Letter

I am now nine months pregnant, with my baby due any moment. So I am passing the time here in Los Angeles by getting on with Persephone-related business, reading The Shuttle, and - of course  - pining away for all the hustle and bustle and wallflowers of Lamb's Conduit Street. Wallflowers are scarce in these parts, but to make up for it I have a lemon tree in my garden, plus an avocado tree at the end of the street, which means that the main hazard of my day has become trying to avoid having one of the enormous fruit that fall from it landing on my head on the way to the shops. Yikes.

My main Persephone task recently has been liaising with Focus Films, who are the people behind the film of our best-selling book Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. It is all tremendously exciting, as they throw around slightly daunting words like global-distribution-sales-projection-box-office-tie-ins-Fran McDormand-income-forecasts etc. In addition, following the enormous success of the film The Queen starring Helen Mirren, there is now a rumour going round Hollywood that many of the big film studios are specifically on the look-out for more projects featuring fabulous roles for older women. Some Persephone books fill this criteria, so we are now talking to a number of people in the film industry to try and persuade them to snap up some of our other titles.

I live just down the road from one of the best independent bookshops in the city, Booksoup, which I still waddle up the hill to browse whenever I can find the energy (which in the last few weeks has not been often, to be honest). Booksoup is particularly lauded for having a very full programme of talks and readings from authors, local and otherwise. Similarly, Chevalier's Bookshop in Larchmont does jolly well, as does Portrait of a Bookstore in Studio City. This success is hence in contrast to the likes of, for example, Duttons, about which there was a huge kerfuffle in the LA press recently when it was forced to close its Beverly Hills branch after just a few months due to lack of passing trade! So with independent bookshops' struggle to survive felt just as keenly here as anywhere in the world, the aforementioned provide an interesting case study in the ongoing debate about what it is that makes an independent bookshop work. Passing trade? Friendly staff? Stock choice? Or just luck? Who knows.

Impending motherhood means that I've been re-reading all the Persephone books that take motherhood as a theme; these include The Homemaker, Saplings, Family Roundabout, Princes in the Land and Hostages to Fortune (which has a birth of a daughter on the first page).  None have entirely put me off the idea yet, fortunately, though Princes in the Land came close with its amazingly honest and searing portrait of a mother who comes to be disappointed by the way her children have turned out. Persephone hopes one day to reprint a manual for mothers and mothers-to-be - a sort of How To Run Your Home Without Help for the pregnant. Nothing suitable has come to light yet…

I have now moved on to one of Persephone's latest books, The Shuttle, which is about American heiresses marrying English aristocrats. I was captivated from the beginning, not least because in her Preface to the book Anne Sebba mentions an advertisement placed in the Daily Telegraph in 1901 that read: 'An English peer of very old title is desirous of marrying at once a very wealthy lady… her age and looks are immaterial, but her character must be irreproachable…' It is the kind of advertisement that was, in fact, pretty common by this date - which I know about because of the subject matter of my next book, Shapely Ankle Preferred: a history of Lonely Hearts Ads. Lonely Hearts ads actually began much earlier than most people realise - as early as 1695 - so that by the time the Daily Telegraph was publishing them in 1901, they were a surprisingly well-established element of the courtship process.

Apart from The Shuttle, I am reading Richard Schickel's book on Elia Kazan.  He is a huge figure here, not afraid of speaking his mind, and he must have been enjoying the (literally) world-wide spat that ensued from his controversial LA Times article about book reviewing. It is a controversy that has been brewing for some time, that we have referred to in the Fortnightly Letter 30th May 2007. Here are two more responses: in the Guardian and the New York Sun.

Otherwise, I am looking forward to the first episode of my husband's new television series The Flight of the Conchords, which starts on HBO this Sunday (the reason we are in Los Angeles in the first place); and am just sitting and waiting for the baby to arrive, trying to enjoy my last moments of peace and quiet, while also indulging in some obligatory pre-labour nesting - all the while attired in my beloved Persephone pinny, of course. 

Fran
15 June 2007
Los Angeles