Rose Tremain lives in a Georgian house at the top of a hill on the outskirts of Norwich. Entering her echoing hallway, the atmosphere is as peaceful and sophisticated as an art gallery. Upstairs, her husband, the biographer Richard Holmes, is working in his study and, if I were not here, Tremain would be working in her study, which is off to the right of the living room. She's hospitable, candid and laughs a lot. Perhaps it's something to do with the way I sink into a low couch with a view of the Norfolk countryside behind her, while she answers my questions from an elegant armchair, but meeting Tremain is an inspiring experience. She talks about personal and universal subjects in arresting language, in a way that feels almost as transporting and horizon-expanding as her fiction.
"They're about loss of love, friendship, status and, in the end, life," she says of the stories in her new collection, The American Lover, which were written over the past decade. Many of her characters are reflecting on pivotal moments which often involve heartbreak: "Love shakes your equilibrium, sometimes for magnificent reasons, sometimes for heartbreaking reasons," she continues. "If your life is a line, love interrupts it in a catastrophic way. I'm interested in the way life can change in an instant."
Readers should pace themselves ("One story a day or perhaps one a week"), allow stories space to resonate: "A story has to say something of substance with brevity. When a reader picks up a short story, because it's proclaimed itself as something important, a clock starts ticking in their mind. That doesn't happen with a novel. I want the reader to come away with the feeling that they've had something quite rich. They lose that if they gallop through the book."
Tremain, who has published four previous collections, has always avoided autobiographical fiction. "I find drawing on my own life dull," she says, but admits that the new book's title story, which was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, is in part based on an affair she had in her early 20s with an older man. "What a mistake to admit that there was a real life Thaddeus," she laughs, almost blushing. In the story, it's 1964, when 19-year-old Beth is swept away by Thaddeus, a 40-something American. "Perhaps we'll skim over that," adds Tremain: "Although there is a shadow figure in my life behind Thaddeus, the progression of the story does not follow what happened. He wasn't American."