Shireen Jilla

Silence is underrated

Shireen — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 08:22:46 +0000

I know my silence has been long this summer. And I can’t claim the Indian weather brought it on.

My issue with blogs per se, my writer’s blog in particular, is that there is this hamster-wheel imperative to write, even when you have absolutely fuck all to say.

I know, I’ve tweeted about perching part therapist/part novelist behind a pile of books in Chester Waterstones. I have also tweeted about the incredibly wonderful vibrant audience at the Chiswick Book Festival. But 140 characters lends itself to a quick thought. Whereas, in my old-fashioned thinking, a blog needs a theme. Beginning, middle and end.

Hence the Indian summer of silence. I was contemplating my internet void on my way to my old school, Putney High, last Thursday. I was due to talk to a group of six-form students in the library about writing a novel, publishing a novel. I imagined this long-haired cabal of knowing, mouthy students, cocky clever, equipped with A*s and an Urban Outftters wardrobe. I got out all my notes, my best, knowing jokes – the ones that seem to have worked countless times. i blow-dried my hair as long as possible.

The first surprise was the school looked, felt and smelt exactly as it did when I was there. I had a flashback of this silent, plaited girl in the corner of the library. And I saw her in the faces of the girls in front of me. Ok. They now all have this obligatory mane, a bedraggled version of Kate Middleton’s locks the night before her wedding. They wear an unfortunate combo of mini skirt, leggings and netting. But they were far from being X-Factor styled. They were the most attentive audience I’ve been in front of. And the toughest. No idle laughter here. Serious faces listened to every word. The silence hung like sweat above a boxing ring.

After the first five minutes in which I nervously tried to tickle their humour, play to their age and draw them out, I relaxed into this extraordinary atmosphere. Here silence was totally acceptable. Attentiveness the norm. In a world overwhelmed by a deficit of both these qualities, I realised how often we all play to the lowest common denominator.

I didn’t want to leave. I felt this ache as I shut the heavy oak door and heard the rush of traffic on Putney Hill.

All I wanted was to find a hallowed corner of the library and enjoy the silence.

Train Travel

Shireen — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 13:52:46 +0000

I am going to sound like Jackie Kennedy O armed with a portmanteau of leather luggage and a porter to boot. And yet. Here’s the thing I am uber romantic about train travel. Now I admit scraping my – admittedly Mulberry freebie holdall – along M&S Euston floor as I fight to buy a Cape Cod kind of salad, sweating onto a packed train only to be butted in my seat by every passing bag and larger than average body isn’t sensational. But once the train moves, crisps are demolished, travellers disperse down the line, the horizon opens like an oyster, fields unfold and the view becomes a mediation. It is certainly the best way to go to a book festival as I found out last night with the wild sea bordering the train track for the last hour to Caernarfon. As I pull away now I can spy sea, dogs and gulls. Not bad a few hours after a lively book event.

A Time for Women

Shireen — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 11:32:34 +0000

Now I have written endlessly about the tough mountaineering that is the debut novelist’s lot. So I thought that it was important to be fair, honest and true, particularly this week when, hopefully, it has been shown that devious dodgy bastard behaviour by the media or, indeed the Met, will no longer play or pay. Of course, this is a Ray Ban-style conclusion. But then I am a novelist. I don’t need to consider the fact that the News of the World will merely close in name for a few months to let the dirt be industrial cleaned by Murdoch Corp and then reinvented as an equally insidious Sunday Sun… Anyway, this blog is, as I promised, is solely about being a writer. And since I’m not a columnist for NOTW about to be sent on uncertain gardening leave, it’s been a very uplifting week for me. For one big reason. The upside to being a potentially rising novelist is that you get invited to lovely do’s. I have to admit, however social I may seem, I am not really a fan of walking into a cocktail party of hundreds of people I don’t know. I am more suited to being at my desk than being the Duchess of Devonshire. However, when I got a smart thick Advent purple invite to a dinner for ‘Exceptional Women’ cocktails and dinner at the Ritz, my obviously huge vanity gave way. To be honest, how I had gate-crashed on the invite list of such a gathering, I didn’t know. But I assumed it would be full of the creative, risen, rising or even in half ascent. What I never imagined was that there would be so much more substance to the event than the thickness of asparagus or statuary of the pannacotta. This definition of Exceptional Women included a Professor from Imperial College (mother of twins, of course) who has been key to a team that can now reproduce bones; there was 86-year-old Helen Bamber, whose foundation fights for women and children who are trafficked across Europe and Lyse Doucet, the multi-award winning BBC war correspondent, whose feet mostly touch Afghani rugs rather than Ritz carpet. Not to mention an MP, who has set up a school in Kabul for over a thousand girls, most of whom now go to top universities. I was sitting near a girl in her twenties who set the Cultural Sensitivity department at the Advertising agency Oglivy to make sure that Asian women were properly represented and appealed to. Oh and she has also done a masters in Anthropology, written two books and is getting married today. Miriam Gonzalez Durantez (aka Clegg), though so smiley and clearly rather lovely and the Notting Hill jeweller Dinny Hall were merely the roll-on royal icing on the brandy-soaked fruit cake. It certainly made my paltry achievement seem positively Primark. More importantly, it reminded me how incredibly lucky I am to meet such ‘Exceptional Women’.

Dear James Daunt

Shireen — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 08:08:10 +0000

This is a long overdue love letter to James Daunt.

Just to bring those of you who aren’t living in London up to speed. Daunt Books is the Bentley of independent bookshops. I have tweeted about them a few times before. But I’ve decided they deserve a proper blog.

There are many great features in a Daunts Bookshop. The organic bags you get to properly carry your hardbacks and then use to carry everything from your Waitrose shop to your gym kit because the bag is symbol of discernment, taste and literary smarts. The deep, library style shelves with books displayed singularly like works of art;. The round mahogany sitting room tables which are selectively laid with more books. Then there is the ‘hand-selling’ – the independent bookshop’s jargon for knowledgeable, well-read booksellers guiding you to a book you don’t yet know is for you.

All of this many of you will have experienced. But if I may share with you what it feels like to be a debut novelist walking into a Daunt Books.

There is Max Porter, the manager on the Fulham Road, who is my cheerleader. Every time I sign books for him, he regales stories with me about other authors. He makes suggestions – for example that I should try and do a reading at the Brompton Library because that’s where Rosie Allison started; he immediately dresses my books with the coveted cream banner that signifies it is signed and places them strategically on the tables always one near the till. Then there is Ben at Cheapside. I will never forget walking into his store a week before my book launch and starting to tell him about Exiled. He smiled with the sort of calm enthusiasm I’ve learned to love in Daunts, and guided me to a copy of Exiled on the table downstairs. I almost wept and clung to him. When I called him last week, he remembered me immediately and shared with me the fact I’m selling about one a week. I also have to mention Natasha in Hampstead. When I first showed her Exiled, she smiled broadly. My brother’s off to New York, I must give it to him. Last time I was in Belsize Park, Emily climbed out of the window where she was working on a display to get me my books to sign. In the middle of the book launch of The Ginger Pig Cookbook, an assistant in Daunts in Marylebone High Street searched extensively for the books Brett had put on one side for me to sign. Then there is gentle Thomas in Holland Park with his gentlemanly respect usually reserved for Ian McEwan coming to sign his masterpieces.

I owe so much to James Daunt and every one of his kind, caring managers, who have taken my frail writing career in their experienced hand. Which is perhaps is why I was so shocked by the immaculately made up girl (can you be a woman before you have grown up manners, I’m not so sure) with a neat pony tail at the till in Holland Park on Thursday. I asked for gentle Thomas. He wasn’t available so I explained my mission. I had driven over to sign a couple of books. She snapped, ‘I doubt we have more than one.’ I wasn’t deterred. I’ve signed one many tiimes before. I smiled and repeated my eagerness. She then stuck the signed copy back on the shelf without a word. I prompted gently, ‘Is it possible to put a signed sticker on it?’ My big faux pas. ‘We don’t have signed signed stickers,’ she sneered. ‘That not exactly very Daunts.’ She turned away from me a till. I stuttered my correction, ‘No I mean the lovely banner.’ She shrugged over her shoulder at me, ‘We might if we can find one.’ I was Julia Roberts. The whore in the Beverley Hills salon. Only I wasn’t. I was an author in a beautiful independent bookshop that I revere.

The girl with pony tail is an aberration; she is working in the wrong place. She should go to sulk in Sub Couture, the clothes boutique on Kensington Park Road. A sneer works in fashion, but definitely not in fiction.

Perched on a high bar stool

Shireen — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:26:12 +0000

Yes I know. Today is Tuesday. It is not the day I blog. Which is supposed to be Friday (because more of you read blogs on a Thursday or Friday, apparently, according to my social networking guru). But inevitably the reality is I blog over a coffee on Saturday morning. This week I’m rather later than late. So, I know, this better be worth waiting for. OK. Last Thursday night, I was almost falling off a high retro bar stool in Soho House alongside Matt Cain, Channel 4′s culture editor, who had so much more control of his posture on his stool ; and his relationship between his stool and his microphone. Actually he also had so much more control of what he said. You can just tell a presenter by the way he grabs his of mic. I was worried. I was worried that I didn’t have enough facts to back up my argument in our transatlantic debate; I was worried no one would turn up to hear my paltry facts or fiction; I was worried people would be bored, which, unfortunately, when you are towering over your audience only five feet from the feet of your stool is pretty obvious. And of all my worries, my greatest one was I would hate every minute of the experience. It’s one thing dribbling on in a bookshop about how you wrote your novel, how you got it published. Who is to know what is fact or fiction. But transatlantic differences are rather closer to home. Especially for Americans in London. And I was sure that there would be a few of those in the audience. As you know, the debut novelist story isn’t out of a Hollywood movie. It’s a tough recessional London backdrop, where worries come true. There were two men in the back row on their Blackberries. Now the PR from my publishers Quartet Books tried to reassure me that they must have been Twittering about how much they were enjoying the debate. I think not. Their heads were down when they weren’t looking out of the window. Still, what became quickly apparent between the Liverpudlian in the second row heckling and the Americans calling out that they had never heard of a weighted jacket was that a debate open to floor is so much more fun to do than delivering a monologue to an audience, who generally seem to make their mission to have a poker face throughout. The discussion swiftly became octagonal – between Vanessa, a manager from Soho House who has lived in New York, the American, the Irish woman who had lived for a decade in NY and sounded American, the Liverpudlian, my Hollywood-actress style PR, whose succinct precis and uber beauty even turned the Blackberry heads, a blonde English rose and of course Matt and I – and hot with different voices and opinions. And, perhaps more importantly even, I didn’t fall off my stool.