I can describe this process but I can’t explain it.” One day I had nothing and the next day I was working on it. With Mothering Sunday, there was no premeditation. I hadn’t written stories for decades and then suddenly I was writing lots. The stories in my previous book, England and Other Stories (2014), came to me inexplicably. But many things in life cannot be explained. “No,” he says, “there’s no agenda and Jane isn’t me. He suggests we start with champagne and, once we’ve clinked flutes, I ask if he was trying, in his new novel, to make himself interview-proof. Still, I hear Swift enjoys the kind of long lunch that’s synonymous with literary London’s past and, when he arrives, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, he asks with some relish: “So, we’re going to eat and drink, then?” Not only that – Jane, the protagonist of his new novel, Mothering Sunday, regards “interview chicanery” and “bothersome questions” as the banes of a writer’s life. Reading interviews with him, I sense that, although polite and thoughtful, Swift finds discussing his work a chore. Interviews can be nerve-racking affairs but, as I wait for Graham Swift at a crowded Soho restaurant, I feel especially apprehensive.
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