Claire Tomalin | 'Investigating people's lives is what I most enjoy doing'

Claire Tomalin is one of the UK’s most distinguished and popular literary biographers. Her seminal books have sold well over half a million copies in the UK and illuminated the lives and work of some of the titans of English literature: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft. And in Ellen Ternan (The Invisible Woman) and Dorothy Jordan (Mrs Jordan’s Profession), they have introduced readers to two extraordinary, but previously unsung, women.

In the month of Tomalin’s 84th birthday, we meet at her home in Richmond because she has now trained her biographer’s gaze on her own life. Her measured memoir, A Life of My Own (Viking, September), is engrossing, contemplative and in parts, quietly devastating. It also provides a fascinating account of the fabric of one woman’s life in the 1950s and ‘60s, as she combined family life with forging a literary career. In her introductory note, she states that in writing the book, she was driven partly by curiosity. “What would I learn about myself?”, she asks.

As recently as 2011, Tomalin said in an interview that she doubted she would ever write a memoir. So why has she done so? “Well, I suppose because I’m so old! And also investigating people’s lives is what I most enjoy doing.” The process of investigating her own life was assisted by the fact that both she and her parents kept diaries, and retained large caches of letters. And the actual writing of A Life of My Own was influenced by her reading for Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Life, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. “One of the things that’s so extraordinary about Pepys is he shows that your life is seamless. Everything is part of everything else. You don’t go off to the office here, have a dinner party there, then have children there. All these things are interacting all the time. So I thought it would be interesting to look at my own life in that way.”

Born in 1933 to a French father, an academic who went on to work for the UN, and an English mother, an accomplished musician and composer, Tomalin’s childhood, though loving, was splintered by her parents’ ill-starred marriage and subsequent divorce. “As long as they were together, they poisoned one another; apart, they were restored to sanity,” she writes. She was a lonely child, for whom reading provided delight and consolation, as did writing poetry. While studying English at Cambridge (she graduated with a first), she met her first husband, Nicholas Tomalin.

I’ve had more opportunities than most and was privileged to know a lot of interesting people. But I certainly don’t want to set myself up as any sort of great figure

Although A Life of My Own contains a galaxy of encounters with literary stars - among them Julian Barnes, Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, with whom she had a brief affair (“it’s the only thing some people know about me”) - Tomalin is at pains to emphasise that her biography has been nothing special. “I’ve had more opportunities than most and was privileged to know a lot of interesting people. But I certainly don’t want to set myself up as any sort of great figure.”

Still, her eventful life has been punctuated by personal and professional drama, and by tragedy. She gave birth to two daughters, Josephine and Susanna, and then her third child, Daniel, died at six weeks old. A third daughter, Emily, followed, but by this time her marriage was in trouble. “We were parents, but in many respects, we were hardly grown-up ourselves,” she writes. Nick Tomalin, a gifted writer and journalist, was also a bolter: he had numerous affairs, and was often absent for weeks or even months at a time.

Meanwhile, his wife worked hard to hold their family life together and began to build a life of her own, becoming a publisher’s reader for William Heinemann (she was later told she got the job partly on the strength of scoring seven out of 10 for her looks), and subsequently for several other publishers. She was an early reader and advocate of To Kill a Mockingbird, and worked on books by Edna O’Brien, John Fowles and J G Ballard. She began to review, and subsequently became literary editor of the New Statesman, and then of the Sunday Times. Recalling these times was “very entertaining. I laughed a lot”.

A temporary reconciliation with her husband produced a fifth child, Tom, who was born with spina bifida. Despite her anguish over his condition, Tomalin determined to give him the best possible life, juggling what was effectively single motherhood with a burgeoning career at the centre of British literary journalism. She started work on a book about Mary Wollstonecraft. And then another tragedy: in 1973, Nick was killed in Syria while reporting on the Yom Kippur War. “Whatever the failings of both of us in our marriage, it felt now as if the sun had been eclipsed,” she writes. Further agony was to follow with the suicide of her daughter Susanna in 1980. Little wonder that Tomalin opens her introductory note to A Life of My Own by stating: “Writing about myself has not been easy.” She tells me: “Trying to write about a marriage to a brilliant and charming man, which was disastrous but which produced wonderful children, is extremely complicated.”

We sip tea in her sunny dining room, looking out into a beautiful garden where I spy Tomalin’s second husband, playwright and novelist Michael Frayn, sitting reading a book. So what did she learn about herself in writing A Life of My Own? “Well, I learned firstly that although you think you’ve made all your decisions absolutely individually, it seems to me that often I was just swimming with the tide, and that I was much more a creature of the time I was living through than someone who was making a lot of decisions for myself.” She pauses for a moment. “Writing my life, I looked at myself almost as if I was another person, and quite dispassionately: what the child me went through, and at my first marriage. It highlighted those moments where you either fall into despair or you pull yourself together. Every time Nick ran off with someone and my marriage got worse, it forced me to make an effort and to get a better job instead of being knocked down.”

I’m in awe of Tomalin’s steely spirit and her sinewy, youthful intellect. It’s hard to believe that she is approaching her mid-eighties. When I leave, she accompanies me to the bus stop, at one point sprinting up the road ahead of me to try and flag down one that goes speeding past. Writing A Life of My Own has made her reflect on “how fortunate I have been with the last part of my life: having a very happy marriage and work I really enjoy. One doesn’t want to be complacent: nobody knows what’s going to hit them the next day. But that late happiness perhaps is quite unusual”.

One lasting regret, as she makes clear in her memoir, is that she didn’t start to write full-time sooner. “Perhaps it will cheer other people up that I didn’t really get to do what I wanted to do until I was 60”. Nevertheless, her biographies, and now her autobiography, are testament that the benefit of age gives Tomalin remarkable perspective, both on the lives of others and on her own. “People can write very good biographies when they’re young but actually I think being older is a better situation from which to write them. I’ve got much more knowledge and human understanding now”.