Julie Myerson is the author of ten novels including the best-selling Something Might Happen and three works of non-fiction, including Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in our House and The Lost Child. As a critic and columnist she has written for many newspapers including The Guardian, The Financial Times, Harpers Bazaar and the New York Times.
Julie Myerson
THE ACT OF WRITING feels like a search for truth in its rawest state, but in fact it’s pure artifice. A writer will spend hours, days, weeks, months turning phrases around and around until they feel most true. It’s an exhilarating kind of alchemy and I can’t live without it, in fact I am not even myself without it.
I AM CRAZY ABOUT GARDENING and will spend hours on my plot trying to make a world which looks like it sprung up just like that, alive and natural. And yet, like writing, so much of gardening is artifice. I love that it teaches you patience. You have to plant, wait, hope, watch very carefully and see what happens.
MY WRITING AND MY CHILDREN ARE UTTERLY ENTWINED. I wrote my first novel between having my second and third babies and writing and motherhood have always been threaded together for me in the most mysterious and profound way. Children always find their way into my books because I write about what moves me and they move me intensely, they always have.
I HAVE A BORDER COLLIE who is the sweetest dog in the world, a genuinely good soul. If writing and gardening teach me patience, she teaches me kindness and gentleness. And the importance of biscuits.
My CAT RULES THE WORLD. You think I’m joking. There’s an old bench under a quince tree in our garden which is her office. She has plans to overthrow Trump. Not many people know this and I may have to kill you now.
MY FAVOURITE FOOD is mashed potato and my favourite flavour is ‘plain.’ I am much teased for this, especially by my daughter who has always been adventurous about food.
MY SENSE OF SMELL drives everyone insane. I can step outside the front door and tell you if it’s going to rain. For a few years after my mother-in-law died, her perfume would follow me around the house. When my babies were small I could tell them apart with my eyes closed just by sniffing the tops of their heads.
I JUST DISCOVERED INSTAGRAM and finally I see the point of social media! But, though I recently got a smartphone, I still prefer to turn it off and just sit on the bus and think.
I HAVE MEDITATED EVERY DAY for the past seven years. It rescued me from a very dark place and I don’t think I could manage now without that extra space in my head.
I COULD NOT LIVE WITHOUT READING. At the moment I’m most inspired by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, James Salter and Elizabeth Strout, but it changes all the time. I want writing that shakes you up and and makes you re-think everything. The most exciting writers are the ones who smash through boundaries. I would always rather read a flawed novel that takes risks than a more perfectly achieved one that doesn’t.
