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CM: Gavin Wallace characterizes your work as very focused on areas of female experience alternately marginalized and besieged by an entrenched male value system, and he feels this creates a powerful statement about aggressively masculine values in Scottish society and culture. Douglas Gifford also points to this in terms of the way you deal with bureaucracies and structures in some of the novels and stories - how they seem to be very male-oriented. How do you feel your world plays with concepts of gender and social identities?

JG: I don't feel my work like that if I can help it. I've got a thing about looking at myself too academically - I'm sure the practice of academics is quite different and frequently quite hostile to the process that writers are engaged in. Where I'm coming from needs a lack of self-consciousness to kick in, not the hyper-awareness of academic analysis. My work is to ask "How does an intelligent woman cope with now?" That's it. I want to write as though having a female perspective is normal which is a damn sight harder than it sounds. I don't think people tend to regard "women's priorities" as in any way normal: so-called women's issues are still regarded as deviant, add-on, extra. Not the Big Picture. Women have written a lot of novels of course - that's the traditional way for women to try and record their truths, in the subterfuge, if you like, of novels. The structures and normal practices of both politics and the law make it difficult for women to speak as women directly because there's little accommodation for a female way of seeing. I think women's traditional attraction to fiction is just that - a go at reconstructing the structures. It seems like the place you live in is in some ways a fiction to the predominant culture which is called "reality." Simply for a woman to write as a woman, to be as honest about it as possible, is a statement; not falling into the conventions of assuming guy stuff is "real" stuff and we're a frill, a fuck or a boring bit that does housework or raises your kids round the edge. That stuff is not round the edge! Raising kids and running households - that's the middle of everything! Pointing up these other priorities, where what passes for 'normal' has no bearing on you or ignores you - that fascinates me.

And to reprioritize, to speak as though your norms are the ones that matter, is what's happened to Scottish writing as well recently. Scottish writers have started writing as though their language and national priorities signify, whereas for years we took on the fiction they didn't. The Let's Imagine we Matter thing is important. What if I don't accept I'm marginal, add-on territory - it's the same root for me. I think that's what's happened to Scottish work in general, what happens with some women who write. Sure, there's a paradox in that Scotland has bother big-time with noticing the links here, but there you go. Ha. Anyway. Reprioritizing. I hope that's what I'm doing.

CM : That idea you brought up - issues of Scottishness and well as issues of women writing - critics have seemed very split on which they think is taking priority in your work. Pat Kane reads it as very much as addressing issues of Scottish identity and class orientation, while someone like Margery Metzstein is reading it in terms of an agenda of expressing what it is to be a woman and not as engaged with issues of class consciousness or nationality. Do you fell that t his split is largely a fictional construction? How do you feel you're working with these two strands?

JG: There's no problem with that. Both of them can have perfectly valid cases without wiping each other out. In fact it's good. If everybody can see quite plainly what your agenda is then you're not writing fiction. When I find fiction exciting, the way I'm trying to make fiction, is to present a world to walk into, to offer stuff as elliptical and ambiguous as the world outside. Readers ought to encounter the characters as people, have opinions about them; be forced to address what they're bringing to the process. That pushing readers to acknowledge that they come with an agenda too, with a history, their own construct of what the world is, is part of the process. That to me is principally what fiction's for. I know it does other things - it's for escapism, it's for exploring universal truths, it's for stories dear me there are always stories - but I enjoy the fiction that asks me to look at where I am in the world. It's the kind I want to write too. I don't feel I'm addressing issues, I feel I'm looking at everything. My job is to go out there and be very honest about what I bring as well. I let my protagonists encounter things that to me are as real - as felt - as possible. I can't think "I'd better shove in a class issue in here, I haven't done it for ten pages" or "whoops - this woman's not much of a role model so I better change her". Ha. It doesn't happen like that. That's an academic's approach. My objective is to finish the damn book and get it as honest as I can make it. An academic's is to attempt to decode it. It's not mine. I don't begin with those perspectives. I begin with "I've got a story to write. "

CM: Your work is often categories as being lined to a Glasgow School of writing along with writers such as James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, and younger writers like AL Kennedy. Edwin Morgan says that you represent the city from "unexpected and familiar angles". How do you feel you work with that idea of a Scottish landscape or an urban landscape in your writing, and do you see yourself as part of this "school" or as something different?

JG: Jings. I think Very few people see themselves as part of a school- that's a very nineteenth-century idea somehow. I don't think Britain's ever been very comfortable with schools - the suggestion of shared alliances there. We tend to be people who fight each other. All British Writers hate each other, it's traditional. Ha. Anyway, the current field of so-called "Glasgow writers" aren't really - A.L. Kennedy's from Dundee, Duncan McLean is Orkney by way of Aberdeen, Irvine Welsh is from a small Edinburgh suburb. I'm from Ayrshire. Two of the writers you mentioned are indeed Glasgow born and bred, Alasdair and Jim. As well as writing about other places, Gray writes specifically about Glasgow - it's deliberate and necessary. Kelman is writing not so much about as through Glasgow. His landscapes are often alien, hostile places, more states of mind (albeit states of mind influenced by physical landscape) than anything else. They needn't be Glasgow, and less and less are they becoming Glasgow. He's moving much more into the territory of abstract writing. I never really think of Jim as Scottish at all, which always strikes outsiders as funny. You know that famously stupid remark about needing a dictionary to "cope" with the Glaswegian? To me it's completely unobtrusive, just a device to an end. Most who choose to get bogged down with the language are making a political choice - I won't read through this filter, I choose to make it illegitimate. I think Jim's writing through an existential tradition, using traditionally illegitimized language perhaps, but it's the existential stuff that shapes his meaning. That's the most profound thing about Jim's work, not the Scottishness. Anyhow, no. I don't think there is such a thing as a Glasgow school. The writers you mention know each other. I know Jim Kelman and like him very much. I know Alasdair Gray, I think Alasdair's fabulous. You didn't mention Tom (Leonard). I'm mentioning him now because I always think of Tom alongside Alasdair and Jim. These three are friends. They deliberately comment to each other about work and ideas. Jeff Torrington does it too. But women writers in Scotland - at least the ones I've met - don't tend to do that. The women tend to feel more isolated because they are more isolated. In some ways, they maybe even prefer to be. I've got a wee boy. The bulk of my time is spent trying to work out ways of being a decent parent to him, not forging fresh Literary Philosophy with the other gals, or even the boys. Going off to the pub etc? Come on. I've got other stuff to do. Ok I do blether about stuff like that occasionally to my dear, long-suffering friend Duncan McLean. To other women novelists? It's never arisen. Actually, that's not true either. It's just not down the pub or often. Some short chats with Jenny Diski, letters to Barbara Gowdie, one mind-bending conversation with Grace Paley, and a truly odd, inspiring weekend with Mary-Lee Settle spring to mind. The companionship of other women writers when I'm in a foreign country is always seized too: two Czech writers I'll probably not meet again have said things that stuck, that matter. What do you do when... How do you find the time to.... It's that stuff. What I get from talking to them is more the will to keep going. None are Scots I notice. Ha. That said, I will track down the work of women writers quite deliberately, feel inspired that way. Men are much more written about - the world is still very male-prioritized. Young male prioritized. There are many more books analyzing men's work, enthused by men's work, attaching the notion of substance to men's work. Work by men is much more readily available, is publicized more - PEN women's committee have the details if you need them. We're back to that question of what's "real" and "interesting". You do have to look slightly harder if you want to bypass the received wisdom about all that, especially if you're after writers who're not "marketed" as the jargon would have it. I do that on purpose, look for people to read. And I learn that way. But no I don;t meet up with other women writers consciously and talk about "our situation". Help. Being expected to is powerfully inhibiting. Because we're fewer, there's a strange expectation we'll somehow bounce off each other - you know, because we're both women and we're creative. Like being the only two gay men at a party. Alison Kennedy and I used to get paired at readings a lot, and it's been quite difficult for us to form a relationship with each other partly because of feeling that weight of expectation. That's hard. Same when you're paired with Another Scot in a foreign land. We'd better bond and not let the tourist board down. Oh dear.

CM: Your work has been compared to that of Kelman, Gray and Kennedy. Do you see similarities between yourself and these writers, or is that another academic construct? Out of what you've read in the past, what do you think has informed your own work?

JG: I would need to academicize my own work to answer that. I can take Jim's or Alasdair's stuff away and analyze it - I've been through the University treadmill and I know how to do it if I need to - but in order to write I need to shove all that to one side. I couldn't do it to my own writing till way after the event, and then somewhat circumspectly. There's some stuff I'm aware of immediately, I suppose. The influence of Alasdair's approach to syntax, for example. Alasdair talks from the middle of Scottish syntax as if it's the middle of Standard English - and when you see that written you think, "For godsake, it's so obvious. That is our Standard English" and it becomes yours too by sheer adoption of common sense. But I can't imagine reading something, pinpointing it as a Technique or Astute Post-Modern Device, evaluating its worth to My Artistic Objectives and adopting it deliberately in that way. That's not how writing works, for heavensake. I feel like the Last Great Naif saying this but writing can't be that cynical, that School-of-Writing analytic/academic Dot-to-Dot way and survive, either morally or aesthetically. Certainly not spiritually. Unless you've pathetically set your heart on being The New Joyce or somesuch, that wouldn't occur. You absorb what you absorb by feel. You just feel what's missing, what's required now, hope you have the imagination, the leaps of faith to find it. You can't scour late twentieth-century literature thinking "This is what I am trying to absorb: this is what I am trying to add to." I don't think you can read work in that deliberately predatory way - I will write like this because I admire it and it will make other people admire me in turn- and produce anything other than pastiche. I think in order to produce a cutting edge, a voice, it has to come from someplace subconscious, somewhere bigger than your conscious mind. You consciously craft your work, of course. It would be very arch of me to suggest you don't. In fact, you'll get mumbo-jumbo, flaccid rubbish if you don't. The application of all the powerful, rigorous craft you can muster is something you have to apply. But that's after. You have to have something of yourself to say first.

Other writing and writers can help you clarify it. Sure they can. You also learn the best crafting through reading. Alasdair, like I said, taught me a lot. Marguerite Duras. The first time I read any Duras I was astonished at having not encountered this woman before - she seemed to be writing what I wanted to write! I think Duras stands alone - a wonderful writer. The Lover blew me away. You know Machado de Assis? All this rubbish about Magic Realism and how it's new - Machado de Assis was writing all that stuff in the nineteenth century as if it was perfectly normal. Fabulous, stunning, subversive stuff. Jim teaches you stuff about hunger in the writing, keeping it lean. Virginia Woolf's sheer focus - you can do this all day, and you're aware you're largely talking about happy accidents. A book makes a difference for a lot of reasons - when you encounter it as much as anything else. A book that shook me when I was seventeen, for example, might have had no more than passing influence - or none - if I'd encountered it when I was thirty-five. I might have absorbed what it had to give me another way, been to different a person to let it impinge. I first read Jessie Kesson when I was nineteen - White Bird - and it was very powerful at the time. Disallowed people, the abused child-voice, her granting an aesthetic and moral sense where traditionally it didn't exist - all very powerful. Lewis Grassic Gibbon's italics! That he didn't use inverted commas! It can be things as simple as that that can blow you away. I notice I'm tending to talk about things I think fed my own writerly priorities. That's predatory too, I guess, but more like sniffing the flowers in the park than picking them. Aesthetic encounter, not acquisition. There's a world of difference.

CM : So which Scottish women prose-writers do you read?

JG: Ha! Not a discreet question. To tell you the truth I'm hardly read anything at the moment except music and social history books. When I'm reading bits I read bits of everything, so that's as wide an answer as you're getting. Names I go back to are Jessie Kesson and Catherine Carswell - Lying Awake gave me a real buzz when I read it. My favourite current Scottish women writers are poets in the main. I tend not to be wildly inspired by things Scottish, however. I don't find Scottish landscape inspiring, I don't find the Scottish weather inspiring; the Scottish people are just who I have - when you've lived in the same family for ages you're allowed to take them for granted a little. The faults of my country are the faults of my country and they are many, but they're what I've got to make sense of. I don't read other people's work thinking, "This is Scottish work, how do I relate to this?" If somebody I've met brings out a book, I'll have a look because it's interesting. If it's a book that's speaking to me, I'll make it a long look. I'll go to their readings to lend support or simply nose out what they've been immersed in since last I saw them. But if you asked me to name writers that blow my socks off, a fair percentage would not be Scots, fair percentage would not be women, a fair percentage would not be prose-writers. Where does that leave us?

CM: I do want to pick just a tiny bit more on this idea of Scottishness and the idea of the sense, especially in the past few decades with the rise of Scottish nationalism, the sense of being a minority, of being colonized. Welsh brings that up here and there in his work. I wanted to know what you felt about that perspective, and do you see links in the Scottish writing you've read? How does that fit with, say, writing from India or South Africa, with other writers who are dealing with possibly the same issues?

JG: Well, black writers who live in the States are who I tend to think of immediately. I remember thinking why did The Colour Purple sell in such massive numbers? What is it that the public imagination picked up on there? Or in Beloved? The Bluest Eye? The comparison might well be odious, or even tenuous, but I could hear chimes with Scottish women's situation in those books too. The chime that my language didn't make sense, was uneducated or stupid. The way I signaled not through my skin but through my mouth that I was not capable of True Understanding of Culture. Something about my people, in a less blatant way, showed we were "slave" class - fit to be grouse-beaters, crofters and soldiers. How can you have a soul or speak the truth in that voice? You know Tom Leonard's The Six O'clock News?

this is thi/ six a clock/ news thi/ man said n/ thi reason/ a talk wia/ BBC accent/ iz coz yi/ wi dny wahnt/ mi ti talk/ abootthi/ trooth wia/ voice lik/ wanna yoo/ scruff...

Now those books aren't primarily about value-judgments based in language, but the way they used language and talked about women and class rang big chimes with me. The biggest snobberies, biggest lies are those that lie unchallenged within language-use itself. I think that's what people were relating to in those books. Their language and priorities refused to defer to the usual power-structures. I see that as being important.

The book I'm writing just now has no let-out for 20th-Century Scots syntax. It's about a 19th Century German woman. I could still use my own syntax, I thought about it, but chose not to. It's been unsettling, but very illuminating. Other things - the rupture of sentences, the fragments, the placings of words distinctly on the page, the white space, juggling with tenses, musical notation - take the whole weight this time. In some ways it's an experiment, but I noticed it was the overtly Scottish elements that I chose to surrender. The "Scottishness" is something I'm able to jettison, at least this time around, but not the other formal challenges.

One reason I might be doing it is I got bogged down by the whole "Scottish" sales-tag - you know this mild feeding-frenzy that happened with Scottish writing. It kind of horrified me. Suddenly, it was like the whole thing was in danger of being contained, gift-wrapped. We were all "urban and gritty", even those of us who weren't. I felt a strong push of This is what's expected - this is what you guys do - and what was usually meant was certainly guys. The women got to be add-ons again or compare-and-contrast elements. The chaps and their priorities were the "culture", according to the New Yorker. I kept wanting to write and say Excuse me, there are women over here as well, taking only prescribed drugs if any. And I know some men who felt the same things - they were being hijacked, somehow. Twentieth Century consumerism is relentless. It got so the word "Scottish" started to mean this media-thing rather than anything else: I was having difficulty perceiving what I was about from what the media seemed to be telling me "Scottish writers" were about. I also lost a connection. Studying music, for example, I'd felt the lack of women and lack of Scots together. The apparent invisibility was my attraction to writing - writing to make visible. Now that Scottish writing has a profile, it's a bloke's profile, and one I find I wish to distance myself from. The most visible of it doesn't say a great deal to me about what I consider to be the wider priorities, the things I take for granted as my adult priorities. For whatever reason, I'm finding a need to shift sideways, to take away the bits that are buttoning me down. Scotland always meant something to me. It was a place to stand from a quite literally different perspective. Then that very geographical difference was used to make us out as clones. Scary. I guess shifting off the overtly, the apparently current Scottish expectations is my stab at clearing some clutter.

CM: Kind of linked to that, in the introduction to Meantime in 1991, you spoke very bleakly about women's writing being "flavor of the month" that would go out of vogue when publishers saw a limit to its usefulness. Revisiting that comment, do you still feel that may be going on with women's writing? Don't you feel it's a little more permanent?

JG: No. The word "feminism" has become a joke word again. We're all supposed to be too grown-up and blasê for that now - hooray hooray we can all wear push-up bras and pout again. It's so bloody stupid. Wee girls in school don't want to touch the word feminism; they know it means uncool. Cool is ladettes. Cool is trying to work the sexual pull of behaving like a naughty boy while abortion rates are soaring, and so are the number of single-parents, the bulk of whom are female. I think what I was trying to say back then, a tad cynically I'm afraid, was that one has to be very careful about marketing tools. Women's voices as women's voices seemed to have a platform back then, but you could see the end of that marketing strategy coming. Let's be clear that the writing itself can't be subverted if it's good writing, but marketing can sell a sound idea, a radical idea so the idea is secondary. The idea is being sold on the back of a sugar-coating, the purpose of which, first and foremost, is sales. Not aesthetics, or anything else related to literature. First is sales. Fair enough, that's what publishing houses do - it's a commercial enterprise these days. But it's risky territory to point to the success of a marketing campaign and say it's a success for some form of morality. That said, the readership who buy the books, for whatever reason, still get to access the writing as the writer intended it. Whatever the wrapping, the present inside ought to be as heartfelt. What was going on in the seventies, I think, was was that women's publishing houses had managed to acquire cachet. And while most knew there was something antithetical about radical ideas becoming marketing commodities, it had its place. Work was sold, read, reviewed. But I have a natural tendency to be canny. You get Warhol's fifteen minutes in the limelight, but must be very careful to remember that the limelight is not what it's about, and that it will go away. It's limelight's nature. A lot of readers will move on to the next thing, zero in on the next novelty. Others, of course, won't. But through the whole thing your job is just to keep the writing coming intact. I have seen people smacked very badly by thinking "This bunch of reviews must mean I'm a genius". "Flavor of the month" is a kind of blunt way to put it but marketing moves on. There is an enormous tendency to conflate marketing with value. It sells so it must be good. Well, mibby. But not necessarily. That stuff must be resisted for your own psychic survival.

CM: One more general question then I want to talk specifically about some of your work. Some women writers object to the idea of a male writer assuming a woman's voice in the narrative. Alasdair Gray assumes a woman's voice sometimes, and there are others. What's your sense of who's allowed to write in what voice?

JG: Jings. You're allowed to write anything. Permission from other folk ought not to come into it. You know what you have to say and why you're saying it. That's part of being a writer isn't it? That's why you picked that job, It's a control freak's dream. Does it say something valid? Does it say something true? Does it say something aesthetically pleasing? Does it say something worth saying - that's the big one. Others will ask that of your stuff, but how it gets written is by you asking that of yourself. Sure, you can look at other folks' work and think it's not valid, that it's a cynical exercise in shock-tactics, media-angling, or whatever. I don't think it's up to any writer to question another writer's sincerity or way of working with a view to stopping them doing it. That would be exclusive, terribly arrogant. I don't think it's up to me to assume that men adopting female personae are doing it for cynical reasons - the men's subjects are all dried up and now they're pinching ours . Ha. They're not. They're writing women out of their heads, male interpretations of women. Male visions. How could they be anything else? Alan Warner's women, for example. Never done fiddling with their stockings. Doesn't invalidate what else he's saying - of course not - but it does remind you Alan's doing the 0bserving. Which he is. There's no invisible narrator - that's a fallacy. Lassies in films is another one - always taking their tops off to try another one on, checking their nipples are at the right angle before they go off to the shops. Never see middle-aged women doing it. What's that about? Alasdair Gray's women are completely different: they're unknowable, powerful, apart. Terrifyingly rational. Men writing through female personae are not all doing the same thing. It's a writer's prerogative to get the material on the page as they choose. You can imagine you're a tomato if you like, for godsake. A wee green blob from another galaxy. How could it be not allowed? What gets scary is when reviews or media reinvent those books as How Women Think. The Definitive Babe. What the Modern Tomato/Wee Green Blob Really Really Wants. That's bollocks. Seldom if ever the writer's intention, surely. That's a newspaper angle.

CM: Foreign Parts got a lot of attention in terms of the relationship that you create between Cassie and Rona in the story. There's the sense of close companionship and a couple of critics have read it as maybe no necessarily being homosexual or lesbian, but an alternative relationship to the heterosexual relationships that have characterized Cassie's past. That sort of something else, an alternative way of knowing someone - what were you trying to create in writing the two of them in maybe this ambiguous way?

JG: I was trying to create a believable friendship. There was some funny reaction about it from some reviewers, though. Some chaps got a bit stumped why anyone would look at women if it wasn't to assess them for sexiness. Why no rape, someone asked. Are they queer? Dear me. Sexual activity is a tiny tiny thing, but sexuality makes up an extraordinary amount of your life. These women have no sexual interest in each other, but their sexuality is switched on nonetheless. Cassie's skin is far too open to other people in general. Cassie wants closeness, desperately. She wants tenderness and makes that very plain. And how she expects tenderness from a woman is a bit of sharing, a bit of companionship, a bit of getting drunk together, a bit of a laugh. I wouldn't say she's ruled sex off the cards. Somewhere in her head she's thinking, "I've been screwed enough by men, is it worth a go?" But sexuality doesn't work like that. Plenty of gay people would be largely heterosexual by now if it did. They're just two women. One's wondering what went wrong with her love-life in the past, and the other one is the unfathomable Other. In that, Cassie's being consistent. She never really understood what motivated the men in her life and now she's exactly the same with Rona. We see Rona through those eyes: unknowable and downright weird at times. In many ways it's distinctly not lesbian. Sex isn't clouding the issue. It might have been interesting to write the book with a male Rona, but it wasn't the book I chose to write. Cassie gets intimate by taking her clothes off. I wanted to take that away from her and see what she did.

CM: That brings me to a question about Rona herself. Cassie is very open and Rona is closed to her. What were you thinking of, putting the two of them together in this way? Why is it important that Rona is so unfathomable, is so closed off? How does she act as a foil for Cassie?

JG: By not being Cassie. Cassie's terrified of aging, of the inevitability of death: Rona's never thought about it much. Cassie seems to think you have to have the answer to your life quite early on and then you can live it: Rona lets things come, has no urgency. Cassie's acutely self-aware: Rona's blissfully self-blind. My fascination with women's magazines is there unspoken. In The Trick is To Keep Breathing there's a lot about women's magazines and Popular Culture - how it will really fuck you over if you trust it. One of Joy's problems is she'll trust anything, she's very earnest. Cassie's been a bit like that in the past too, but now she's reached the stage of "Hold on a minute - what's true here, what's actually right?" And what she's coming to towards the end is what Rona's somehow known, only Cassie's come to it consciously. You go around and you admire the scenery. That's just what you do till you die. Rona's not scared of that. Cassie's terrified time's passing - she can't even wait in the cemetery. And somewhere toward the end she realizes you can take your time - rushing won't stop it. Rona's got something that Cassie hasn't got. Stillness. Cassie's got fun sussed, passion - Rona hasn't. Cassie's vitality. They're feeding each other. I wanted to make a very tender relationship - women who know you gain from affiliation. They've worked out that they're maybe stronger, more rounded, for having each other.

CM: Q 9 Now in The Trick is to Keep Breathing, you bring in Joy's reading of the magazines and her buying into the possibility of "wonderful Lips in Ten Minutes". At the same time, she's very empty. We get long descriptions of her making herself up and going through her beauty routine but at the same time she's purging herself physically and emotionally. How were you trying to balance that sort of emptiness and and that sort of artificiality in the shell she's trying to create?

JG: Well. I guess you have to bear in mind Joy's largely emotionally wrecked during this book. Nothing is there for her - or what is, she can't grasp. That was part of the point - strip everything from her. I wanted to have somebody for whom the ordinary sustenance no longer existed. Then. What on earth would keep this woman getting out of bed? Because she does keep getting out of bed, even though she perceives the option not to. I was astonished by her keeping going, by the fact that people do. That something that drives us. Towards the end there's a kind of glimmer of insight as to what it is. If all you're doing is getting out of bed to see if the stars are still there, it's something. Stars, Christmas lights, a piece of music - that's all right. It's something. You take what there is, nomatter how small, and you build on that simply because you have to - the alternative is nothing. She hasn't come to terms with that in the beginning. I guess the whole book is about that choice. Is too little enough? It has to be enough for folk every day. These promises of very, very little things like 'twenty-minute lips" are at least a promise. A lot of people, I think, get by with that little. They're not doing it consciously - that's too sad to do it consciously - but we're all doing it. We find a gardening tip, a new Marks and Sparks ready-meal and find excitement in it, tell our friends. 50P off. It's a something. That's part of the daily getting -by, and that to me is what makes human beings heroic. That great works of art get made is remarkable, but more remarkable than that is that there is so much bloody misery in the world, so much effort and demand and folk keep at it, trying to construct, make it better. They rear children, cultivate vegetables, try to treat each other with kindness. Whether to keep going for that or not - that's what that book's largely about.

CM: There is consistently a strand of grotesque imagery that runs throughout your work. For instance, in the short story Blood, all the blood welling up. A lot of the stories play with this element of the grotesque, a bit of darkness, something that usually has some relation to the body coming through - and that seems pretty consistent. How are you working with that?

JG: I think that's true. I am obviously fascinated by physicality - sometimes repulsed, sometimes wildly attracted. In Where You Find It corners of men's bodies get eulogised over. Physicality is always a focus, particularly in Foreign Parts. There are rhapsodies about Rona's face, plum membrane on her lips, the body's resistance to exercise. Toothache and menstrual cramps. I'm obviously fascinated by physicality, partly to do with my own obsession with what Cassie's terrified of - death. Death is the most bizarre idea. Being then nothing. All this intricate machinery. Try and kill your body off and it will fight you to stay alive. It's also to do with my fascination with gender, the differences between men and women which are more pervasive, even at a physical level, than they seem. Maybe I should have been a doctor. My fascination is a common one, and very simple. The fact of being. For me it's very literal. If you're not fascinated with the simple fact of being, you've not got a lot to write about. There's something peculiar about the interaction of physicality with that which transcends physicality. Who wouldn't like to write about that?

CM: I'd love to hear a little more of what you're writing about now.

JG: Well it's a book about Clara Schumann. More people are aware of her husband Robert Schumann - yet she was the famous one during their lifetime. The most famous virtuosa of the nineteenth century, a concert career that spanned sixty years, Brahms' best friend. She had eight children, two miscarriages, nursed her husband through madness, paid for the entire family alone, one of her children died in a mental institution and she supported her dead children's children - you think Jesus, does this never stop? She kept a diary from the age of seven or so till the end of her life - about twenty years' worth had been lost, probably destroyed by her daughter after Clara's death. That kick-started me into thinking that even what's survived is partial. The stuff between the lines of what was written - that was where my interest lay. Her husband's illness - there's so much romantic rubbish spoken about mental illness and artistic creativity, as though rotten or nuts behavior is somehow ok for talented people - was begging for me to look at it. The meaning of her being a carer struck me. Their story, hers especially, covers a lot of my fascinations: the difference between perceived reality and actuality, the difference between what people would prefer to know and not know, silence, a woman's life, unrewarded love - all there. Clara Schumann didn't speak at all until she was four and at various periods in her life thereafter, she fell silent. So did he. As I said already, I was starting to feel a bit stranded with The Scottishness. It doesn't matter what I write it's going to be urban and gritty, isn't it? So to hell with that. This is not urban. A bit gritty but not in the ... um ... expected way. Ha. When I hit on a structure it sealed the idea. Do you know Schumann's song-cycle Frauen Liebe und Leben? A Woman's Life and Love? The structure of the song-cycle is the structure for the novel - or is so far. It's not finished. Quite an academic notion, come to think of it. Which is us back where we started.