![]() ![]() "I can't hide every trace of my entire life, but if I had more space I would have," she says, ruefully. Quite apart from the subject matter, the publisher in her - she is an editor at Headline Review - is only too aware of the risks involved in having a journalist and a photographer in her comfortably battered living room. She is talking very fast, partly because that's the way she talks, partly from nerves. They're just behaving like normal people." ![]() "It's Jews behaving badly," Mendelson says, all too aware that she will be accused of "letting down the side". When We Were Bad, one of very few novels written from the viewpoint of British Jews, revolves around a London family whose lives are turned upside down when the eldest son abandons his fiancee for an older woman on what is supposed to be his wedding day. Mendelson comes from a close, academic Jewish family, is one half of a lesbian literary couple, and is suffering an attack of stage fright about her most recent book. And so Charlotte Mendelson's three novels, full of close, competitive families of fierce love and troubled filial loyalty of lesbian yearnings both acted upon and ignored of being Jewish in Britain, reveal both a great deal and not very much about their writer. The great mistake is to assume that nothing has been adapted, twisted, changed, and, in the changing, become fiction. Nothing makes a writer bridle more than a journalist suggesting their fiction is autobiographical, though of course it often is. ![]()
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