Anna Metcalfe interviewed Valerie Martin for the Financial Times.Martin was born in Missouri and brought up in New Orleans. She has written seven novels and three collections of short stories.
Her celebrated 1990 work, Mary Reilly, retells the Jekyll and Hyde tale through the eyes of a housemaid, and became a film starring John Malkovich and Julia Roberts. Property: A Novel, set on a plantation, won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003. Martin’s latest book, Trespass, is out now.
A few of the questions and answers:
Read the entire Q & A.What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?
Martin Amis’s Experience. The bit about the teeth. That really got me through the flu.
* * *
What was the last book you couldn’t finish?
Dr Faustus by Christopher Marlowe.
* * *What book do you wish you’d written?
J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.
--Marshal Zeringue