Driving Miss Daisy - Interview with Meg Rosoff

Award-winning novelist Meg Rosoff is one of those brilliant, instantly engaging women you’d love to have at a dinner party. Dry-witted but warm, confident but self-deprecating, she has an uncanny ability to express complex and disarmingly honest truths with charm and humour. Her blistering intelligence won’t surprise anyone who’s read her novels, which include What I Was, There Is No Dog and Picture Me Gone, which has just been nominated for the U.S. National Book Awards.

Based around teen protagonists, the stories are dark, complicated and funny beasts that explore war, incest, sexual identity, religion – a veritable Pandora’s box of taboo subjects for Young Adult fiction.
Her first novel How I Live Now, written when Rosoff was 46, has been adapted for the big screen. It stars Saoirse Ronan as Daisy, a teen swept up in love and war in dystopian England. Daisy’s battle for identity is a theme close to Rosoff’s heart. Describing her childhood and relationship with her mother as “very complicated” – “she has a strong sense of what is normal; a craving for us to be normal children and marry nice Jewish doctors” – the author explains how she so readily connects with teenagers.
“Your teen years are meant to be when you figure out how the world works, how love works, how to survive without your parents – and for me, it just didn’t work. You’re searching for the ability to see yourself clearly in order to see the world clearly, and in my family it was very difficult to do that. There were certain expectations and for me, clarity was hard-won. It took a long, long time.
“I remember very clearly, just a few years ago, still desperately trying to understand how the world worked (laughs). So when I write about teenagers searching for truth and meaning, it’s a very personal thing. For somebody who didn’t figure out what their calling is until they were 46, you can understand why that search for identity is so important to me and so fresh.”
Explaining her upbringing as a “distorted mirror” of secrets and omissions, Rosoff seems determined not to shield her young characters from the harsher aspects of life – nor indeed her own children. In a Guardian column entitled You Can’t Protect Children By Lying To Them, she emotively describes her battle with cancer, and her realisation that not being open with her young daughter Gloria caused more harm than good. “If you don’t talk to kids about the difficult stuff,” she writes, “they worry alone.” 
Echoing those sentiments today, Meg is resolute. “It’s a life philosophy, as well as a writing philosophy,” she. “It’s funny, my mother called me from California and said, ‘I found your article online and it’s very good, but I must say I don’t agree with you. We really must lie to children’. And I just thought, ‘Oh, God. Where do you think I got all this lack of clarity from?’”
Given her commitment to honesty, it’s no surprise that Rosoff cheerfully addresses the wariness she felt upon seeing her precious first novel being adapted for the big screen.
“I do think the film is amazing, but there are always changes that make you stumble. Director Kevin Macdonald is a much more dramatic storyteller, whereas I’m an emotional storyteller. The drama and power of his version is extraordinary, but I missed some of the relationships. I was a little bit taken aback when I first saw it, but once you get used to someone else’s version, it’s very exciting.”
She also admits that Saoirse Ronan wasn’t her first choice for the lead.
“Kristen Stewart had actually been up for the role, back when no-one knew her, and she was exactly like the Daisy I had in my head. Saoirse wasn’t what I imagined Daisy to be, but she’s a force of nature. She’s such an incredible actress, I’m thrilled with her take on it.”
More of Rosoff’s works will be hitting the big screen, as her novels The Bride’s Farewell and Picture Me Gone have both been optioned. Despite some residual wariness about adaptations, she admits a very practical reason to hand over control to a director.
“It wasn’t a difficult decision, because most writers need the money!” she laughs. “So you just go, ‘You’ll pay for film rights? Yeah, here!’”

How I Live Now is in cinemas now, and Rosoff’s new novel Picture Me Gone is available from Penguin