Sophie Dahl's first novel draws on her childhood, but she's unencumbered by her literary pedigree, writes Róisín Ingle
A few moments after we meet, author and model Sophie Dahl politely requests that I refrain from writing about a minor aspect of her lifestyle. It's not a particularly earth-shattering titbit and anyway she is so charming that I agree, jokily suggesting that later she might trade me some other information in exchange for keeping schtum. I don't tell her this, but by other information, I mean her feelings about the press coverage of her latest romance, with singer Jamie Cullum, which is causing much fun for tabloid headline writers because of the difference in their heights. (To sum up: She's very tall, he isn't.) As it turns out, she doesn't want to say anything about her relationship. "Just say I said I was happy, really happy but that I didn't want to talk about it," she says at the end of the interview.
The granddaughter of Roald Dahl wasn't always so shy. When she burst on to the international modelling scene at 18, becoming a poster girl for normal-sized women everywhere, she blabbed unselfconsciously in interviews. "I was puppyish in my enthusiasm," she says of that life-changing time. "I was just so excited about being able to wear these gorgeous clothes and fly all over the world that I was so open about everything. I read the interviews now and I flinch slightly".
These days, aged 30, publicising her first full-length novel, Playing With The Grown-ups, she is more considered and unwilling to be "dissected" by journalists. Instead, she has done the dissecting, mixing a dollop of autobiography with a large measure of fiction to produce what she calls "a messy cake" of memoir and fictional elements.
The result is a lyrical - the grandfather in the book has hands "true as butcher blocks" and a voice "like the beginnings of a bonfire" - and accomplished coming-of-age story following the main character, Kitty, from childhood to what Dahl sweetly refers to as "grownuphood". Kitty has an unorthodox, eccentric upbringing with her mother Marina, a famous beauty who trails her children around the world searching for love and God while struggling with depression and drugs.
DESPITE THE FACT that Sophie had an unorthodox, eccentric childhood with her mother Tessa Dahl, a famous beauty who has talked publicly about her struggle with depression and drugs, and who once brought her children to live in an ashram with a guru, she is not keen on answering the question of how much is autobiography and how much is not.
"It's tricky, the autobiography question, because obviously with a first novel you do draw on that but I also run amok with fiction, so it's weird . . . I don't really want to go through the book page by page and say well that happened but that didn't, it takes away some of the mystery."
Regarding her childhood, she will say that "mine was probably slightly more disciplined than Kitty's because I was at boarding school for long stretches at a time and, unlike in the book, had one step-father who was around for a long time, perhaps it was the same in that there was lots of characters in and out of our lives." And while it could never be described as conventional, there is no sense of deprivation in Kitty's story - rather, it's a celebration of a childhood less ordinary because Dahl has no time for Misery Lit.
"I have no complaints about my childhood whatsoever," she says, sipping cappuccino on the terrace of a Dublin hotel where the waiters appear entranced by her beauty, coming over every five minutes to see whether she needs anything.
"My mother brought an element of magic to all of our lives for which I will be eternally grateful. It's so easy to write damning bitter books about childhood or parents and I think what I wanted to get across in the book is that parents do the best they can with what they know - but there is no formula to it, no rule book. It was a really lucky childhood and while, yeah, there were bits of darkness, which is known about because my mother has made no bones about her struggle with depression, the overriding memory of it is a very happy, good one."
She was always going to be either an actor or a writer, but a part a few years ago in a Bollywood movie, "the most categorically awful film" she says now, put paid to her thespian ambitions. Growing up, she was surrounded by relatives who were actors or writers - including the most prolific of these, Roald Dahl. Writing in a hut in his garden, he named the main character in The BFG after her and she says she wishes she appreciated this more when he was alive.
"I took it totally for granted," she says. "It was only when I started school and my grandfather would come to a school play I saw the excitement he created, it was like the Beatles were there and that's when I though 'oh', and realised a bit more," she says. "It's so annoying when I look back because there are so many things I would have asked him, I do have moments thinking I wish I could go and knock on your hut door and ask you a question about such a thing, he was such a curious mind with so much to say about everything, it's a wasted opportunity."
She says he had a "massive chair" to accommodate his six foot six frame. "The chair is still there and whenever you walk into the dining room there is almost a shock, even now, that he is not in it". She doesn't feel burdened by the fact that her grandfather is a literary legend, saying it was worse for her mother, also a writer. "She has started writing again, which I am so pleased about," she says.
DAHL THE SUPERMODEL, was discovered by the late great stylist Isabella Blow on whose doorstep she had plonked her sprawling 18-year-old frame for "a self-indulgent cigarette" after a row with her mother. "This woman spilled out from a taxi with a galleon ship hat on her head and I knew I wanted to be her friend," she remembers. Championed by Blow, Dahl, a gorgeous size 14, was suddenly everywhere and over the next few years she became more famous for her non-scrawny size than for her big-eyed, movie-star beauty. She left Britain for New York in her twenties to escape the caricature - "the constant discussion of my weight was a bit of an albatross" - and become an actor, but this turned out to be phase two of her modelling career, where she shed pounds and posed nude for the perfume ad that catapulted her into the world of high fashion. She is scathing of "our obsession with bodies and dissecting them, and as much as I love reading magazines in the hairdressers I always feel slightly tainted and I don't really want to look at a stranger's cellulite on a beach," she says.
Dahl the writer emerged after she'd written a rake of journalism for various magazines and completed an illustrated novella, The Man With the Dancing Eyes. She sold her current book on the back of one chapter and then panicked. "I felt I didn't know who I was writing it for and it felt as though I was just playing at writing a book," she says. After writing an article for American Vogue, she received a letter full of praise from a student in Los Angeles. "She said she and her friends stayed up all night talking about the article and said she wanted to read it in a book. Everything clicked into place then, I knew who I was writing for." The student, Caitlin Blythe, is thanked in the acknowledgments of her new book.
Before leaving Dahl and the smitten waiters I ask her about Jamie Cullum, thinking I might be rewarded for agreeing earlier not to talk about that minor thing, and she says she couldn't believe Radio 4's Jenni Murray ("I mean, Jenni Murray!" she gasps) also raised the issue of his height when she spoke to her for Woman's Hour. "It's an irony really having escaped the whole size thing first time around that's it's back in another form . . . I don't want to give it air time, I find the level of dissection uncalled for and baffling," she adds.
But the writer who still models will talk about her food memoir, due out next September. For more Dahl titbits, you'll just have to wait until then.
Playing with the Grown-ups is published by Bloomsbury, £12.99