I once read an article where an author —for the life of me I can’t remember whom— said this, or to finish his sentence:

When I grow up I want to write like Peter Carey.

Personally, I don’t want to write like Peter Carey.  Although I have enjoyed some of his novels he seems a bit full of himself these days, like he’s started believing his own publicity.

However, leaving my petty prejudices aside, I couldn’t even aspire to write like him. I have an imagination but not that vivid an imagination!  I know my limitations and I can’t visualise ‘literary genius’ or ‘magical prose’, or any other superlatives you like to think of, being mentioned in the same breath as my name.

That’s okay.  It’s alright to have more modest ambitions, isn’t it?  To be a competent ‘second tier’ writer, as W. Somerset Maugham once famously described himself.

So...drum roll...

When I grow up I want to write like Joanna Trollope.

Why? Because she writes about the things I am interested in. Some call it domestic fiction—men and women and their life challenges and relationship troubles. The thing is she does it so intelligently. Her stories are not clichéd: her characters are realistically flawed and their lives are messy and complicated.

Of course, the things I admire about Trollope are the very things others criticise her about: her own modest ambitions. She is described as ‘accessible’ and particularly in her home country of England as ‘middle-brow’.  Anyone who has ever lived in Britain will know what a putdown that is.

However, Fay Weldon is apparently a fan. She has said Trollope “has a gift for putting her finger on the problem of the times. She likes to tackle the apparently easy, but really very difficult subjects – how parents get on with their children, and vice versa – which many a lesser writer prefers to avoid.”

I have yet to read Trollope’s latest offering, Daughters-In-Law, but I recently stumbled across a decade-old novel of hers called Marrying the Mistress.

How’s this for a premise: A 60-something married judge with two adult sons has been having an affair with an ambitious female barrister half his age for seven years, when he decides he wants to end his marriage and marry her.

What reactions does that sentence invoke? Sleazebag judge, gold-digging mistress, poor wronged wife, yes?

Trollope turns this on its head by making the wife completely unsympathetic. She’s so cold and passive she’s repellent. So much for preconceptions—I was ‘rooting’ for the judge and the mistress a few chapters in.

And her observations are spot on. Such as this, where Carrie, the wife of the judge’s elder son, Alan, is describing her teenage daughters:

In the kitchen, Rachel and Emma had cleared up approximately, doing the simple stuff like putting the plates in the dishwasher and leaving anything that required application and conscientiousness, such as scouring the roasting tin that held the chicken.

Oh yes, Trollope knows teenagers.

In the same paragraph Carrie goes on to describe her experience of mothering three children:

I had the sensation of dragging a whole lot of boulders uphill – nice boulders, boulders I can’t help loving despite their shortcomings – and then just as I get near a resting place, never mind the actual summit, one or two of the boulders roll out of my grasp and bump steadily down to the bottom again.

As a fellow mother-of-three I sometimes feel exactly like this.

I enjoy getting stuck into challenging books, but there are occasions when I simply want to luxuriate in an intelligent accessible novel, exactly the type of novel Joanna Trollope writes.

More importantly, Trollope is not possessed of a talent so otherworldly that it leaves mere mortals (such as me) depressed.  She is a writer I can hope to model myself on.

That said, she has written sixteen best-selling novels, so I’d better get a move on!