My week: Linda Grant

The novelist goes up the wall waiting to hear if her book has been shortlisted for the Booker, is preened by Trinny and Susannah's stylist and abused for her views by a raving redneck blogger

Linda Grant writing in The Observer,
Sunday September 14 2008

Everyone on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize knew that some time on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning the week before the official announcement of the shortlist there would be a call. Or there would be no call. You knew you would be sitting there in diminishing optimism that your publisher would ring to say you'd made it and that when the phone did ring, and you're silly with hope, it's American Express touting unemployment protection insurance which you don't need because you're not employed in any sense the policy can find in its own definitions.

I do not do well with delayed expectation. I had spent the previous weekend successfully arguing myself off the shortlist by assigning in my own mind all the available six places to the novels I was sure the judges would choose. My methodology was the erratically successful scheme of trying to psychoanalyse people I'd never met to determine what kind of fiction would move them. It's just an extension of the futile pastime of sitting on the tube driving yourself mad trying to work out what the person opposite you is thinking; but that's the problem with being a writer, you spend far too much time inside your own head.

For Linda's full account link here.