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In her last novel, Still Here, author Linda Grant extolled the virtues of chocolate-brown lingerie and gave explicit instructions on the best way to apply mascara. Fashion and beauty tips are not what you expect from a "serious" author - there's a sense that such things are superficial. However, Liverpool-born Grant is unapologetic about her passion for fashion.
She even has a blog, called The Thoughtful Dresser, in which she recounts her forays round London store Harvey Nichols and includes photos of her latest shoe and handbag purchases.
"It's a male conspiracy to say being interested in clothes is trivial," Grant says. "After all, men are interested in sport. You don't need sport but do you see anyone around not wearing clothes? I've always liked fashion and I think it's rubbish to say it's superficial.
"But I'm not a shopaholic. I can go for months and not buy anything at all. I just like looking, I like clothes. I think people like Chanel and Dior were geniuses. They were like Shakespeare and Milton."
Grant even wrote a piece for UK Vogue a few years back about clothes in literature. "Chaucer is highly descriptive of everything the Canterbury pilgrims are wearing," she says. "The first page of George Eliot's Middlemarch is about what Dorothea Brooke is wearing. There are descriptions in Jane Eyre about going shopping for fabrics."
In Grant's latest novel - the Orange prize longlisted The Clothes On Their Backs - she plays with her favourite subject to her heart's content.
Clothes are what give her characters dignity, show neglect, rebellion, lack of self-love. Clothes are the first things bought to reflect new wealth and the last possession and protection when all else is gone. Clothes can get people killed.
The Clothes On Their Backs is the story of Vivien, her timid Hungarian Jewish parents, and her colourful uncle Sandor, vilified as a slum landlord, barely mentioned by his family and relentlessly fascinating to Vivien.
Grant says the novel began with the idea of Vivien's parents, refugees terrified of attracting attention, living lives of grateful routine, fearful that any change might bring everything down and then they would "slide down the map of the world, back to Hungary, clinging on uselessly, ridiculously".
"That's where the novel started," says Grant. "Clothes kind of came over it gradually and fairly intuitively, almost without me noticing."
Since Grant is the daughter of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrant parents it's tempting to assume this novel has an autobiographical base. Like Vivien, her youth straddled two very different worlds.
"There was a very strong Jewish cultural identity that only existed in the house, and outside it was the 60s and it was all about Liverpool, the music and the poets."
But Grant resists the idea that any of the story is based on her own life. "I've never written an autobiographical novel although everyone always thinks every novel is autobiographical.
"I don't know where it came from. I think you see people out of the corner of your eye and they register in your unconscious and come back again."
For Grant, the ideal life would be spent very much alone, writing in the morning then wandering around London browsing at clothes and letting people register on her unconsciousness. But the growing popularity for Writers and Readers festivals means the more successful an author becomes the less time there is to write.
"We were talking a lot about this when I was at the Adelaide festival recently," Grant says. "I think you become a writer because you don't like doing those things. We're people who wake up in the morning, shut the door, turn on the answering machine and say, `leave me alone'."
"The nature of writing is that it's completely solitary. You hope there is somebody out there in the world who is going to connect with what you write, but they're doing it in their solitude, which is reading."
Grant wonders how some of the great authors of last century would have coped on the modern merry-go-round of literary festivals. She recounts a visit she once paid to the Dunedin home of Janet Frame.
"There was a woman incapable of dealing with the rest of the world," recalls Grant. "When I met her I couldn't even imagine her going down to the shop to buy a packet of tea. She was incredibly shy. There was a very small room with a big table which had everything on it - cups of tea, typewriter, manuscripts - and she sort of offered me this bread and butter that seemed to have been prepared two years earlier.
"I was only there 45 minutes but in the end I thought, `That's the way to do it'. It was amazing meeting her and I felt she really understood what the life of a writer was, which was keeping the rest of the world at bay. as much as possible. I tend to think that authors are best off staying at home."
