Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast

in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a novelist. As a child, she envied her musically gifted brothers

and sister, and wanted only to play the cello. But poverty precluded such a purchase and

she became the listener in her family, a role which stood her in good stead when, as a

young mother, she sat down to write her first novel. Four books later, she won the book

a prize. Eight years after that, she was in the lists again as a runner-up. Nevertheless,

the human quality she most admires is a sense of failure. That at least is striving, she

says, and of her own achievements remarks, that she's merely a successful novelist who

failed to become a musician. She is Bernie's Rubens. Do you believe that writing is far less

of an accomplishment than playing a musical instrument?

No, I don't think there are any rules about it. I think this is just a personal choice.

I would rather have become a musician, a cellist, in other words, than become a writer, because

I get a lot more pleasure out of listening to music. I take music enormously seriously,

in the sense that, although I'm a serious writer, I don't take my books seriously.

But does that mean that you're not proud of what you write?

Yes, I'm proud of the achievement of having written 70 novels, but I would give up every

17 of them in order to play one bar, like Cross Drop of Itch, for instance.

But in that sense, I mean, aren't you author of your own fate by insisting on playing

the cello? I mean, if it was a musical family, there were presumably other instruments there

that you could have played.

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