Zoë Heller: Metamorphosis
The Telegraph, 13/09/2008

Zoë Heller is a rare creature - a girl-about-town columnist successfully reinvented as a writer of serious literary fiction. She talks to Sam Leith about her latest novel

Photograph by Vincent Dilio

'What do you think of the cover?' she asks. '

What does it make you think?' We are sitting outside a restaurant in Tribeca, Zoë Heller's neighbourhood in downtown New York.

I look at the cover of Heller's new book. THE BELIEVERS, it says, in tall red capitals. ZOË HELLER, it says below, in black letters just as tall. The background is tinted a pale custard, and looping round the letters is a dropped-spaghetti squirl of gold filaments with assorted symbols tethered to them: hearts; Stars of David; crucifixes; dollar signs; hammers and sickles; lucky horseshoes.

'It made me think…' I begin. My eye lights on a gold representation of the sacred symbol Aum. 'It made me think there was going to be a whole lot more Buddhism in it.'
'Yeah,' she says, somewhat resignedly. There is no Buddhism whatever in the book.
'The Americans tried various things. All awful. The last one had all these symbols but in the shape of a heart. I said, "It seems a bit soppy to me." My editor said, "Really? I thought it was clever." And I said, "I don't mean to be rude, but a heart is never clever. A heart is anti-clever. That's why it's a heart."'

If you had made your name writing the sort of autobiographical prose that cast you as a real-life chick-lit heroine, and then started a second career in literary fiction, you too might be a bit sensitive about having gold foil and hearts on the covers of your books. But to be fair to her publishers, it is hard to see exactly how one would go about designing a jacket for The Believers.

To read the rest of the story link here to The Telegraph online.