Interview:Novelist and former Observer food critic John Lanchester tells Louise Eastabout his new memoir, which explores his mother's background in rural Ireland and the identity fraud she concealed until her death
Once the province of retired generals and Arctic explorers, memoir is increasingly a writer's medium. In the last six months alone, we've read poet Andrew Motion on his mother's accident; biographer Miranda Seymour on her boorish dad and Jonathan Franzen on growing up geeky in small-town America.
Novelist John Lanchester is hardly a startling addition to their ranks. One of a handful of writers who can earn both whacking great advances and respectful reviews, Lanchester has three novels under his belt, and, as a former deputy editor of the London Review of Books, can lay claim to being a key member of the London literati. He's married to biographer Miranda Carter and boasts a suitably colourful ex-pat childhood - 10 addresses in six countries before the age of three.
But the story Lanchester recounts in his new memoir, Family Romance, is not one of amahs, sundowners and Fleet Street, but a tangled web of fact and fiction with rural Ireland at its dark centre. The unravelling of that web started five days after the death of his mother, a native of Lurgan, Co Mayo, when Lanchester discovered she was 10 years older than she had always maintained.
The possibility that this might be a simple, if extreme, act of vanity was discounted when Lanchester learned that his mother had stolen her younger sister's identity and name some 40 years previously. "It was a tremendous jolt, with the corollary that it also made sense because of how she was," he says. "She had an immense force of personality and yet she was very absent at the same time."
Shocked and grieving, he didn't piece together the reasons for this bizarre family fraud immediately. "It took a while to get to the point where I could face even thinking about it," he says sombrely. "It was like Bluebeard's castle because there were these giant trunks of paper which I knew I'd have to open at some point. But I did intuit quite quickly about the identity theft. Once I asked about the names, things fell into place with a giant clicking noise."
Lanchester's mother had been a nun. After one false start with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Wexford, she joined the Presentation Sisters in Tuam, and spent some 14 years with the order, much of it as the headmistress of a girls school in Madras in India.
But in 1938, at the age of 38, Sister Eucharia left the order, travelling to London without so much as a change of clothes. More than anything, she wanted a family (it was the death of her first fiancé which had sent her scurrying back to the sisterhood) and, to her delight, she was engaged again within nine months. Days later, her fiancé cut off all contact; Julia believed it was because of her age.
So when Bill Lanchester - kind, intelligent, and with a stated desire to have a big family - came along, she took matters into her own hands. Hey presto, Julia Immaculata Gunnigan, aka Sister Eucharia, became Mrs Bridget Teresa Lanchester, known to all by her nickname, Julia. The couple had a son, John, then suffered a series of miscarriages.
FOR LANCHESTER, THE one element of the story which was not a surprise was that his mother had once been a nun.
"I don't remember being told, I just kind of worked it out," he says. "My mum had this amazing ability to deflect things and, from an early age, I knew what I was not supposed to talk about. Once or twice, I asked direct questions, but it was very difficult and I certainly never got an answer on a subject that she didn't want discussed."
Julia was impressively thorough, and left little in the way of a paper trail. None of her letters revealed her true birth date and she never wrote or spoke about her early life. Much to Lanchester's surprise, he discovered his mother had trained as a nurse in the Richmond Hospital in Dublin; it was a qualification she could never use again once her identity had changed.
"That was an amazing thing to have kept quiet about her whole life," he says. "She was always very good at knowing how long you had to boil things for them to be sterile or how to tie a bandage. I just thought she picked it up along the way."
When Lanchester went to Ireland he discovered that Julia's family of six sisters and one brother were, like him, unaware of what Julia had done. "It explained a lot of things. My mother was very proud of being Irish and being a Gunnigan in a straightforward way. So why weren't we always going there? Why weren't relatives always visiting? Why was there this slight sense, never put into words, that there was something dangerous and difficult and charged about Ireland and about her family?"
For their part, Julia's family simply believed that their eldest sister, who now lived the life of an ex-pat wife transferred around the globe by Bill's employers at the bank, had become a fearful snob. "That was the only explanation that fitted. One of my cousins joked that Julia was the Posh Spice of the family, and yet she really wasn't like that."
What her family described to him was the shame and disgrace attached to leaving religious life in the rural Ireland of the 1930s. Not only did they vividly remember Julia's first fall from grace, but three of her sisters subsequently also joined - and left - the sisterhood. Overnight, Julia went from being a local heroine to the family pariah. Her parents did their best not to talk to her, and she was made to wear her postulant's dress for months.
"I think it was an absolutely key thing about my mum," Lanchester says. "She left Ireland in 1948 with that feeling of shame and the need to keep secrets completely intact. Everything about Ireland and the dynamics of her family subsequently changed, but for her, it was like a sealed jar, it was still alive."
LANCHESTER NOW BELIEVES that his mother may have told his father just before his death in 1983 - a letter written by Bill to his accountant refers to his wife being older than he. To her son, however, she never breathed a word. "The fact that she never told me means either she didn't trust me or she didn't trust the world. She had a thing about the world knowing things about her."
Only once did she risk her secret coming out, when John, an only child, expressed the desire to meet his 26 Irish cousins at the age of 18. "Thinking about it, it was bizarre that she let me go because it would only have taken one remark to have blown the whole thing open . . . So maybe 5 per cent of her did hope it would come out."
Family Romance is beautifully written - no trace of self-pity darkens its pages, nor, more remarkably (particularly, given the years of agoraphobia and panic attacks Lanchester himself has suffered) anger. Instead Lanchester performs a remarkable act of what he describes as "emotional detective work" in an attempt to piece together, not just what his parents did, but why they did it, and what they must have felt.
"The thing that still catches me by surprise is the sadness of it, in terms of her isolation and the price she paid," he says. "I thought she didn't work because she felt she wanted to put her feet up, and there was something awful about realising that it was because she wasn't able to use her qualifications. She did it, thinking it was a one-off decision, and instead, it kept on costing her."
It was only when he read the first draft of his own memoir that Lanchester realised how profoundly the atmosphere in which he grew up shaped him as a writer. Concealment lies at the heart of each of his three novels, even those written before he knew of his mother's deception.
"Very important things that are not said are a key thing in all those books," he says. "And I didn't know that. It was obviously just a complete preoccupation. Most writers have an itch they can't quite scratch and mine was something to do with my childhood."
It's a particularly interesting insight as, in all other respects, Lanchester's work is startlingly diverse. His debut, The Debt to Pleasure, which scooped every award going in 1996, is a blackly funny recipe-book-cum-whodunit. Such was its success that Lanchester's editor, Jon Riley, nicknamed it "The Invoice from Pleasure", yet with Mr Phillips, Lanchester changed register entirely, detailing in opaque prose a day in the life of a suburban accountant as routine and unflamboyant as a sex-obsessed Mr Pooter.
Then, just when everyone thought Lanchester's forte was the meditative portrait of the internal landscape, he switched tracks again and wrote Fragrant Harbour, a zesty, plot-driven yarn about Hong Kong in the 20th century.
"I rather envy writers who do variations on a theme," he says. "I like reading those books but in practice, I can't do it."
THE IDEA FOR The Debt to Pleasure was fully formed before he took on the job of restaurant critic for the Observer in 1992.
"The general interest in food was only starting, and part of my work was to write about the democratisation of food," he says. "There was something kind of fun about writing about this psychotic snob at weekends."
Its success enabled him to write full-time, an experience which in turn fed into his next novel. "Mr Phillips started with this figure on a park bench, who has just lost his job and doesn't know what to do. You see a different city if you're not working normal work hours."
In 1997, shortly before his mother's death, he returned to Hong Kong, where he spent much of his childhood, and observed at close hand the handover ceremony. "There was all this pomp and circumstance, flags being lowered at midnight and the Brits wearing hats with dead ostriches on top while it was pissing with rain. Everything was symbolic, all these big imperial abstracts, and that made me angry because it left out the fact that this is a place where people lived. That was what really made me want to write Fragrant Harbour."
The publication of Family Romance is not without its anxieties for Lanchester. Having written The Debt to Pleasure in near-secrecy, he suffered from panic attacks in the run-up to its publication. "The whole publication process felt like going into a skid. There was such a feeling of loss of control. If you're nervous of exposure, it's some weird primeval atavistic fear, like heights. It's not rational."
He is the first to acknowledge that such a fear does not make him the most obvious candidate to write a memoir, in itself a public act of disclosure. "I can't really pretend that exposure isn't part of it this time. I haven't really figured it out yet but somehow the exposure must be partly the point because otherwise why do it? I hope it will be clearer after it's had a public life, but I have a feeling it's to do with wanting it to be in the past. Part of it is me wanting to close the book."
What he worries about less is the reaction of Julia's family. "I was very, very apprehensive but those who have read it have been really nice about it. It suddenly make me think, if only she'd known this is what their reactions would be, maybe she wouldn't have had to keep it under lock and key. Their responses made the point that the cost of this was way too high."
Family Romance is published by Faber on Apr 5, £16.99