Books
Marie Phillips: London is so divine
31.05.07 Katherine Rushton
"My number one piece of advice to aspiring writers is to work in a bookshop, especially if it's a little indie," says Marie Phillips, whose Gods Behaving Badly (Jonathan Cape) is out in August.
This is exactly what she was doing at London's Crockatt & Powell bookshop when Dan Franklin, publishing director at Cape made her a £50,000 offer for her début novel. She had emailed her manuscript to him on the advice of an Random House rep and the rest is history. "You get to meet all the publishers, all the reps; always work in a bookshop," she repeats.
Phillips' years of bookselling have also equipped her with a good dose of perspective when it comes to sales statistics. "You see books that you think are amazing crash and burn, and books that you think are pile of shit doing really, really well," she says. "It's a salutary lesson; you can't start judging yourself by how many -copies you sell." One quiet title she feels evangelical about is Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire (Faber), but she won't be drawn on the un-deserved triumphs—save to say they are well known and literary, "and sell by word of mouth, which makes it even worse".
Her own book is not quite literary—it's a funny, lighthearted adventure—but it still manages to make the reader feel clever with its sustained references to the classical world. The Greek gods are living in a dilapidated house in north London, bored stiff and forever squabbling as they slowly lose their powers. A catty attempt at one-upmanship (because Apollo won't warm Aphrodite's bath water) ends up involving two desperately shy Londoners in a mission in the Underworld, to save the mortal world from ending.
"The reason they're in London is total laziness," says Phillips, who has lived her whole life in the capital. "But if they're gods of the whole world it doesn't really matter. They're not the Greek gods; they're the gods, full stop. They could be in Sydney or Addis Ababa."
It's a comic juxtaposition: Adonis has to get his Grecian kicks as a fake oracle on a naff TV show, and takes revenge on a management consultant who spurns his advances on Hampstead Heath by turning her into a tree. The Underworld is accessed through Angel tube station on Upper Street.
Phillips is convinced that Franklin only likes her book as "light relief" from his seriously heavyweight list, but she has nonetheless given up the day job and thrown herself into writing full time. Her routine is structured around Australian soap operas and updates to her blog (strugglingauthor.blogspot.com), which acts like her umbilical cord to the outside world. "It's such an isolating thing, being a writer. I live alone, I work alone, so it makes me feel part of some kind of writing community," she reveals. "Plus, it's practice. Like doing scales on the piano."
Her actual novel-writing is largely achieved in pyjamas. "I doze while deliberately thinking about what I'm writing and then try and get a good hour done before I've actually woken up. It's a very fluid time," she says, then adds: "I get weird ideas—and I like having weird ideas. As you can probably tell."
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