Press Release My Life on a Plate by India Knight • Introduction • Meet Clara . . . • . . . and find out what's on her plate • About India Knight • Praise for My Life on a Plate "India Knight dishes us a helping of humour and heartache on the condition of the modern Mrs." — Elle "Sharp, witty . . . Knight's novel is groundbreaking in current fiction in that it attempts to investigate modern marriage: what it does to women, their sex drive, and their sense of self." — Marie Claire Introduction "I am staring at the half-eaten ravioli on my plate," says Clara Hutt when talking about her life. "The cream and Parmesan have congealed somewhat; the rocket leaves on the side, though still glossy, have started to wilt. It's not unappetizing as such. There's nothing wrong with it. But it could look better. It could make me want it more. It could make my appetite rear up and roar. It's like my life, I think to myself in that dazed, half-lit way you sometimes find yourself drifting into in the middle of a conversation. It's my life on a plate." My Life on a Plate received rave reviews in the United Kingdom and the United States (the Evening Standard reviewed the book in an article titled "Eating Bridget Jones for Breakfast," then ran excerpts from the book for a week!). Vogue called the novel, which has been published in sixteen countries, "a brilliantly funny debut." The author, India Knight, contributes www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com 1 of 8 Copyright (c) 2003, Houghton Mifflin Company, All Rights Reserved
Transcript
Press Release
My Life on a Plateby India Knight
• Introduction• Meet Clara . . . • . . . and find out what's on her plate• About India Knight• Praise for My Life on a Plate
"India Knight dishes us a helping of humour and heartache on the condition of the modern Mrs." — Elle
"Sharp, witty . . . Knight's novel is groundbreaking in current fiction in that it attempts to investigate modern marriage: what it does to women, their sex drive, and their sense of self." — Marie Claire
Introduction
"I am staring at the half-eaten ravioli on my plate," says Clara Hutt when talking about her life. "The cream and Parmesan have congealed somewhat; the rocket leaves on the side, though still glossy, have started to wilt. It's not unappetizing as such. There's nothing wrong with it. But it could look better. It could make me want it more. It could make my appetite rear up and roar. It's like my life, I think to myself in that dazed, half-lit way you sometimes find yourself drifting into in the middle of a conversation. It's my life on a plate."
My Life on a Plate received rave reviews in the United Kingdom and the United States (the Evening Standard reviewed the book in an article titled "Eating Bridget Jones for Breakfast," then ran excerpts from the book for a week!). Vogue called the novel, which has been published in sixteen countries, "a brilliantly funny debut." The author, India Knight, contributes
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regularly to a number of British newspapers and magazines and was recently shortlisted for the Bollinger-Wodehouse Prize, awarded to "the most original comic writing — what has really made people laugh over the past twelve months" for this book. Now published in paperback from Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books, My Life on a Plate is the perfect cure for the end-of-summer blues.
Just optioned for a film by actress Minnie Driver, who says she was born to play the part of Clara Hutt, My Life on a Plate takes a comical but sometimes disheartening look at what comes after "I do." With wit and humor, Knight introduces a story that parallels her own, tracing a woman's life from her marriage to and eventual separation from a charming yet reserved husband to the angst of her career interviewing celebrities.
Although thirty-three-year-old Clara Hutt finds that she's not discontented with her life as a part-time journalist and married mother of two, she's not as happy as she expected to be, either. She has a perfect, elegant husband who is passionate about his career as a fashion magazine editor but not about her and their two boys, who can be darlings or absolute terrors with simply atrocious language, and she has just botched an interview with an up-and-coming dance star who may or may not forgive her for insulting him and giving him head lice.
Clara makes for a completely believable character — sassy, irreverent, a bit plump, and sometimes even a little mean. Who wouldn't love a woman who knows that sometimes singing Madonna songs gives a girl the guts to follow her heart?
Meet Clara . . .
Meet Clara in her own terms:My name is Clara, which is quite pretty, and my surname is Hutt, which isn't, although it enables me to think of myself as Jabba the Hutt in my more self-loathing moments. This is useful. I have two children . . . I have a husband, Robert, who is a mystery (does anybody actually know what goes on in their husband's head, or is it just me?) but quite attractive. I have a part-time job as a magazine writer, a big house and nice clothes . . . I am thirty-three. And some days I wake up with the feeling that my life isn't all it should be.
Meet her mysterious husband:
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Robert, in his wisdom, chooses to spend his weekends supine on the ecru sofa in the living room ("his" room), listening to opera, with the door shut. Because he is so tired. Because his life is so tiring. His levels of exhaustion would suggest he was a particularly overworked junior doctor, rather than a magazine editor who took long lunches and came home at seven.
Meet her unruly sons, Jack (three) and Charlie (six), who use bad language and ask those difficult questions:"Everyone has a mummy, dumbo," says Charlie. "Everyone comes from their mummy's tummy."
"Do they?" asks Jack, fascinated. "Even Batman? Who puts you in there?"
"The daddy," says Charlie helpfully. "The daddy gives the mummy a seed. You were a seed. A little seed."
"I was not!" says Jack.
"You were a stupid seed. I was a cool cowboy baby with cool guns."
"Mum-mee, Charlie says I was a seed."
Both the boys gazed expectantly at me.
"You were a sort of seed," I say, vaguely, wondering if 7:45 in the morning is really the time to go into all this.
Meet Clara's best friend, the one who is single, child-hungry, and sometimes a little frisky. Needless to say, there are moments when Clara envies her, and moments when she does not:"Anyway, so he comes in for coffee and we start kissing and so on, you know, and end up in bed . . . And . . ." There is a dramatic silence. "And he was Mr. One-Inch," Tasmin says, looking cross but fighting, I can tell, a laughter fit. "He was Mr. 'Is it in yet?' Basically, he had a weeny peeny."
"A weeny peeny!" I stammer, weeping with mirth.
"The weeniest!" croaks Tam, helplessly.
"A weeny peeny and a flooby tongue," I scream, beside myself.
"And he liked talking dirty," Tamsin says.
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"Nothing wrong with that, in theory," I say, sobering up.
"Absolutely not," says Tam, wiping her eyes. "But he kept referring to the WP" — more sniggers — "as Little Dave — he was called David . . . Anyway, it was all downhill from there."
Meet the temptation — a sexy Irish dancer:His skin is sheeny with sweat and he's wearing a skin-tight white T-shirty affair, through which . . . you can see his erect nipples. Beautiful legs, though. And arms, actually — sort of sinewy. I have to concede that, speaking as a purely detached observer, i.e. on aesthetic grounds alone, Dunphy is a bit of a fox. Sexy, even. Speaking, however, as the kind of observer who's spent time with him, he also, to me, looks exactly like what he is: a vain, tight-T-shirted, poofy-eyed creep.
. . . and find out what's on her plate
Clara starts the meal with an appetizers — for appearance's sake, naturally . . .Like me, all my girlfriends are, and have always been, on intimate terms with London's beauty counters, and I've always thought there was something pretty suspicious about women who weren't. Why, for start, deny yourself the joy of looking better — unless, of course, you have yourself down as a total babe in the first place, which I suspect many of these artfully "natural" types do. Still, who in their right mind wouldn't swoon at the little sable brushes, lovely eye colors in dinky little pots, scented creams, tingly astringents? Who would say "No thanks" when given the option of making their eyes twice their natural size?
For the salad . . . perhaps something from the country?Nature and I aren't what you'd call immediately compatible. There's so bloody much of it and it's so pitifully low on shops. I would love vast fields of undulating wheat much more if there was a tiny shop in the middle of each one. Nothing too de luxe: we're talking small, unobtrusive accessories boutique rather than, say, giant Harvey Nicks . . . And maybe fewer cows? . . . Angst aside, I need to address the fact that the wardrobe absolutely doesn't contain a single garment that works in the country. One of the greatest mysteries of life, if you ask me, is the question of how people — women — dress in the country without looking almost incredibly unfeminine. If I dress
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for the country, I look like a drag: like a middle-aged truck driver in a bad frock.
The entree is quite traditional, garnished and glazed rather unforgettably . . .I am forced to consider the increasingly likely possibility that I am some kind of retro throwback. Am I really the only person around that took the "keep thee only unto him" bit of my marriage ceremony seriously? And does this make me somehow comical? . . . There's a difference — isn't there? — between going to bed with people because the sun is shining and it seems like a good idea to lie in the long grass, and betraying your husband of a rainy afternoon?
With a side of Doris Day, just to keep the meal interesting . . .I hate my streak, but I can't help having it, nor it me, and I've given up on trying to shake it off. My Doris streak — hello, trees! hello, sky! hello, er, Rock! — is, I think, an inevitable by-product of my family situation. It's what happens to you when your immediate family is a convoluted mass of divorce and fragmentation. At the end, deep down, you want to be the one to break the pattern . . . The streak is responsible for my fixation with wanting to be mother to my children, and no one else's; be married to my husband, till death us do part. The streak makes me want to be neat and nuclear; sometimes it even makes me think I wouldn't mind being suburban.
But she will do without any dieting, thank you all the same . . .I don't believe in dieting. Me, I'm anti. I constitutionally disapprove of any slimming regime, on the heartfelt principle that Life Is Too Short . . . The kind of women who ogle a biscuit and then, guiltily, take a bite, squealing a winsome, "Ooh, it'll go straight to my hips," are the women I despise most in the world.
And dessert — well, Clara always knew what shaped her life . . .It's perfectly simple: you hum a bit of "Express Yourself" to cheer yourself up, and then ask yourself, What would Madonna do if she were in my shoes? The marvelous thing was you could apply this simple question to everything and it always gave the right answer. The day Tam and I started playing it was the last time any sweating weirdo tried to press himself up against us on the tube . . . Pre-Madonna, faced with this unhappily frequent circumstance, we'd move away, or give feeble dirty looks. Post-Madonna, we start hurling very loud abuse (it took a couple of goes before we decided there was no real need to do this in an American accent) . . . If we fancied a boy but felt too
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shy, as ourselves, to do anything about him, we'd do Madonna and ask him right out . . . Treated badly by a friend or boyfriend? Well, Madonna wouldn't lie around sobbing . . . and neither did we . . . Doing Madonna quite literally shaped our lives.
About India Knight
"There are very few novels that humorously reflect witty, urbane, capable thirty-something women's concerns and experiences. Some try, but I haven't yet come across one that doesn't rely on the search for an improbably saturnine-yet-tender Mr. Right as its central premise. (If you've got your man already, this is not as thrilling to read about as it might be.)
"I am not excited by the other kind of 'woman's book' either, in which fey, cerebral author lurches in state of semihysteria from one emotional crisis to another, frail, flowerlike neck wobbling around trying to carry pumpkinlike weight of superior, outsize brain." — India Knight
India Knight writes a weekly column for the Sunday Times (London) and is a regular contributor to a number of magazines and newspapers, including the British editions of Vogue, Marie Claire, and Elle. She also wrote a weekly column for the Observer Review. She attended Cambridge University, where she studied modern languages and English, from 1984 to 1987. She currently lives in London with her two sons. My Life on a Plate is her first novel.
When asked who she thought would be the ideal market for this book, she answered, "Anyone with a pair of breasts." Following are a few additional questions India Knight answered about My Life on a Plate.
How did the idea for your book originate?The book sprang from a weekly column I used to write for the Observer newspaper. It was called Navel Gazing, and was a kind of domestic column taken to the extreme. And then one day my husband announced he was leaving, so I wrote about that. There was a kind of brouhaha around that column; some people thought it wasn't really on to write about something so private. I am of the opinion that since one in three marriages in the UK ends in divorce, it was exactly the right thing to write about, and certainly the right subject to treat with a degree of humor and as few histrionics as possible. I'd been writing it for about four months when I started getting letters from publishers, and here I am. This does not make the novel autobiographical:
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the narrator is not a million miles removed from me, but the rest is pure fiction.
How would you summarize My Life on a Plate?The book is about marriage and family life in the twenty-first century. I was sick of reading about sad single girls and perfect, deliriously happy married ones, and I wondered why nobody wrote about that feeling you get when you've been married a few years — that "Is that it?" feeling. Mainly, though, it's about two things: a) the way marriages can peter out for no real reason — no dramatic revelation, no crisis, just a growing dissatisfaction; and b) it's about clinging on to responsible adulthood by the skin of your teeth. It's also, I think, more honest about how women think and operate than the majority of so-called women's books.
Praise for My Life on a Plate
"Sharp, witty . . . Knight's novel is groundbreaking in current fiction in that it attempts to investigate modern marriage: what it does to women, their sex drive and their sense of self." — Marie Claire (UK)
"Disturbingly funny . . . India Knight has a gritty understanding of the games married people play. This witty writer has written a snappy account of modern marriage with an underlying seriousness." — Sunday Times (UK)
"Well-written, neatly constructed and . . . funny . . . Like her creator, Clara has a talent for seeing the farcically tragic in all that surrounds her." — Guardian (UK)
"A comic tour de force." — Telegraph (UK)
"An enormously charming, often scabrously funny first novel . . . The irrepressible Clara is also irresistible: as she deconstructs and reconstructs herself endlessly, there are insights aplenty about making do, holding on, and letting go." — Kirkus Reviews
"Witty and raucous . . . entertains while animating many of the common misconceptions people have about marriage." — Publishers Weekly
"Witty commentary on middle-class mores and humor make this . . . novel an enjoyable read." — Library Journal
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"At once realistic and hopeful." — Booklist
"A wickedly funny and painfully honest comic novel. It comforts those of us who have experienced the misery of marital desertion and an infestation of head lice. It's a triumph. I intend to buy it for everybody I love." — Sue Townsend, author of The Adrian Mole Diaries
"India Knight's wildly funny survey of women's lives will leave you nodding in recognition and laughing out loud. Picture Nora Ephron (of Heartburn) meeting Nora Helmer (of Ibsen's A Doll's House) for cake, coffee, and fireworks. Delicious." — Regina Barreca, author of Perfect Husbands (and Other Fairy Tales)
"Knight's funny, assured portrait . . . combines chick lit with journalistic lifestyle-ese (and the power of YSL's Touch Eclat)." — Independent (UK)
"So vigorous, funny and opinionated . . . Not only full of brilliantly funny and knowing sentences, but of heroically ghastly characters too." — Evening Standard (UK)
"This novel makes a refreshing change from the 'single girl seeks man with increasing desperation' theme . . . The style is zappy and witty, with clever and perceptive dialogue . . . Clara is such a riotously outspoken and unpretentious heroine that you cannot help loving her." — The Bookseller (UK)
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