Linda Grant: Abrasions of the Past

Author Linda Grant has clothed past insecurities with a confidence drawn from her series of highly acclaimed novels, the most recent being Upstairs at the Party. She takes time out from Edinburgh International Book Festival to discuss just how

Feature by Angus Sutherland | 03 Sep 2014

Linda Grant’s latest, Upstairs at the Party, is more diffuse than her earlier works. And that’s its strength. It’s more contemplative, less wedded to history. That’s precisely the point, of course. The action flits back and forth through time, as Grant is prone to do, but her protagonist here, Adele, has a different relationship with the past. Or at least she hopes to. In prior Grant fiction, her memoir Remind Me Who I Am, Again sets the precedent: history abrades. It nips at the heels. At York University, though, where the bulk of the action in Upstairs occurs, cloistered by geography and the self-centredness of youth, selves are fashioned out of thin air. Back stories are sent the opposite way, out into the void. Here Adele hopes to excise herself from family, alive and dead, and from the influence that they wield.

Grant sees this fool’s errand mirrored in her own university years, and does so with a wry fondness. As students, she says, "We think of ourselves as a collection of attitudes towards the world. But in fact we are more than that, and where we come from has formed us, but we are, I think, trying to conceal it." Adele remains an outsider. And, to make matters more fraught, all about her are bold and unapologetic personalities. Hardness becomes a substitute for the bombast of her peers. Faced with a sense of inadequacy, fearing a cultural clout that seems so inaccessible, she sharpens the tongue and hardens the façade. And, perhaps inevitably for a Grant book, clothes are enlisted in the process.

Grant talks about her own defensive hardening at university, her Scouse arrogance. "There’s that feeling of trying to cover up what you don’t know. The things which people who are posher than you take for granted." It’s a keen contrast. In Upstairs at the Party, Adele is branded ‘primitive’, and is duly buffeted by lofty ideas. The question of class is, perhaps inevitably, central to this opposition. Adele’s primitive designation is firmly rooted in her having come from Northern working-class stock. The buffeting comes from her various class foils. The buffeters are, for the most part, comfortably middle class. And that comfort is key. Grant recalls an exchange from her own York years – one that didn’t make Upstairs but easily could have – in which a peer is amazed to learn that Grant has never seen the work of Claude Chabrol. Where would you even track these pictures down, Grant wonders? "At the NFT, of course!" (N.B. Claude Chabrol was a French New Wave filmmaker, and the NFT is Southbank’s National Film Theatre. Of course.)


“If any writer’s honest, the pleasure of coming to a literary festival is meeting other writers” – Linda Grantr


Whatever insecurities Grant may have felt back then, class-rooted or otherwise, she presents a confident front now. Though her responses aren’t quite trotted out, they’re certainly the words of a veteran interviewee. Perhaps these questions don’t probe as well as they should. Then with a slight meta edge, the interview moves towards the process of interviewing itself. Does she enjoy the publicity circuit, the festivals? Our meeting is on the periphery of Charlotte Square, current home of Edinburgh International Book Festival. At this Grant falters. Media training or reticence hold her back, but she gives voice to that first, authentic thought: "I mean, if any writer’s honest, the pleasure of coming to a literary festival is meeting other writers." Which is refreshingly pander-free. And, true to her word, she’s arranged to meet Ian Rankin for a drink that evening. She concedes that they make an unlikely writerly duo. 

Improbable literary chums aside, Grant confesses that her writing life remains, per tradition, a solitary one. Social networking provides compensation, though. She describes Twitter and Facebook as today’s cultural salons. Indeed, Grant was tweeting as I tracked her down in her hotel lobby. On what? How foreign a country does Scotland feel? I try to cajole her into an answer, but she won’t be drawn. She and Rankin will doubtless discuss ‘the great question’ over drinks. Perhaps it’s friendships such as these that account for the stark difference between the Grant of today and her younger self. Where once she felt shut-out of the Guardian reading crowd – the Express and Mail were preferred in her house – she now writes for it. A realm that once seemed inaccessible now counts Grant as a firm fixture, for better or worse. With ten books under her belt, how could it not?

Early on in our conversation, I blunder a question to the extent that it seems as if I’m asking if her latest fiction is, in fact, autobiographical. This is a crass question, regardless of how loudly an author’s life might echo through her or his novels. Grant duly upbraids me: she’s forever being asked that. When The Clothes on Their Backs, Grant’s fourth novel, was first published, she suffered the same questions. Her response? "Yes, it’s based on my time as a pimp in pre-War Budapest." I’m chastened. So, though she can naturally lapse into what seem like seasoned responses, it is with some reluctance. Grant is eager to be guided off piste. This reality comes clattering into focus when we turn to her student milieu.

Because, looming prior to the Guardian and the string of published works, are the peculiarities of 1960s York University. The institution limps out of Upstairs with a reputation sullied. This may surprise those keeping tabs on Grant’s accomplishments. The university awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2012. In fact, she tells me, it was her visit to receive this recognition that spurred the novel in question. A suicide judders the heart of Upstairs, and, naturally, reverberates on to the novel’s close decades later. Upon discovery of the body, the students, rudderless, call members of the faculty. One response is callous, another is disinterested, which is somehow worse.

Grant’s assessment of her unfictionalised alma mater is every bit as caustic. "There were at least two [students] that I know who were later diagnosed with schizophrenia," she recalls. "I mean, very serious mental illness, and the university did absolutely nothing to assist them whatsoever. Kind of worse than that, there was a degree of crossing the lines between the faculty and students." Reluctant to go into specifics, her stride appears to falter. But then she forges on as she began: "I mean, not a deliberate exploitation, but people who needed proper medical help being offered a different kind of help by academics," she pauses for an instant, then comes to rest with, "So, as teenagers, we were caring for people who needed proper medical help." Even by its absence, that place bears down.

Those great formative years at Upstairs at the Party’s heart, their trauma, judders on unabated. Grant’s own experience seems scarcely different. History nips, history abrades.

Upstairs at the Party is available now, published by Virago