Isabel Wolff

Biographie

Isabel Wolff by Isabel Wolff

Here, briefly, is the gen about me. I was born in Warwickshire, read English at Cambridge and, after five years as a struggling actress I got a 'proper job' at the BBC. I had twelve very happy years at the World Service, where I was a producer, then reporter in News and Current Affairs. I travelled widely compiling documentaries in Central America, Africa and the Far East. I also wrote freelance features for many magazines and newspapers such as The Spectator, The Evening Standard, and The Daily Telegraph who, in 1997, commissioned me to write a comic column, 'Tiffany Trott'. Within a month of the first column appearing, I'd been contracted by HarperCollins to turn Tiffany's adventures - or rather misadventures - into a book. To my amazement, HarperCollins then wanted another book, and another, and another and so somehow, without ever having set out to be a novelist, here I am.

In my novels self-deception is the main theme - the difficult journey from lack of insight into one's own behaviour, to wisdom and self-knowledge. That's why I write in the first person. I love the fact that my heroine usually doesn't see what's really going on. She doesn't 'get it' (or is pretending she doesn't) but the reader, gradually, does. So the reader is always just one step ahead, working it out, or seeing through the evident ambivalence of my heroine, or the naked guise. For writing in the first person opens up an ironic gap between what my heroine says and what she clearly feels, or between what she thinks is going on around her, and what actually is going on. We can all be self-deceiving, seemingly only what we want to see, and by the end of the novel the heroine finally sees, or is forced to face up to, the truth about who she truly is and what she wants. I write with a combination of humour and pathos because that's true to life.

Although the books are all written (so far) in the first person, they are not introverted, stream-of-consciousness novels, but romantic comedies with dramatic set pieces - weddings, christenings, charity balls, dog shows - and a number of on-going plotlines, which I weave together as if for a film. And this is the really hard part - the planning and structuring, because each book has to be very carefully worked out. But once I've cracked the main plot and the various sub-plots that shoot off from that, then the writing is actually great fun. That's when my characters truly come alive.