Kit de Waal has had it with writers who turn their books into sermons. “You don’t need a message, you can just entertain me over a cup of tea and some biscuits. Who are you to tell people what to think?”
The novelist, memoirist and chair of judges for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction is warming up. “If I get a book that says it’s about identity, I just think I’m not going to read it. I don’t care, I want entertainment,” she says. Her 2016 debut, My Name Is Leon, about a vulnerable boy in the care system, won acclaim and awards for balancing gritty detail with joyful humour. “There’s so much shit in the world. Entertain me, make me laugh and cry. But please don’t preach to me because I can’t bear it.”
I’m speaking to the 64-year-old author through my laptop screen and instantly regret not having travelled to meet her in person. Since de Waal broke on to the literary scene in her fifties, she’s always seemed like the kind of woman who could do a few rounds of shots and still deliver the keynote speech at a literary festival the next morning. “Force of nature” is how she is often described in the genteel books world, where a novelist with a Brummie accent is unusual.
When I explain that my two sons have been unwell, preventing our meeting, de Waal is understanding — her third and latest novel is about the many pressures of caring for two young boys. The Best of Everything is a deeply affecting, character-driven story about a nurse who becomes a single mother in 1970s Birmingham. Paulette, an immigrant from the Caribbean, finds herself not only bringing up her son, Bird, but also Nellie, the scrawny young grandson of the man responsible for the death of her lover.
Nellie is lost, he’s trouble, but he’s desperate for Paulette’s attention, “winding around her legs like a hungry cat”. And although she still harbours resentment towards his careless grandfather, she can’t help but love the boy. “It’s like the two of them know each other from some other time, like they have found each other again.”
It’s a story of loneliness and sacrifice that navigates great sorrow with a remarkable lightness of touch. “Paulette is like so many women I know, from my childhood, from my friendship groups. She has this enormous reservoir of love and needs to put it somewhere. She is somebody who thinks they’re insignificant — and I love people who think they’re insignificant.”
The Best of Everything draws on de Waal’s experiences of growing up in a working-class family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Birmingham suburb of Moseley, which she described vividly in her 2022 memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes. She was born Mandy Theresa O’Loughlin to Arthur, a bus driver from St Kitts (like Paulette), and Sheila, a nurse from Ireland who was initially a child minder and informal foster carer. De Waal said she and her five siblings became like a “tight-knit tribe”, bonded by the chaos of their precarious family life with an “aloof” father and “a mother who was bipolar”.
“People would say to my mum, ‘Could you have my child for a week or a month?’ That happened all the time. I grew up in a three-bedroom terraced house where there were five children. There was a lodger in one bedroom, my parents in another and then one for all of us. I think it was 12ft by 10ft.” By the time she was ten, she had taken on a caring role. “I could bring up wind. I knew how to cream a bum with Sudocrem.”
It was a childhood that was “very difficult, very weird and also joyous. We laughed every day. At my parents rather than with my parents, I have to say, because they were weird. And both, in their own ways, racist.” Her father told his daughters not to marry white men, while her mother complained about the African nurses.
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Meanwhile, de Waal and her siblings developed deep bonds with strangers’ children. “Growing up in such close proximity to children you aren’t related to didn’t feel strange. It made me fascinated by informal parenting, where you have an emotional connection that you cannot explain. Love bridges the gap of genetics. Love just fills in that space.”
De Waal, who used to advise social services on the care of foster children before she became a writer, says she is even more certain of this having been through the adoption process. She and her ex-husband, John de Waal (a barrister and the brother of the writer and potter Edmund de Waal), adopted their daughter, Beth, when she was two-and-a-half, then five years later Luke, who was one at the time. “I found out that I couldn’t have children when I was about 34 and the consultant explained my options, including IVF, and I said, ‘Oh no. No, no, no.’ I went straight to adoption. And I didn’t mourn. I just thought there’s another way to have children and to parent. Did I need to have a child inside of me in order to love? No.”
She paints a happy picture of her life as a wife and mother. “I worked, I always worked, but I loved bringing up children. I like making jam. I like homemaking. I like flower arranging.” But then, in her late thirties, she began to experience early menopause and went on a “crusade” to try to understand what was happening to her body.
“This was way before talking about the menopause became this popular thing. All the books I found said that your husband has retired and your children have left home and I was thinking, no, I have a one-year-old and a five-year-old.” She says the drop in oestrogen made her much less amenable to situations she didn’t want to be in. “I started saying ‘tough shit’. That’s what I wanted to capture with Paulette, this sense of ‘is this f***ing it? Because I might want something else in my life.’”
De Waal embarked on a writing career late, having only started reading novels in her early twenties, when she suffered from insomnia. Then, just as her first book was being published, in her mid-fifties, John left her. “I was absolutely blindsided by it. And very disempowered. It coincided with the release of My Name Is Leon so I had this fabulous sense that I was wonderful as well as” — she feigns weeping — “‘How do I manage?’” De Waal adds: “I’ve never been happier. I’m genuinely fulfilled. I just found a second wind when I was published and thought, ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’”
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Over the past eight years she has seized every opportunity offered to her, from curating literary festivals to judging all manner of prizes (coincidentally, her former brother-in-law Edmund chaired the Booker jury just as she was announced as chair of the judges for the Women’s Prize, which has been “like getting a masterclass in women’s thinking”). She now divides her life between three different places: Leamington Spa, where she’s lived for 27 years (“It’s a poor man’s Bath and a teeny bit smug, but I love it. I’ve found my tribe now”); Wexford, Ireland, where she has family; and Leicester, where she is the writer in residence at the university.
She’s also been “seeing” a “really nice guy” for the past two years. “I would never describe this person as my partner — he’s my ‘boyfriend’. We did think about ‘beau’ but I don’t like that because it’s pretentious. Boyfriend feels fun. You might dress up for the boyfriend. There’s no underpants left at my house and no knickers left at his. We’ve gone on holiday together, but it’s still the nice bit before ‘Who’s taking out the bins?’”
Her sixties are surprisingly rich and fertile. “I feel like I’ve stepped into this last phase of my life and there are no dead spaces, no cold corners of the room,” she says. “The word I’d use about this part of my life is ‘unapologetic’. I spent so long in my life trying to fit, whether it was with the Irish community, or black people, or middle-class people, or working-class people. None of those groups fitted. It was like wearing a jacket that was a size too small and pinches. Then all of a sudden you put on a gorgeous jacket of silk that was tailored for you and say, ‘Hello, I’m comfortable, and I’m here.’”
The Best of Everything by Kit de Waal (Tinder £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members. She is in conversation with Bernardine Evaristo at the Southbank Centre, London, on Apr 9; southbankcentre.co.uk
