Introduction

3Jennifer Johnston’s next book, This is Not a Novel, deals with Imogen whose brother Johnny, an outstanding swimmer, is believed to have drowned thirty years before but she is convinced is still alive. Retrospectively, Imogen remembers her life with her parents and brother, and their relationship with the disquieting German teacher, Bruno, loved and cherished by the whole family. Having witnessed a scene she should not have and knowing she should keep silent about it, Imogen literally loses her voice and is confined to a mental asylum. Years later, after her father’s death, Imogen (who has recovered her voice) finds a trunk full of papers, letters and diaries related to her family, and becomes aware of the connections between her withdrawn great- grandmother and herself, but also between Johnny and his great-uncle Harry.

Interview

François Gallix: Throughout The Gingerbread Woman—and right from the title—there are many allusions to the well-known English nursery rhyme, ‘The Gingerbread Man’:

Run, run as fast as you can,
You can’t catch me,
I’m the Gingerbread Man,
And I’m out of the pan.

My question is about whether you had in mind the nursery rhyme before writing the story or whether you decided later to include it in the structure of the novel? Did the story come before the nursery rhyme or the nursery rhyme before the story?

Jennifer Johnston: No, the story, of course, came first. But what comes into my head is an idea of a story, and this actually was started off as a radio-play. I was asked to do it by RTE. I wrote it and I was not very happy with it. But I was even less happy when I heard it, because they did it so badly! It was unconceivable. It was the story of these two people who were like ships that passed, and they told each other their story and they just both passed on. And the dog. The dog made lot of sort of dog noises in the play! It was so bad that I thought: ‘I cannot leave this story like this! This is pathetic! It has been born and it is really a sick baby. I’ve got to do something with it.’ So I had my entire story in my head—which I do not normally—and so basically I started to write it. As I started, it grew, and all sorts of things added themselves in, including the story of the Gingerbread Man who actually gets eaten by a fox, because foxes are cleverer in the end of all than Gingerbread Men. That just happened, and when I knew it was right, that was the moment when I said: ‘I am going to call this The Gingerbread Woman, because this woman is also eaten by a fox.’

Catherine Rihoit: This nursery rhyme, ‘The Gingerbread Man’, reminded me for some reason of The Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger. There is also this nursery rhyme in there. I wondered why it reminded me of it, and then, suddenly, I thought there was something similar in that you have this character who is on the lam, so to say, from love, and she thinks that as long as she keeps running, nobody can catch her. But, in fact, danger is not behind her, it is just in front of her. What is that about? Is that fate?

Jennifer Johnston: I suppose you could call it fate. I think one of the things one has to say to anybody who wants free advice—which is worth exactly what you pay for it—is: Don’t ever run away, because it is going to get you in the end. It is going to come round and get you the other way. Do not ever run away. This is personal. I learnt this from my life. We all learn this from our lives. It would be great if we believed the things that people said to us. Then none of us would ever get hurt or damaged or anything at all. So, you are right but it is not a nursery rhyme. It is a little story, a children’s story.

François Gallix: You once said that when you were writing, you felt that some of your characters were actually talking to you, sometimes almost dictating what you should really be writing. In The Gingerbread Woman, I was wondering which character actually talked to you. Did they all talk to you or was it only Clara, probably Lar as well? But did James also talk to you?

Jennifer Johnston: No. James is not good. I have a terrible habit of doing this. I use my male protagonist as just a method for the plot, like a piece of furniture. This embarrasses me because I feel one day I must not do this anymore. Right back at the beginning, when I wrote How Many Miles to Babylon (1974), I did not do that with my two heroes, but I did it with other people in that book. In The Gingerbread Woman, I could not help it and I kept saying: ‘I’ve got to get down to work on James, I’ve got to make James real!’, and then I could not be bothered.

François Gallix: But Lar is all right.

Jennifer Johnston: Lar is okay, and the dog, and Lar’s shadowy mother and father on the telephone. They were all okay. They are like a different book though, in a way, to Clara, because she has a lot of vitality and Lar does not have any really.

François Gallix: Whenever I sum up your novels—which is very difficult because of course one tends to leave out the essential—there is a lot of sentimentalism in the summary. But when one reads the whole book, it appears that you avoid sentimentalism, and one cannot really express that in the summary. I was wondering how you could manage to do this. Is it something you do willingly? How do you avoid writing a novel that would sound like a soap opera—which is not at all the case?

Jennifer Johnston: This is something that has always puzzled me. Why do some people seem to know how to write and other people do not? And the people who do not are a hell of a lot more successful than I am. They make an awful lot of money, which is what being successful is! I have never been able to work out why I hate sentimentalism, and yet my head is filled with romantic thoughts. Then, what is the difference between sentimental and romantic? Where do you draw the line? I draw the line by leaving out an awful lot. And when it comes to that moment when I finish, when I put the last full stop and then I go back and read the book, I think: ‘Well, now, what should I do?’ I usually cut. I very seldom rewrite bits at all. This is the fear of being sentimental. You just have to pare it down and pare it down all the time, so there is no room for the sentimental to creep in. But it is hovering around.

François Gallix: I was wondering whether that was not one of the reasons why your novels are so popular in France. Perhaps there is a need for readers to go back to sentimental stories, without, of course, the effect of stories that are tear-jerkers. There is this very pleasant idea that finally there is nothing wrong in the sentimental novel, as long as you ‘pare it down’ as you put it.

Jennifer Johnston: I just do not want to write sentimental novels. I really don’t! Whenever that word comes into a review, I get furious, because I know that my stories—if you can call them stories, because I am not very good on plots—tend to be, in my own head, sentimental stories: stories about people losing things and finding things and not finding things and losing things and being made unhappy and all the things that are what sentimental stories go for. I am just very frightened that one day I will write a sentimental book, and then that is going to be the end. It is the last book I will be writing. So if you please let me know!

Catherine Rihoit: Maybe also you avoid this trap because your heroes are like real people. This a great feat for a novelist to achieve. They sound like quite ordinary people but they are not ordinary at all.

Jennifer Johnston: Who is ordinary?

Catherine Rihoit: I don’t know.

Jennifer Johnston: Well, you see, that is the thing!

Catherine Rihoit: How do you achieve this feeling that the people you read about in your novels—they are like people, they are not even characters, they are people—you might meet them just by going down to the shops, you might just cross one of them on the street?

Jennifer Johnston: And then you become a character in a novel by me?

Catherine Rihoit: Yes of course!

Jennifer Johnston: You have to beware! I do not know. When you read wonderful novels, when you read the short stories of Anton Chekhov and when you read the plays of Anton Chekhov—he to me is God—he is dealing all the time with people. There is also the sentimentalist hovering around him there too, but it never breaks through. If I could ever say that I was influenced by anyone—and I would not like to say that, because I really have not been—I would like to be able to say that it was Anton Chekhov because I admire so much the way that he wrote. I have to read him in translation. I went in to learn Russian for three years so that I would be able to read Chekhov. I staggered through The Three Sisters and it took me about six months and I thought no, I would rather read it in English than do this.

Catherine Rihoit:I was going to ask you about Chekhov because I thought there was something Chekhovian in the atmosphere of the novel: the melancholy. There is a climate of melancholy constantly as though the characters—I was going to say the people again—as though the characters you write about had given up in some way. They are still standing up but they have given up. Maybe their illusions are gone.

Jennifer Johnston: Yes, but does this not have to happen to everybody?

Catherine Rihoit: It happens to everybody but how do you live after you have lost your illusions?

Jennifer Johnston: You just go on, like Chekhov says. You just go on. Uncle Vanya is the greatest ending to any play that has ever been written. It is phenomenal. And you know that these people are desperate, they are lonely, their hearts are broken, their lives are falling out but they are going to go on. That is terribly sentimental when you say it like that but it is not, it is reality.

Catherine Rihoit: I was wondering if the general theme of your novels were not: how do you go on, how do you manage to go on?

Jennifer Johnston: The people in my novels?

Catherine Rihoit: Yes.

Jennifer Johnston: Well they just do, they just go on. In The Gingerbread Woman, Clara probably will go and sit by the edge of the lough and watch the doctor fishing. She will probably get married to him and they will just go on being miserable. But they will have each other to be miserable with.

François Gallix: But fortunately you left that out. It is for the reader to decide.

Jennifer Johnston: The reader can decide that, absolutely.

Catherine Rihoit: I thought it was wonderful, leaving out the possibility of marriage to the doctor.

Vanessa Guignery: The title of your next novel, This is Not a Novel, is obviously a direct allusion to Magritte who is referred to as early as page two. But it may also be an implicit comment on your part on the status of this rather vague literary genre, the novel. I would like you to tell us more about this choice of a title.

Jennifer Johnston: It seemed quite simple to me. I was wondering what to call this book and I was wondering how to write this book, because I do not make a pattern or rules. I do not do things the way one should do in advance. I suddenly remembered this extraordinary exhibition of Magritte that I went to in Brussels. I had never seen Magritte before. I had seen postcards, I had seen paintings of his in books and I had always been very amused. I suddenly was struck at this exhibition by how magnificent this man was, and what he was trying to say does not come out in these postcards and reproductions in any way. You just get clever pictures which are looking at the world in a slightly skew way. And this came back into my mind when I started write this, and also just because one of my major problems in life is that I always make very bad jokes. I have always done this: all my books are filled with my very bad jokes and my brother is the only person who really likes my books because of my very bad jokes. He makes them too. He and I make the same very bad jokes. And we drive other people crazy.

I suddenly started to write this piece and I thought: ‘I will just see what happens’. I wrote that first couple of pages and suddenly I thought: ‘Yes, now I am going to jump into the sea, this young man is going to be a swimmer.’ Before I really started this I had fiddled around with making this to be about the son and the father, and I had written a lot of scenes like a play between the son and the father. The father was actually going to be rather awful and he was going to be bullying the son with his swimming and all this. Then because of this rather light-hearted introduction, I suddenly thought: ‘No, this is wrong, this is totally wrong. I have to have somebody other than the father.’ I am going to have the sister. So the sister in some strange way becomes the main character in the book. It was no more than that.

I wanted it in a way to be a little bit about Irish history and why so many Protestant people left Ireland after 1921, which is a question that is still hanging over everyone. Now some of them have started to come back, but it was hanging over people for a long time. So I knew a lot of little bits here, there and everywhere were going to go into this book. I thought: ‘Perhaps it is not going to be a novel after all, perhaps it is going to be a little bit of history. Perhaps it is going to be less history and perhaps it is going to be a cri du coeur by the girl looking for her brother. But maybe it is not going to end up by being a novel.’ I think it has ended up by being a novel but as it ended up by being a novel, I was not going to throw the first three pages away. My elder son says I should have, he says they are awful. But he does not like my jokes.

Vanessa Guignery: A few weeks ago during a public meeting in Paris, you said that your first idea for a title for this book was Echoes and I think that the echo is indeed a central motif in this book. It refers first to the echoes that each of the characters hears at their house near the sea. But there are also echoes between the characters: Johnny echoes his great-uncle Harry who died during the First World War and had homosexual tendencies, Imogen resembles her great-grandmother and would like to recreate her music. Could you tell us more about this motif of the echo?

Jennifer Johnston: It is a strange thing that when you start to write a book, you do not have these ideas in your head and it is like planting a flower or a little bush. You water it and you write. You water your bush and your bush will grow in different directions and so will the book that you are writing. A lot of those people who came into that book I did not know at the beginning were going to come in. And indeed the great-grandmother suddenly sprang into my mind. Now, all the places in this book are real places: my grandfather lived in one house in Amsterdam Road, and my other grandfather and grandmother lived in a rather grander house in lower Fitzwilliam Street. They are all connected and they are very much connected to me. Rather than any of the people being connected to me, the places are. Suddenly it came into my mind that the great-grandmother must suddenly become very important in this book and I wondered how I was going to write about her. So I just took the fact of her existence and I let that sort of simmer in my mind. This woman was a musician; she was born and brought up in a time and age when she could never have done anything with this except play the piano nicely at dinner parties or something like that. But she could never have taken this talent that she had and used it like a woman would now. I wanted to say something about that, about the helplessness of women in those days, the helplessness of the fact that her husband never told her about the letter he got and she found it and she committed suicide.

On the other hand, I knew about the echo I was going to have between Johnny and his great-uncle: that was going to be definitely an echo. And the letter that he sent his father, that his father gets after he is dead, is actually a letter that I have now in my bag that was sent to my grandfather by his elder son who was killed in Gallipoli. It is a strange letter that I carry around with me all the time. When my grandparents died, my mother somehow got this letter and then she gave it to my brother and he gave it to me. It is like a magic piece of paper in my bag. I have always wanted to use that letter. I have also wanted to use the poetry of Francis Ledwidge who is not a great poet but he is a very potent poet. He was an Irishman who came from a small town quite near Dublin called Slane. His family were poor people and when he started writing poetry he was a farm labourer or something like that. Then he met Lord Dunsany who suddenly thought, ‘This young man is very good’, and he encouraged him and let him go to his house and use his library and read his books. Then when the First World War started and the Irish were encouraged to go to the war, he joined up in Lord Dunsany’s regiment and he was at Gallipoli also. He was very badly injured and was sent back home. When he was at home, all his friends were starting to work their way towards the Easter Rising that happened in 1916. They tried to get him to join with them because they knew that he was a patriotic Irishman like they were and they did not want him to go back into the British army. They said: ‘No, stay with us. We are going to rise. We are going to push the British out of Ireland and there is going to be this wonderful thing that happens.’ But rather like Siegfried Sassoon, and indeed Wilfred Owen, he said: ‘No, I must go back because my pals are there and I have to go back.’ He went back to his regiment and was killed. But he had written some quite good war poems.

In my book, the great-grand-mother sets these poems to music. She hides them away and these are discovered by her great-niece after she is dead. The piano is still there and the great-niece takes the piano, learns to play the piano and plays her great- grand-mother’s music on the piano. And in her letter to Johnny, she quotes one of these poems by Francis Ledwidge, which is rather a nice poem (p. 100). It is not a great poem, but it is quite a touching poem and it keeps her going. She goes on. She does not know if her brother is ever going to come or not, but this is her song to him. Like The Gingerbread Woman, you do not know at the end if he will come. You think he will not come. If he does come, he may be a ghastly bit fat gay European man who only speaks French or German or Italian, and they would come and stare at each other and she will say, ‘Who are you?’, and he will go back to wherever it was. The world is filled with disillusion. They certainly would not fall on each other’s necks and say, ‘Oh, how I have longed to see you’, and be happy ever after, because nobody is ever happy ever after.

Vanessa Guignery: Talking about the style of your novels, you once said that you like the English language very much but that you were actually writing in Irish, because Irish had a different rhythm. It seems indeed that when I read your books, I hear a language which is flowing and which has an original melody or music. Could you tell us more about what you meant by that?

Jennifer Johnston: We are separated from our neighbours by a small piece of water and a lot of other things inside our heads. The Irish language was stamped out quite a long time ago for political reasons. I am not complaining about that because I love the English language and I am very very happy, I am very glad I was not born an Irish person in a country where one only spoke Irish because then I would not have been a writer. I love the English language but I do have to say that we speak and we use the English language in a much more flexible and fluid way than the English do. We cannot go back to Shakespeare—nobody can do that—but as for the English now, the English since the middle of the last century, it seems to me that their language is sort of diminishing all the time. They use fewer words, they are not brave with language. This is not totally true of all of them obviously—the Scots are rather more like us. But we have this other language behind us, and whether we speak it or whether we do not, it is there inside our heads. And we use the English language with a sort of abandon that they do not have. This has to do with the way we think about things as well as our use of language but we use the language that way because we think differently from the English. We have different perceptions in our heads. We are more interested in the strange things of life. The English are great but they do not believe in fairies! We do not believe in fairies either but we do behave as if we do, and when we use the language, we certainly do.

We believe profoundly that we invented language and we invented our way of speaking the English language. You can see all over the world where the English language has gone: to America, to Australia. The Australians are very funny. They use a sort of 1935 language in a most amazing way. The Australians have taken the English language and they have added to it the most amazing words. Obviously the language of the Aboriginals is in there too, but it is also the language of the Irish convicts, the language of people from France, from Italy, from the Lebanon. They have all invented this magnificent language which they use in their books and it is fantastic and very lively. The poor English are left with the bones of their language which they are not really making anything of. There are a few people who do, but there are not very many and I think this is sad. I think what we do with language is wonderful. Take Colum McCann. You must all go out and buy or get from your library a wonderful book called Dancer (2003) by Colum McCann. It is superb. In this, he has one amazing section where he has a sentence that lasts for four pages—it is just unbelievable. It is absolutely wonderful. You cannot put the book down and you can barely turn the page because you are so excited by the ‘busy-ness’ of this sentence. You do not think: ‘when is it going to end?’ You just think: ‘I cannot stop reading.’ This is a writer’s trick but then you can only use writers’ tricks with language. James Joyce was the man who changed language and changed the way we were allowed to write books. Up till then there had been the solemn Victorian novelists who were such a pain—I apologise, I know I am talking out of turn, but that is what I find. And then suddenly this man came along and broke all the rules, and for that I say: ‘Thank you God for James Joyce.’

Catherine Rihoit: I wanted to ask you about Bruno. He reminded me of the boy in the film by Pasolini, Theorem.

Jennifer Johnston: I have not seen it.

Catherine Rihoit: It is the story of a boy who goes and seduces a whole family. I found the character of Bruno extremely fascinating. He could have been the hero of the story because everything revolves around him, and yet he is always in the shadows, extremely mysterious. He is at the foreground of the story but at the same time he is in the background all the time. I loved the way the heroine of the story thinks that she is meeting him in the street or suddenly he is in the shadows and he is not there at all, or she smells his after-shave and then he is not supposed to be there—of course he is there somewhere.

Jennifer Johnston: He is there. He is in bed with Mother.

Catherine Rihoit: So Bruno is like a perfume somehow.

Jennifer Johnston: Bruno is like a perfume, a rather evil one. And the only person who does not like him also is Mathilde.

Pierre Cardin: Your book is dedicated to Francis Ledwidge . . .

Jennifer Johnston: The back of it, yes, it is.

Pierre Cardin: He is repeatedly quoted in the text, so is he not the real hero of the book and is not his destiny narrated through Uncle Harry’s?

Jennifer Johnston: Well, not really. It is a nice thought. As a man, he was an interesting man and he was heroic, but he was very heroic of his time. The people who went and ‘allowed’ themselves to be killed in the first World War, were they heroes or were they merely fools? It was the most terrible war that happened for really not very important reasons. And people just allowed themselves to go and be slaughtered because the bosses said they were to go and be slaughtered, and they went and they were slaughtered. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Irishmen—some enormous number—Germans, exactly the same thing happened to them. He was a brave man and he did not stay at home with his friends and take part in the Easter rising, which might have been a foolish thing to do. He said—I cannot quote him exactly because I do not remember how to quote him exactly—: ‘We are fighting for the rights of small nations and I believe that you are also fighting for the rights of this small nation but I want to fight for the rights of all small nations.’ So he went back to Flanders where he was killed and that was heroic. But I did not ever want him to become more than the man who wrote those charming poems, and then suddenly when I had finished I thought I had better salute him because he deserves that. But I had no other thoughts in my head.

François Gallix: Can I ask you another question about the use of a computer in The Gingerbread Woman? What sort of effect did you wish to create? There are so many references to it and the novel ends of course with the Macintosh.

Jennifer Johnston: Yes, it was my Macintosh. I just wanted to pay tribute to my Macintosh. I have got a wonderful one. I have got an iMac—that is something else. That is what success does for you: you buy an iMac! That again was my bad joke and I enjoyed putting those computer noises.

Mounir Nassor: While we were commenting upon your book, we were wondering about the meaning of the sequence of the consonants, ‘cccllmmm’ (p. 67 ff). Some were saying that it would mean the noise of the computer when you switched it off or switched it on . . .

Jennifer Johnston: Yes, yes.

Mounir Nassor: . . . or did it mean something else?

Jennifer Johnston: No, no, no.

François Gallix: There was no message, no code.

Jennifer Johnston: No, no. You university folk! You are always expecting things to mean more than they do. It is very nice and I suppose you have to earn your living somehow. But you take a modest book and you weigh it down with all sorts of ghastly meanings and then you ask the unfortunate writer: ‘What did you mean when you put ccclllmmm?’ I meant ccclllmmm!! That is what my computer used to say. Now I have an iMac that says something totally different.

François Gallix: But even if there was a code, we would not expect you to tell us.

Jennifer Johnston: Well, I am telling you the truth!

François Gallix: Do authors tell the truth?

Jennifer Johnston: Sometimes, sometimes.

Mounir Nassor: I wanted to ask you about the overall presentation of your book. Do you have any say when a book is finished and you give it to the publisher? Do they ask you about the colours, the cover?

François Gallix: Although you are very good at describing meals and drinks and jam . . .

Jennifer Johnston: Oh, I love food!

Question: In The Gingerbread Woman, the character teaches Irish literature and you refer to different authors and poets. Is there a reason why you wanted to list these authors?

Jennifer Johnston: No, they just came off the top of my head. They are the ones who get taught about in universities.

Jennifer Johnston: Yes, absolutely! I hate Philip Larkin too. He has been very rude about my books, what’s more!

François Gallix: You say about this poem that it is much better to read the poem than to spend money when you go the psychiatrist: ‘Roger McGough seemed more helpful and indubitably less expensive’ (4). Is that what you mean?

Jennifer Johnston: Yes, that is true. Reading poetry does you a lot more good.

Sophie Gaberel-Payen: You said that when you write novels, you hear voices. I was quite interested in that. Could you tell us more about it?

Jennifer Johnston: You will not believe me but I will tell you. I have had a lot of voices in my head for quite a number of my novels. Before I start writing and also when I am probably writing the last line, I have voices in my head. But the most positive experience came with Two Moons. Two Moons is about an actress and her very aged mother. They both live together and the very aged mother is a bit of a nuisance. I have my own study where I work and before I started writing this, this little fat man who looked like Dany De Vito kept coming into the room and sitting down on the sofa, just sitting there. He did not really say anything. This was not so much like voices. He just came in and he sat there. I was going on writing the book that I was writing but I was very aware of this fat man sitting there. He went on doing this for about three or four months. Almost every day, this little fat man came in and sat on the sofa. Then I finished the book I was writing and all the various things that happen when you finish writing a book happened, and this man was there. I thought: ‘I do not know who this is, this Dany de Vito, but obviously, whoever he is, he wants to get into one of my novels.’ So I started thinking about the actress and her mother, and I thought: ‘I had better start trying to see where I am going with this.’ I wrote this scene of the old lady sitting in the garden outside the house and suddenly, over the hedge of the bottom of the garden, comes a little fat man! I suddenly realized: ‘This is the little fat man who has been coming in and sitting next to me!’ And he turns into an angel and goes through the whole book. He is not the main character but he leads this old lady to death, which is a very important thing that we all find some way of getting to death. We are all going to die. We may not think we are going to die. In fact we all think we are never going to die, but we are all going to die. It is a very important thing that we have in our lives some way of getting to death that is not too painful. This angel takes this old lady by the hand and they do all sorts of mad things. But he sorts out the problem that she has had in her head for ever, for years and years and years, which is a problem she had with her husband. He sorts this out for her. He shows her this and then she dies—well, she goes off to dance with him in Sansepolcro but whatever. The minute I got him, the minute he came up that path, he left my study and he never came back again. For other books I have had other voices in my head but I never had a manifestation like that man. At the moment it looks as if it may be going to be made into a film and I am hoping they are going to give that part to Dany De Vito.

Mounir Nassor: Could you let us know who was the character who was talking to you while writing The Gingerbread Woman for example?

Jennifer Johnston: No, really. Because it had been a radio-play beforehand, I had sat down and I had worked in a different way on that. I had done it quite quickly. It was not a very good radio-play, I do have to say that, but they just screwed it up so much it was embarrassing. So when I sat down to take the radio-play apart and turn it into a book, they both talked to me, both those two people, Lar and Clara. Clara’s mother was very much in my mind a lot of the time too. Clara’s mother is the sort of mother everybody really needs, who is there and drives you crazy, but she is there and she is solid and she makes jam! I never had a mother who made jam and I always wanted one. So that was a sort of wish fulfilment: I wrote about a lady who made jam.

François Gallix: Did the radio-play help you in the editing of your story?

Jennifer Johnston: No, the radio-play was awful, but I might never have written that book if I had not written the radio-play first. Then it was unfinished business and I had to do something with this poor little sick baby, so I turned it into a novel.

François Gallix: So, there is no way we can hear the awful radio-play, is there?

Jennifer Johnston: It was absolutely awful, I promise you. The radio-play was terrible, I am not exaggerating!

François Gallix: Did you actually do some editing in your story? Did you write the whole story about Clara and then edit it?

Jennifer Johnston: No, it just grew. It grew a lot and all sorts of other people came into it like his parents, and the scene with her mother in the coffee-shop. None of that was in the radio-play. The radio-play was just really a dialogue between him and her and the dog and the doctor. That was all. It was not a very good radio-play. I do say it was not very good.

Question: You said that Irish English is different from the English language. Do you have any typical example of the difference between the two?

Jennifer Johnston: No, you just have to read English books and read Irish books. We all think we are talking perfectly normally, so it is only when you start thinking about why rhythms and things are different. You want to go to Dublin and you hear the people’s voices all the time. In England you do too but they are totally and utterly different. We talk about different things and we talk about the things in different ways. It is not that we have a different vocabulary—we do not. We have very much the same vocabulary but we just use our vocabulary in a much more fluid way than the way the English do.

François Gallix: In The Gingerbread Woman, there are many allusions to Inspector Morse by Collin Dexter.

Jennifer Johnston: It is just another bad joke.

François Gallix: I do not think it was a joke really . . .

Jennifer Johnston: It was a sort of joke because I love Inspector Morse so when you put yourself into a book just for a moment, it has to be a joke.

François Gallix: Also it puts a date on the book.

Jennifer Johnston: Yes, it does.

Pierre Cardin: The Gingerbread Woman will probably be interpreted in a post-colonial perspective. What is your opinion about post-colonial interpretations of contemporary Irish fiction?

Jennifer Johnston: Thank you. That is a lovely question. I doubt that this is the sort of question that writers get thrown at them by students and by professors and people like that. I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in whether a novel is post-colonial or not post-colonial. I do not write post-colonial novels. I write Jennifer Johnston novels. I am not political in that sort of way. I cannot put a finger on a post-colonial Irish novel at the moment which I could tell you about. Why do we need these labels? It is only to make things easy for some people. I do not approve of labels. I hate labels. I almost hate being called a woman writer because I just do not like labels. I cannot bear them. For too long we have all been labelled and put in pigeon- holes. This is why the Americans will not buy my books. They do not like them obviously, but it is also because I am not writing about Ireland. Perhaps were I writing post-colonial Irish novels, they would publish them. But I do not think so. They do not like my attitude, they really do not like my bad jokes, so they say no. So I cannot answer that question. That is the sort of question that you want to ask a really intellectual novelist and he will give you an answer or she will give you an answer and it will probably be a lie. You have to beware of novelists because we do take lies out of our head and pass them on with great pleasure.

François Gallix: You gave us the title of your new novel that is going to be published next March [2005]. You told us that your first idea for the title was War Games but that you could not keep it. Perhaps you could tell us why.

Jennifer Johnston: My publisher said that there was another novel called War Games, and if there is then you cannot use it. This seems silly to me but there it is. So it has now got a very peculiar title. It is called Grace and Truth which is a quotation from the Bible and it is quite pertinent, but it is a silly title. That is what it is called, Grace and Truth, and it is going to be published in March 2005 in English.

François Gallix: Thank you very much, Jennifer Johnston, for this very stimulating talk and we are all looking forward to reading Grace and Truth.

7Transcribed by Fabienne Béduneau, Nawal Mrini, Mounir Nassor, and Vanessa Guignery. Edited by Vanessa Guignery (with Michèle Théry).