of step, not her, she says stoutly and laughs. "The world has changed. Men used to behave appallingly and because women were financially dependent and completely helpless we had to put up with it. Now if men behave too badly the women can leave and take the children with them and support them and so men behave much better than they did." Really? I sound so unconvinced by this world view that she retorts, almost indignantly: "Of course they do! God Almighty you should have lived then!"

OK, so they behave better than the 1950s. But back in 1997, Weldon claimed women were now so powerful over poor old men, making them feel so inferior, that in 20 years' time there would be more women than men in top management posts. Thirteen years on and still no sign of it. Isn't the truth that women are semi-equal to men and only for as long as they have no children? Agreed, says Weldon, feminism never did solve that. But in the early 19th century only one in three women married. Not every woman was expected to want children in the way 20th-century women are expected to. "Lots of women had babies who were not suited to it, became extremely annoying and turned into feminists," she says, looking sideways, eyes glittering.

The feminists annoyed traditional women because it meant their sacrifices were in vain. And they annoyed men who hated them for suggesting it wasn't women's duty to iron their shirts. "But there's no point in saying women should go back into the homes because they're not going to," she says. "I'm sure I wouldn't. Things change and as soon as there was contraception and household technology which made an incredible difference … the washing machine, the microwave … all the things that enable you to have children and a job …"

Yes, but not the top job. "Would you want it to be different?" she says. "Do you want the top job?" Do I hell. I'm not interested in their hierarchies. "That's what I mean," she says. "They are hierarchical and women are not. But women want to turn men into women." No, other way round surely. While male values prevail, women can only get on by apeing them. Women who achieve top jobs are often more macho than men. "They're horrible," agrees Weldon.

But, she insists, women are naturally competitive. "Once they competed for men to get the best possible mate for their children. Well you don't do that any more because you can go down the sperm bank." (You have to smile at the way she makes it sound like sperm banks now rival Tesco on every corner. She uses that technique of comic exaggeration often as a writer.) "Nevertheless," she continues, "the competitive thing remains and women are now terrifically competitive with other women. They want to be slimmer, prettier, sexier, and in jobs they will stab their rivals in the back. Women now spend a lot of time betraying their sisters."

As she gets older, she thinks back to the awful things she did when younger. "Yet always justifying yourself on the grounds that it was the only thing you could do in the circumstances, meanwhile leaving other people in terrible trouble that you ignore." Are we talking men again? "Yes." She laughs. What does she really think of men? "Oh I just like them as sexual objects. I don't want to get rid of them. They're pretty."

The characters in Kehua are all sexually motivated and Weldon has never made any secret of her enthusiasm for men. Monogamy is very difficult, she thinks, because we all live so long and change so much. Her own relationship history is complex. She had her first son when she was unmarried, though the father offered her the chance to become a housewife in Luton. She refused (Luton!). But at 25 she was struggling, needed security and married Ronald Bateman, a divorced teacher in his late forties. The strange thing was he never wanted to have sex with her, though he did want to offer her up to other men then hear about it. Instead, she ended up "entertaining" (for free) businessmen from her friend's advertising agency in lay-bys outside London, then worked as a nightclub hostess.

Was Bateman gay? "I don't think he was. He was too interested in sex. He just never did it. But then people were so sexually neurotic then. The sense of sin and guilt and disgrace that clouded sex, the amount of ignorance."

She eventually fled the marriage and worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency, famously working on the "Go to work on an egg" account. Her second husband was Ron Weldon, an artist who frequented therapists and insisted she did too. But then he went to an astrological therapist who claimed he and Weldon were incompatible. It had taken them 36 years to realise the depth of their incompatibility but now it had been pointed out, Ron left Fay for the therapist. It sounds remarkably like a plot Weldon would make up but her revenge on therapy culture actually came in her 1993 novel Affliction.

Yet she went to therapy for years. "I hated every minute of it." People in therapy talk about all the emotionally charged stuff in their lives that make them hurt or angry or dysfunctional but Weldon describes traumatic events with a "so there we are, then" composure. Well, she'd die of exhaustion and misery if she didn't, she says. But most women would be pretty outraged at the idea of their husband wanting to set them up with lovers. Wasn't she?

"No I don't get outraged because they are what they are and if you don't like them, you shouldn't marry them." Anyway, most of life was just about surviving. "It was about having no husband or no money or no anything, just … I am probably just traumatised and have never had a proper feeling in my life."

What on earth did she talk about in therapy if she felt like that? "They never said anything. You listen to your own words and if you listen to your own words enough, you understand your preoccupations. It's terribly useful. It enables you to finish your sentences and talk on radio. It's interesting because you realise your feelings and reason are completely separate things so you are able to separate them out, which is maybe what you are registering as a lack of response. You have to do that as a writer. What is a thought? What is a feeling? This is what I think rationally; this is what I feel. If there are differences, you had better decide which is more important."

Ron Weldon died suddenly, hours before their divorce was finalised. Did his death take her anger away? "No, it increased it like anything. I mean, the sort of quest for closure seems to me completely ill conceived and ill judged. You don't just forget. It's part of life. You have to incorporate it in some way and not try to deny it." That's the trouble with therapists. They want to deny all negative emotion and the modern world has become mealy mouthed and unable to deal with people voicing opinions and getting angry. "In fact, negative emotions, mixed with the good ones, are what keeps people alive and ticking over."

She is married for a third time, to musician and poet Nick Fox, 15 years her junior, but has she forgiven Ron for leaving? "No I haven't. I have sort of come to terms with it. The emotions are there but you hope in the end the benign ones will win but it's not a sort of blanket acceptance of somebody."

She hates therapists' insistence on learning to live with yourself after the break-up of a relationship before you form another. "Well, you're really lucky if you have a relationship, aren't you? You don't pick and choose if you have one. You're really lucky if you manage to have a feeling for something. To deny it and say no, I can't because I must learn to live alone because my therapist says so is crazy. They should be thrown in prison!"

When Weldon wrote her autobiography a few years ago, she stopped at the bit where she became a writer. She has written more than 30 novels as well as scripts and is currently working on a musical version of perhaps her most famous novel, The Life And Loves Of A She-Devil. After that there will be another novel. But why did she start? And what has motivated her to keep writing so long? "I just came from a family of writers," she says. Both her mother and grandfather wrote, as well as an uncle. "It never seemed to me to be an art. I never particularly wanted to be a writer. I had something to say and you have to do it which is different from wanting to. There's so much to say. You will never get to the end of it."

Publishing is in a state of flux but Weldon is surprisingly upbeat about its future and apparently unperturbed by the advance of the e-book. She's very modern for a woman approaching 80. It takes two years to write a book, she says, and two to get it on the shelves, so books are already four years old when the public reads them. "Nowadays books are written for a society that has moved on from when the writer conceived of them. It's not relevant, loses its impact. Jane Eyre arrived in a brown paper parcel at her publishers in her handwriting and was in the shops in six weeks. If people are now going to bung books on a Kindle then good for them."

Kehua looks for pattern in apparently chaotic lives but also shows an awareness of things other than the rational. Weldon was never an atheist, exactly. "I was agnostic or too dizzy to notice." Her parents were rationalists but her mother became religious and Weldon, too, now finds herself in church each week. What does she believe in, though? God? "On a good day I believe in it." She doesn't believe in heaven. Doctors brought her round from the brink of death once. "I came back convinced that what was on the other side was exactly the same." An equally complicated place? "Absolutely. Struggle and trouble and rewards and just the same really in a different sort of place." And in this place would she continue to be a novelist? There is a second's hesitation then she says: "I'd quite like to have a rest."

• Kehua is published in hardback by Corvus, 16.99 Using spoof raps, considerable charm and an overhead projector with the street name of Da OHP, Brown gives a very personal account of how he became Unfamous, the title of his show.

His wry analysis of UK rap culture, complete with handy translation notes for those whose Rude Boy patois may be a little rusty, is laugh-out-loud funny but, as his story unfolds, it is Brown's growing self-awareness that gives the gags poignancy. It is all done with warmth, confidence and conviction. By the end of the show, Brown does better than having the audience in the palm of his hand: he has them rapping along with him. This gig redefined storming it.

More polished, and so slightly less effective, was Des Bishop's tale of how his father's terminal cancer caused the fast-talking Irish American comic to take stock of what matters when it comes to masculine ideals. Pa Bishop, a model/actor, was nearly selected to play James Bond and, to a minor extent, has spent the rest of his life regretting how close he came to the Playboy fantasy. Des Bishop's affectionate take on his newfound, post-diagnosis, father-son relationship situation whacks the funny bone without being mawkish or sentimental. Not surprisingly, terminal cancer and sincere, emotional self-realisation are not usually stand-up comedy's stock in trade but, even if Bishop's humour can't cure the illness, it lightens the load, dispels the gloom and challenges taboos.

Lee Kern, Le Monde, 5pm, until 30 August. Nathan Caton, Pleasance Courtyard, 9.30pm, until 30 August. Doc Brown, Pleasance Courtyard, 7pm, until 29 August. Des Bishop, Assembly@George Street, 8.05pm, until 29 August