Seeing life's fragility, she seizes the day
Sometimes it takes pain for a writer to release the book she has inside. Not the ordinary pain of making art, but the challenging, vital pain of losing something or someone precious. That can make her think, "Life is short. What am I waiting for?"
It happened to London-based Meg Rosoff, who published her first novel in August, at age 47. To her amazement, "How I Live Now" is a young-adult bestseller in the United Kingdom and is off to a promising start in the United States as well. In England this month, the tale of a young girl caught in war won the prestigious 2004 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
Born and educated in Massachusetts, where much of her family still lives, Rosoff majored in English and fine arts at Harvard and spent 10 years in New York working in publishing and advertising. She moved to London in 1989, where she married English painter Paul Hamlyn (they have a 7-year-old daughter), and continued her advertising career. She became senior creative director for the British office of the J. Walter Thompson agency.
While she had a busy and successful career, the idea of writing fiction was always in the back of her mind. "Since I was 5," she said by telephone from London, "everyone said I was a natural writer, which I am, but I thought I wasn't any good at plotting. I didn't think I could do a novel." She had written one young-adult book in the girl-with-a-horse genre, but she calls it "a practice book" and never submitted it.
Yet her talent was celebrated in her family. "She was the one who wrote the best stories in school and letters from camp," recalled her mother, Lois Friedman, of San Francisco. "My father said he hated to get a letter from Meg -- they were so long and good he couldn't bear to throw them away."
In 1996, Meg Rosoff's youngest sister, Debby, was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died in 2001. Then another of her two remaining sisters was diagnosed; Rosoff says that sister is doing well. After these blows, Rosoff said, the world looked different.
"Something in my head went `bing,' and it was carpe diem," she said -- seize the day. "Life is short, and if you don't do what you want to do, you won't be around forever. I took two months' leave and wrote a practice novel [the horse book] and an illustrated children's book." She found an agent, who handled the sale of her children's book "Meet Wild Boars," due out next spring. The agent wanted more and thought the horse book at least showed talent.
Rosoff said, "I wanted to write for teens, because it has taken me so long to feel like an adult. A lot of issues with me -- lack of clarity, who you are in the world -- went on a bit too long. And I wanted to write a love story."
But she had no idea how to write for teenagers. "I was afraid if I tried to write in a 15-year-old's voice I'd sound like a complete fool," she said. "I asked my agent, `What are the rules for writing for young people?' She said, `There are no rules; just write the best book you can.' So I started `How I Live Now' in January 2003 and wrote a first draft in three months. People talk about getting a gift book, and this was a gift book for me. Something about that voice clicked with me. It came out of me like dictation. I almost couldn't keep up."
In "How I Live Now," 15-year-old Daisy, an anorexic New Yorker who narrates the story, is sent by her father to England to visit her aunt and cousins. They live on a farm. Daisy is cynical and jaded, and bitterly angry at her widowed father, who has married a woman she can't stand. In England, Daisy falls in love with her cousin, Edmond. Soon a mysterious war breaks out, and the world begins to fly apart, similar to Europe under the Nazi juggernaut. Daisy and her cousins ignore what is happening in the world outside until they can no longer.
Besides the internal drive to write, Rosoff was affected by the current specter of terrorism and war (terrorists have a key role in the book). She also felt there was a different atmosphere in England, after the Sept. 11 attacks, than that in the United States.
"There's a sense of the presence of war here that we don't have in the States," she said. "I lived in a neighborhood that was bombed during World War II. There are churches that were never rebuilt. Everyone here was thinking we may be on the verge of a new kind of world. Someone said to me, `How can you take the tube to work? My sister's husband is a policeman, and he says there's going to be a bomb on the tube.' Another element is I'm Jewish, and people say [of the European Jews during the rise of Hitler], `Why didn't they leave?' Why stay in a city where something could happen at any time? I thought of Kosovo as much as anything. If it could happen there, why not here?"
As it happened, Rosoff need not have worried about sounding phony. Young readers have responded strongly to Daisy's feelings and actions, and don't mind if the book's idioms and cultural references are not perfectly authentic. "I'm getting fan mail from teens who say it's changed their lives," said Rosoff. "It's quite overwhelming. One girl said to me it's the first time a writer wrote for teens in a way that seems completely honest." She dedicated the book to her sister Debby.
Success and acclaim would be drama enough for one person, but something else has happened to Meg Rosoff. In July, just before the book was published, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. "I'm in treatment now, and I feel very hopeful," she said. "It keeps you grounded. It's extra-focusing. My mission is to get well and write the next book."
In writing "How I Live Now," Meg Rosoff seized the day, and she means to seize many more. Having left the ad business, she has already written a screenplay for "How I Live Now" and one draft of a second novel, this one about a teenage boy. "It's much harder work," she said, "writing it in the third person." However hard, when it's done, her young audience will be waiting.
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.
