The central character of You Gotta Have Balls, Ruth Rothwax, is much loved by your fans, who first met her in your previous novel, Too Many Men.
People identify with her. They identify with her obsessiveness, with her endless anxiety about what she’s eating. She has a great envy of her friend Sonia Kaufman who’s one of the very few women in the universe who just eat. She orders food and eats it. She’s not counting calories in her head or asking for alterations for each course, such as ‘Could I have that on the side, no butter, no oil.’ I think people also respond to Ruth’s desire to be a better person. Ruth is a loving person who’s trying her best and a lot of people identify with that. They also like to be a bit horrified by her having to take steamed vegetables in a ziplock bag into a restaurant and trying to eat them with a plastic spoon to disguise the fact she wasn’t ordering anything other than a light broth. There’s something extreme about that which allows you to enjoy it vicariously because it’s not you.

Ruth’s father, Edek, has quite a different relationship to food.
Edek eats everything. That’s something that I found very enjoyable to do. I loved piling course upon course and giving him so much food that anybody else would have been ill. Edek has a hearty appetite, he’s very resilient, he has a great sense of humor. He is a man who because of his past had every reason not to be able to feel joy. But he hasn’t been crushed by what’s happened to him in life. He’s got a great spirit, a great sense of life. That’s juxtaposed against Ruth’s desire to be more bold, more flexible, more embracing.

How did You Gotta Have Balls come about?
When I finished the previous novel Too Many Men I thought I would never write about these people again. I’m never going to go back to this particular quartet – the father, the daughter, and two Polish women who intrude on their lives – but it just wouldn’t go away. Too Many Men was a love story in my eyes – the love between a father and a daughter – and I think the love story hadn’t finished. I think love is very complicated and the relationship between the father and the daughter needed to play itself out more to embrace more dimensions of life. And I also had this overwhelming feeling I wanted to write something very joyful. I wanted to write something life-affirming. I’d spent so much time in so many of my books talking about and writing about loss and absence and death. And I may well have written about those things with a lot of funny things happening in between the loss and the absence and the death because I’ve always been writing about contemporary life, but I think I just wanted to write pure joy. And somewhere in me this is what this book felt like it was going to be and that’s in fact what I hope it is. more

1 2 3 4 5 Next