Too old to write fiction?
April 17th 2009 04:28
Dame Margaret Drabble
Respected English writer Dame Margaret Drabble has announced that she will not add to her list of 17 novels because she has developed a fear of repeating herself.
She will continue to write non-fiction, for which she is equally lauded, but made her decision regarding fiction when she found, while writing her latest book, a part-memoir, that she couldn't remember if she had used an incident from her own life in her writing before.
"What I don't like is the idea that I'm repeating myself without knowing it, which is what old people do endlessly," she told Britain's Radio 4. "The numbers of times I've heard people tell the same stories — the numbers of times I've told the same stories — and you don't really want to start doing that in novels, when somebody can say hmm, you wrote that in 1972."
Drabble, who was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008, is a sister of the writer AS Byatt and the art historian Helen Langdon, and wife of the writer and biographer Michael Holroyd. She also writes plays, screenplays, short stories and biography, and edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Drabble said she had told her publisher that she wouldn't be writing any more fiction, "but they don't believe me". Her literary agent, Jim Gill, said the comments were "based on how she feels" and "of course she would reserve the option to change her mind and write a novel if she felt like it".
guardian.co.uk, readersread.com; image: Sam Green, Boston Globe
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