There’s a touch of Houdini about Zoe Heller. As a 25-year-old journalist she
used to weep when her articles were spiked. Her first novel was viciously
trashed. Then Edmund White, the American writer, declared that with her
second book she had joined “the front ranks of British novelists, right up
there with Amis and McEwan”. And now she has a new trick up her sleeve.
Peter Kemp, the Sunday Times fiction editor, rates Heller’s forthcoming book,
The Believers, as “one of the outstanding novels of the year”, eclipsing
even her acclaimed Notes on a Scandal, which was adapted in 2006 into a film
starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. “This is a big advance that took me
by surprise,” Kemp says.
The green tortoise tattooed on Heller’s arm is a poor guide to a dizzying
trajectory that began as a columnist on The Sunday Times Magazine. The young
Londoner’s chronicle of life in New York blazed a trail for female
confessional writers, although few have surpassed Heller’s sharp, witty
style. She was Bridget Jones before Bridget Jones.
Her years in America made the success of Notes on a Scandal, set in a London
comprehensive school, all the more remarkable. Heller’s tale of a female
teacher’s affair with a teenage boy pupil, and the jealousy of a frumpy
older teacher with a lesbian crush on her colleague, was shortlisted for the
Man Booker prize in 2003 and translated into 29 languages before becoming an
Oscar-nominated film.
Strikingly attractive at 43 and at the top of her writing form, Heller has
chosen her adopted turf of New York and its liberal intelligentsia as
subjects of her latest novel, to be published next month. She has a house in
lower Manhattan but is currently on a year’s break in Bermuda with her
58-year-old husband, the screenwriter Larry Konner, and their two daughters,
Frankie and Louella.
The Believers is a wicked satire of New York’s liberal elite and their 1960s
dreams, focusing on a family of secular Jews. At the centre of the story are
a couple of ageing lefties, for whom religion is anathema, and their
daughter who becomes a born-again Jew.
“It’s very funny and elegant,” says Kemp. “It’s never predictable and it’s all
totally believable. It shows that Zoe Heller has some pretty substantial
abilities.” He shares other critics’ surprise that the novel did not make
this year’s Booker long list.
Gossip writers will find rich pickings in true-life comparisons. Heller’s
father, Lukas, a screenwriter who wrote The Dirty Dozen and Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane?, was Jewish, as is her husband. The story’s central
character, a 1960s intellectual, spends much of the book in a coma. His wife
becomes something of a monster – an echo of Heller’s remark that her own
mother, Caroline Carter, was “not a monster, although she was often
monstrous”.
Heller’s skills of deprecation have been perfected mostly against herself.
Even at St Anne’s College, Oxford, contemporaries were astonished that
someone so glamorous – even in ripped jeans – found it necessary to tell
extended stories of self-parody. Her English lecturer was Ann Pasternak
Slater, whose husband, the poet Craig Raine, remembers her as “very
charming, very funny”.
Her writing style took wing at The Sunday Times. “Zoe was a breath of fresh
air – an antidote to years of queen-bee über-bitches like Julie Burchill,”
one executive recalled. “She was anxious, cynical, vulnerable and
self-possessed, but also honest, witty and raw. That’s why she was
successful: she reflected the concerns of the postfeminist world.”
The subjects of her column could be as mundane as a conversation with a
motorbike messenger, a party she had attended or an errant boyfriend. “But
she always made it extremely entertaining so you became involved,” said Tony
Barrell, who sub-edited her copy and talked to her every week. “It was life
from a New Yorker’s point of view, and it worked.”
In the end, embarrassed to be making a living by writing about herself, she
decided to concentrate on books. Gill Coleridge, her literary agent,
describes Heller as a perfectionist who works “incredibly hard” to make her
writing seem effortless.
An element of journalistic pique may have accounted for the slating of her
first novel, Everything You Know, in 1999. Critics may have expected the
book to be as wry as her columns. Instead, they got Willy Muller, a writer
recovering from a heart attack. Heller was furiously upset by the reaction.
Notes on a Scandal seemed destined for a worse fate. A readers’ report gave
it the thumbs-down and Heller’s respected agent, Pat Kavanagh, concurred. It
was a rare misjudgment: Heller switched agents and the book took off.
Born in north London on July 7, 1965, Heller was indulged as the youngest of
four children. Her overpowering and beautiful mother had made her mark at
Oxford, addressing the Union in a strapless gown.
Later, in an attempt to escape domesticity, Heller’s mother ran her own
business, selling information about European regulations to companies and
producing audio magazines. “I saw her as a superwoman, swooping through life
and saving all comers with her charisma,” Heller recalled. Prone to tantrums
“so dazzlingly and defiantly unreasonable, it was hard not to admire them”,
Heller’s mother would throw chairs about the room and sweep her children’s
possessions to the floor.
When Heller was five, her parents separated, and by her teens her father
seemed “the parent of choice”. A German-Jewish immigrant who then spent much
of his time abroad, he introduced Heller to glamour, turning up at her
school in his Corvette Stingray or “whisking me off to buy ostrich feathers
at Biba”. His girlfriends included a surgically enhanced German and a former
Miss Ecuador.
Heller first fell in love at eight, when she made a “potion” for a boy called
Joshua, who theatrically smashed the phial. There were to be other romances
at Haverstock comprehensive, but she reckoned that her first important
relationship was at Oxford: “We liked each other but didn’t have the
imagination to express that except by going to bed.”
After Oxford she went to study at Columbia University in New York, where she
found that American men were more “freed up” about sex. One suitor who
followed her into a taxi inquired: “So there’s no chance of a blow job,
then?” For two years she fell under the spell of a man whom she described as
“unfaithful, narcissistic and mentally sadistic”.
When Zoe met Larry, the vibes were not auspicious. He was 16 years her senior
and dating “a glum, silent French actress”. Heller was unimpressed, but
Konner had filed her away. Later, on their first date, he was shocked that
she had cut her hair and had a tattoo. “There was a bit of a daddy thing
going on,” Heller admitted, “but he was more emotionally healthy than my
costive father.” Heller followed him to Los Angeles, where he was raising
his second child, then 15, by himself.
A year later she moved back to New York after Konner balked at having children
with her. She dated several “unlikely men”, including a police officer,
before Konner relented. “He said, ‘Please forgive me. I want to come back
and let’s have babies’.”
Notes on a Scandal was inspired partly by the case of Mary Kay Letourneau,
from Washington, a teacher who had an affair with a 13-year-old pupil. She
ended up in jail. But perhaps the idea of a lesbian crush – developed from a
need for companionship in the book into physical attraction in the film –
owes something to an episode in Heller’s childhood.
“One night when I was about 10 years old, a woman turned up at our house
announcing she was in love with my mother,” Heller wrote in the 1995
compilation Mothers by Daughters. The woman, who worked at the office where
Heller’s mother was running a campaign to save London Transport, seemed
unbalanced and was disabused of her notion to move in with the family. “This
was my first exposure to the idea of sapphic love,” Heller recalled.
Her parents died within 18 months of each other when she was in her early
twenties. Sometimes, looking in the mirror, she acknowledges that she is
becoming her mother: “I am, I realise, the best memento I have of her.”
Chair-throwing may be yet to come, but in the meantime she is about to stir
up another literary commotion.
