What inspired you to write Second Honeymoon?
There are two themes, really.  One is the empty nest, and the way that modern fledglings return so often, and the way those returns affect family dynamics.  The other theme is really about women and work, older women rediscovering work, and younger ones getting a first real taste of it. I wanted to write about successful women and the effect their success has on their instinctive desires. One of the things that was very influential when I was researching the book was one of the bits in the 'Evening Standard'. There was a whole piece about young women who were all buying flats on their own in which they were living on their own, and how all the new developments in East London and along the river were being bought by young women who were earning upwards of three-quarters of a million. The numbers are simply huge.

What do you think life was like for your generation when they left home?
I left home in the late spring of 1966.  I was 22; I had been away to university and I had a job in a research department of the Foreign Office.  I left because — like so many of my generation — I was getting married, so I went from watching my mother keep house to keeping one myself (on £3 a week: demanding, but not impossible in 1966).  And so it was a pretty conclusive departure — the door of one stage of life firmly closed: the door of the next one unequivocally open.  In 1966, when you left home, you left.  You were not expected, by yourself, by your parents, by society, to come back.  Grown-up time had begun.

So, when your own children left home it must have been somewhat different?
Oh yes. When it came to my own children, a generation later, things were not quite so black and white.  In the public arena, there had been a liberalising of attitudes and a relaxing of codes of conduct — not quite so many rules, praise be, about How To Behave.  In the private arena there had been huge changes too — I had stopped being a civil servant, been a teacher and become a writer - I had been divorced and my daughters had acquired two older stepbrothers (much beloved).  The children, as it happened, were all quite close in age, and there were long periods of time when I thought that this trudge through education, further education, further further education and training of various kinds would never end.  It wasn’t that I wanted them to go — it was more that I couldn’t see how they would ever manage it.  But they did, and they meant it. And to be perfectly honest, I was so preoccupied with shoving a respectable but as yet unremarkable writing career uphill, that it didn’t occur to me to cast myself, wailing, into the terrible void that the children had left behind.  That — and it took me entirely by surprise — came later.  It was six or seven years later in fact, when my elder daughter got married herself.  The whole occasion was beautiful to look at and joyful in atmosphere.  And after it, I went home — and fell to pieces.  I can’t now remember exactly what I thought, but I remember the feeling of having lost something utterly vital that I would never have again.  And I also remember thinking that when I had calmed down, and when I felt the time was right, I would write about that feeling because I was sure that mothers worldwide have, by and large, known something of what I then knew.

How far do think Second Honeymoon examines the role of marriage as well as the empty nest?
Oh, yes it does, it is all part of the same story…. how maternal feelings never change, on what happens to long marriages round family life, on what men want from women and what women want at one stage, and then definitely don’t at another, from men, on how much harder it is to be independent than it used to be… Looking back at my own.

What did you, as a novelist, find really captured you about the ‘empty nest’?
I think it is this. For these children home may be a pain, but at least it’s safe, and there’s always a full box of cereal. But what is so fascinating — for a novelist, if less so, inevitably, for life — is that the home they drift back to is not the one they left.  In a few cases - admittedly extreme - mothers may long for their sons, and fathers for their daughters, but the children who return are, even after only a short while attempting to organise their own diets and dry-cleaning, not the precise same children who left home. They have led their own lives, however brief and disordered, and they wanted to hang onto them.  They don’t want to be subsumed back into the restrictions of dependence.  And their parents — well, their parents have changed too.

Of all the couples I have talked to while I was researching this novel, only two out of over a dozen said that they were, however much they loved their children, thankful to get their marriages back.  And they were people, I suspect, who had managed never to lose sight of married life on the way along, to a degree that caused one of their sons to say, ruefully rather than accusingly, that he and his sister knew that they always came second to their parent’s marriage, and always would.
For the rest, even those with busy work lives, they were left looking at something they possibly had not looked at very searchingly for a couple of decades or more — each other.  One man spoke almost tearfully about counting the years until his wife emerged — he hoped — from the fog of her absorption in their family, and looked at him again, as her first point of human interest (I didn’t like to tell him, however gently, that this might never happen…). Another said that he was thankful not to be paying all those educational bills any more, but that he missed, acutely, the quiet control that being the bill-payer gave him over his daughters’ lives.  A third said, quite candidly, that he wasn’t sure what he and his wife were going to talk about now, and he was sure she felt the same although neither of them, obviously, would articulate this anxiety…

The women were equally as pre-occupied.  They said, variously, that their husbands were immersed in work, or coming up to retirement, and that both situations made them self-absorbed to an alarming degree.  They said that they missed, keenly, being needed the way mothers of children are needed and that in some cases, they had used motherhood as an excuse not to test themselves in the outside world, and were facing the hopeless-looking “What now?” situation at an age where the confidence conferred by employment is very hard to come by.  They used a lot of the words I had been conscious of over ten years ago — bereft, lost, vanished, irretrievable, gone.  I then read the actress Jane Lapotaire’s account, in her autobiography, of her feelings when her son went off to university and there the situation was, in all its anguish, dramatically down on paper.

Given all these understandable feelings, do you think there remains the age old caution about being beware of what you wish for?
Absolutely!  And it is precisely that caution which dogs Edie Boyd, the central character of Second Honeymoon, who longs for her children’s childhood back in a way that supremely balanced women will find theatrical, and the rest of us will recognise. Edie has a husband, Russell, who hopes for her attention once again and whom she has, quite frankly, neglected in her absorption in motherhood. She has also neglected her career, as an actress, because it was easier to use her children as an excuse rather than face the endless rejections inevitable in her profession.  Her three children, two sons and a daughter, are in their twenties and, in one way or another, look as if they are launched on life, however haphazardly. And then — well, then the children fall into all the complicated economic and emotional booby traps that follow the emptying of the nest, twentieth century style, and Edie’s nest fills up again — but not, oh not, in the way she had anticipated.

It took you some time to make your thoughts into a novel. Why did you find the subject still asked to be put in a novel?
The late, wonderful writer, Alice Thomas Ellis, once had a column in The Spectator, called “Home Life”.  It consisted of extremely funny philosophical musings, and accounts, of marriage and family life in a house in North London.  One column — which I kept — began thus: “The world’s tragedy is this: that men love women, and women love children, and children love hamsters.”  I wonder if that is, in a nutshell, all we need to know to understand why the empty nest is such a big deal? And why, after all this time, I found the subject so alive still, to write about? Or is it that we confuse love and need? That’s one of the wonderful things about writing fiction — you raise as many questions as you answer…

What will your next novel be about? 
I never like to discuss my next novel, as I cannot never quite believe that it won’t all go horribly wrong!  However, I can't get away from relationships, because it's all I want to write about but, you know, I think it is time I get away from blood obligation to a different kind of obligation between human beings: this riveting thing of power, the control we have over ourselves, over other people. My own experience also tells me that that the time is coming to write about women among women — we need to take a clear look at our generosity and loyalty to each other.

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