Edward Carey: ‘I once took 15 years to write a novel’

1. What is your earliest memory?
   Picking daffodils in a Norfolk garden. There was also being forbidden to go on a bumper car in Legoland in Denmark because I was too small. That smarted.

2. Who was your mentor?
   I had an amazing English teacher at school called John Flint who inspired me very much. He taught us King Lear and I’m still in the thrall of his classes many years on. Later, I was lucky to have very generous support from the playwright Hugh Whitemore and the novelist and short-story writer Robert Coover. These two men gave me confidence when I dearly needed it. Things may have been very different if it weren’t for them.

3. How fit are you?
   I go running most mornings before dawn, but remain perennially stout.

4. Tell me about an animal you have loved.
   There was a bulldog called Gerty in the 1970s. More recently, at the start of the pandemic, we took in an abandoned black cat with a foul temper — an appalling brimstone beast that we love very much.

5. Risk or caution, which has defined your life more?
   Sometimes one, sometimes the other. About a decade ago I came a little off the rails — writing-wise — and thought I’d never write again. Returning to fairy tales and to children’s literature taught me to start all over again and to dare myself in my thinking and writing.

6. What trait do you find most irritating in others?
   The enabling of morons or monsters.

7. What quality do you find most irritating in yourself?
   Mind your own business.

8. What drives you on?
   The next book or the next drawing. There has to be something to work towards, or it all feels a bit desperate. In an unhappy moment, stalled or worried, lost or aimless, nothing works better for me than a sharp pencil (Tombow B from Japan) and a pad (Strathmore Bristol Vellum), and then the pencil might take you off somewhere, anywhere. It seems very modest, the pencil, but I don’t think it is. I don’t think it can ever be fully fathomed what the pencil can do.

9. Do you believe in an afterlife?
   I’ll let you know.

10. Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?
    Both, everything.

11. Name your favourite river.
    The Thames at low tide — I love mudlarking. Finding old bits of London in the mud each time I visit the city has always been an incredible delight. That you can find history in the mud any day of the week — Victorian, Georgian, Tudor, Roman — feels like a miracle. I love the Wensum too, as a Norfolk boy. I remember one weekend on the Wensum at dusk with a couple of friends and seeing a strange mist collect above the water. We were convinced it was a ghost. It was an experience to me as profound as the books of Alan Garner, which I read as a schoolboy and made me want to become a writer.

12. What would you have done differently?
    I don’t really go in for regrets. I once took 15 years to write a novel, which was probably too long — I should have told myself: “You might think about hurrying up.” My dear late father once said to me, “You might try writing books that people would want to read.” I’m still working on that.

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