Hanging Out With Nigel Slater and Damian McNicholl

Nigel Slater (left) was feeling the effects of jet lag after his flight from London when he came down to the café at the Soho Grand Hotel, a few hours before he was scheduled to read from his memoir, Toast, but he was still up for a chat. I’d invited along Damian McNicholl (right), author of A Son Called Gabriel, because I’d imagined that putting together the two authors, who’ve written about growing up in Wolverhampton (Slater) and Northern Ireland (McNicholl) in the ’60s, might spark an interesting conversation.

After trading notes on London neighborhoods for a bit, we turned to the origins of Toast in Slater’s column for the Observer. A piece that he’d written about the memories associated with the British brand name foods he’d eaten as a child ran on a Sunday, the very next morning the phone calls from people offering book deals started coming in. Despite steady pressure from the publishers of his cookbooks over the years, Slater had “never joined the celebrity band of cookery people,” he said, carefully bracketing his personal life away from his public life. So a frank account of his childhood seemed counterintuitive at first, but he eventually became more comfortable with the idea.

Meanwhile, McNicholl had finished writing what he called a “cutting-my-teeth” novel which he almost immediately shelved, turning next to what he readily acknowledges as “a semi-autobiographical fiction—though I won’t tell anybody which parts are real.” He described much of the writing process as “expunging demons,” and said he would occasionally reread the previous day’s pages with tears in his eyes. “I’m very pleased to hear you say that,” Slater interjected; he had gone through a similar experience writing Toast. “I was writing about a lot of things I’d never really tackled before, like my mother’s death,” he explained. McNicholl believes their emotional involvement with their material works in their favor. “When people pay twenty-two, twenty-three dollars for a hardcover book,” he said, “they want to read something that’s going to move them.”

(more…)

22 November 2004 | interviews |

It Was Steve Englehart, Right?

The Oregonian interviews Greg Rucka, a thriller writer who’s more recently been toiling for DC, and is currently writing Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman comics simultaneously. “This is the first time in 30 years a writer has held the reins of all three characters at once,” they note.

8 January 2004 | interviews |