Fay Weldon and Caitlin Moran on Living the Life

FAY I was married to a man [her second husband, Ron Weldon, whom she married in 1962] who didn’t like the sound of the typewriter so I just sat on the stairs and wrote… He was an antiques dealer and if you typed at the table it would be sold from under you anyway!

CAITLIN Do you think he was just trying to stop you from writing?

FAY He didn’t like the sound of domestic machinery, which was rather embarrassing if you had rather a lot of small children.

CAITLIN Most women writers are having to write around children. You can be in the middle of an amazing, profound thought and then someone falls off a rocking chair and boom, it’s gone.

FAY Well, the whole thing is about making order out of chaos.

CAITLIN I suspect that had I tried to find a husband at any point earlier than 1996 [when she met her music journalist husband Peter Paphides], I would have remained unmarried for the rest of my life. I can’t see how a girl like me, loud and disgusting, would ever have found a suitable husband in an era before the Smiths, say, or REM.

FAY I was never courted so I thought there was something really wrong with me. When I was 29 I went to a party and met a man there [Weldon], went home with him and sort of never left again – that went on for 30 years. I managed to keep the family [she came to the marriage with one child and had three more] and the career apart so that if I was on television I would remove the fuse from the plug so it would appear to have broken. If I saw an article about me, I’d tear it out of the newspaper so nobody could see it.

CAITLIN Is that so your children didn’t have a sense of you being famous?

FAY I didn’t want to disturb my family relationships by being anything other than a mother, because who wants their mother to have any interests except them?

CAITLIN I’m really lucky because my husband does the majority of the childcare and household stuff now. Had we been married 50 years go, he would have been looked down upon. So I am very scared of ever accidentally getting in a Tardis and trying to go back to 1952 and going on the pull, because I think I would do very, very badly. I genuinely don’t have any regrets at all about my life now. I am 36, I’m cruising along, I feel very happy about the whole thing. Are you an optimist?

FAY Well yes, you just welcomed what happened next, no matter how alarming it seemed at times.

ON WOMEN

CAITLIN When I was a teenager, the idea of being a woman seemed to be about being smooth and serene and beautifully dressed and glossy and just being and floating around and stuff and I just couldn’t see any way that I could do that. I was enormously fat and loud.

FAY If you look at a school photograph of 14-year-olds from my day, about three of them look good out of a class of 30, one in ten is a natural-born looker – and all the others are good women.

CAITLIN It was quite a dressed-down era. You look at photos of teenage girls from my time, and they’re not really wearing any make-up, their hair is simply washed and clean and they’re wearing Doc Marten boots and jeans. Nowadays you can do all these things with your hair and put all this make-up on. On the one hand, I like the fact that you can be in control of that, but when all women are expected to be beautiful, it’s just another job that we’ve got to do. I am massively conflicted about whether it’s great that we can invent ourselves every morning. Who has two hours every morning to invent themselves in that way?

FAY But it’s for other women, isn’t it? It’s not really for the boys.

CAITLIN If you talk to nearly any boy about how they like a girl to be, they like them in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt sitting on a sideboard eating cornflakes and just being giggly and happy and fun and chilled. They don’t want a girl in a tight bandage dress looking like Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love video, coming in all cool and sexy, because nobody knows what to say to anyone who is cool and sexy.

But I don’t think that’s why modern girls have such an obsession about the way they look, it’s because that’s all that they see. A naked, very thin, very sculpted body just seems normal today. There are girls in my area who as they start growing pubic hair, are straight down the beautician’s to have it waxed off.

FAY That seems totally bizarre.

CAITLIN Where are they getting the pocket money, for starters? I used to get a pound a month, how can they afford Brazilians? I can’t afford a Brazilian.

ON MEN

FAY I lived in an all-female household and went to an all-girls school. I never saw a man! Even after coming to England from New Zealand, where I lived until the age of 15, I was again sent to an all-girls school. You weren’t meant to have a boyfriend until you were out of uniform, and since you stayed at school till about 19, it could be rather onerous. But one got a lot of work done, got a lot of books read.

CAITLIN What was your idea of men then, who did you think men were?

FAY I thought men were amazing and wonderful people. My mother kept us and worked terribly hard and made such money as we had. My father still lived in New Zealand and very rarely sent money back as he was meant to.

CAITLIN Was he the only man in the world?

FAY I saw him once a year and could never think of anything to say to him. When one did see men they seemed so strange and foreign. But they brought life and energy into the house, something else other than housework, cooking, worry, anxiety – a sort of cheerfulness.

CAITLIN Did you think that anxiety was a female character trait?

FAY I think it’s a human trait, actually, and I do see a great difference between men and women, boys and girls. Little girls somehow contain their own energy, little boys just sort of flop and are totally relaxed and trust you. Little girls never quite trust their mothers.

CAITLIN That’s probably because I do keep stealing their crisps. They’re probably right not to trust me.

FAY From the age of about 13, seeing my mother’s lonely bed, and my own lonely bed, all I really wanted in life was to have a man in the bed beside me. What a very odd thing to think, not knowing anything about sex. The only naked person you ever saw was in the National Geographic. Me and my friend Nancy Bell would go into the bookshop and look at it in order to see a naked woman. Not a naked man.

ON BOYS AND GIRLS… AND WORK

FAY Boys are less confident than girls of being in control of their life, of finding another partner easily as young women are now.

CAITLIN Really? I genuinely don’t believe there are that many differences between the sexes.

FAY This is what feminism is all about, that you actually see people as people and not as a specific gender. I’m very pleased to hear you say that.

CAITLIN That is definitely how I am trying to raise my girls, except I have taught them to shout “Daddy, the patriarchy!” whenever they fall over… The thing I have got to do next is try to learn how to write a screenplay for How to Be a Woman.

FAY It’s half the work of writing a novel – you have a whole team of directors and actors. You give them the briefest of instructions so you don’t interfere with their craft.

CAITLIN Half the work of writing a book? I could simply leave here and go to the shops?

FAY Spend the money in advance, like I did with my first script, which they then turned down.

CAITLIN That’s it, I’m off to buy knickers, all sorted. Thank you, that’s the best advice I’ve had.

Enjoy more chat with Fay and Caitlin in Living the Life tonight at 8:00pm on Sky Arts 1