Likeable defender of the commas

By MICHELLE HEWITSON

Let's be frank about this: journalists hate other journalists who get horribly rich writing books. So Lynne Truss should be easy to hate.

To make it worse she's become horribly rich by writing a book about, of all things, punctuation, which ought to have sold about 750 copies.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves is the name of her book and it has sold more than two million copies. Mad, isn't it?

It is, she agrees, "quite mad." You can tell that she still can't quite believe it. And perhaps she doesn't, because she says she doesn't yet know how much she's made and she doesn't dare try to calculate it.

When you first meet Truss, you think that if she was a punctuation mark, she would be an exclamation mark.

She's bright and chatty and funny - just like her book, which she wanted people to read not as a style guide but as a book which "addresses you as a chum right from the start".

She is very good at chummy chat.

She suspects she has been a pedant all her life, but still she worried that anyone who wrote a book about punctuation would be "you know, chief geek for the rest of my life".

She is a geek, but not the sort of tsk tsk, look-at-you-over-the-top-of-her-spectacles sort of geek. She is a kindly, cat-loving, cardie and pearl earring wearing sort of geek.

She proves, alas, impossible to dislike. Not least because as well as getting incensed about misplaced apostrophes, she likes cats, and I like cats and people who like 'em.

She gets all teary-eyed thinking about how much she's missing her two 18-year-old cats who are at home in Brighton, being looked after by a friend.

"I desperately miss them and have little moments," she says, having one such moment. So she must be a good sort.

Truss wanted so badly to be a writer of books that she went into therapy in an obviously successful attempt to find out why she couldn't write books.

But she seemed to already know the reason. She thought she wasn't allowed to.

In journalism, she says, "there is meritocracy to a certain level", but "there is a literary class. I think, and I just wasn't from that".

This sounds odd because she was a columnist for The Times and won an award for that writing. In retrospect it probably sounds a little odd to Truss.

"It's very hard to remember it now, what it felt like before. It was all about being self-defeating. There were things I didn't think I was allowed to have."

There is still something of this tentativeness in her, despite all of that lovely new-found success.

When Robert McCrum interviewed her for the Observer, he talked about her "fairly well-defended inner melancholy".

She says, "Yes, my chums were very annoyed by that." She wasn't.

She was, and is still, grieving for her older sister who died almost four years ago of lung cancer.

"I was sad. I mean, I am sad about various things. I just think I'm quite serious rather than melancholy, but I think everyone gets very sad when someone dies."

But generally she rather mistrusts the idea of happiness.

Her next subject, she thinks, could be about "the burden of choice".

"And also having the burden of there's so much potential to be happy in life and it's all down to you to choose the right thing and if you're not happy, you're not choosing properly."

She doesn't have time to think about whether she might be happy.

Obviously, she says, "I'm very happy with the book and I'm quite cheerful, so that's probably the best you can hope for, isn't it really."

But "I don't think I'm very happy at the moment. I'm cheerful but I don't think it's the same thing. But I think it will get better."

She would quite like her life back - much of it is spent travelling to promote the book - if only she could "remember what my real life was".

Her mum ticks her off and says "this is a very good life you've got at the moment".

You wonder whether she'll ever get to the point where "I'll sit down and think 'oh, that was good. Well done, Lynne.' Then I'll count some money."

There is also the uncomfortable fact that her sister, she says, would not have enjoyed Truss' success.

"It's a very hard thing to say about someone but ... she would have hated it. I think it was just a natural sibling thing.

"But I think she always felt with other people too, that anything nice that happened to them was somehow taken away from her."

So you have to wonder whether the therapy was as much breaking through the sibling barrier as it was about the "class" barrier to writing books.

"Maybe," she says, "and possibly the rest of the family too."

She and the rest of the family lived in a council house on a working-class estate in West London. Her family were all heavy smokers and terrific feuders. Truss spent a great deal of her childhood sitting on the stairs "trying to keep out of it".

Which is good training for writers - sitting on the stairs listening and observing without getting involved.

She is still quite good at not getting involved in talking about her own life. Ask about her feuding family and she deflects it deftly with a reply about how "people didn't talk about those things," in those days, "so there would only be my house and what I saw and inferred about the world from the [telly] screen."

Now, "that's all people talk about. It's like that thing about saying 'Oh I love that jacket.'

"I do," she says, of my jacket, "it's very nice. Now everybody does it, and if they don't you think, 'what's wrong with my jacket? I thought I looked really good in this jacket'."

She is, like a good grammarian, also obsessed with things like the decline of manners.

Because what else is bad grammar and the misuse of apostrophes but bad manners?

Smoking also comes under bad manners. She hates smoking. Well, she would, wouldn't she? So she has little fantasies about carrying a pair of scissors and whipping them out to snip off the lit end of cigarettes.

She chuckles at the idea, and I say "you're going to be a dreadful old woman, aren't you?"

"I am," she says, delighted at the idea, "I am. I am going to have to take drugs to get rid of all the horrible feelings and frustrations."

What she will also be is a rich old woman, unless she goes mad and spends the lot. This is unlikely because "I've never had a sort of, if only I had a million quid I would, dot, dot, dot."

Most people would leave this sentence hanging, the ellipsis implicit, but Truss spells hers out, "dot, dot, dot".

What she has done so far with the dosh her dots and apostrophes and semicolons have brought in is pay off her mum's mortgage on the former council house and buy herself a convertible Beetle and a new office chair.

She thinks she might learn to fly because "it's the sort of thing that's normally beyond what you can justify, isn't it really?"

Oh, and she had some pearl earrings made. She shows them off, so after the jacket exchange I have to say, "I like your earrings".

And I do. They're very nice and so, damn it, in a cranky, geeky sort of way, is she.