Friday, April 18, 2014

Sue Townsend: A tribute


The bestselling author of the Adrian Mole books died on 10th April. 

Louise Moore, managing director of Michael Joseph, writes:

I first had contact with Susan Lillian Townsend in 1991 when she was writing The Queen And I. I was working as a (very) junior copyeditor for the great Geoffrey Strachan, Sue’s publisher at Methuen. I nervously wrote Sue a letter telling her what an anarchic, genius novel I thought it was and posted it off. Back came a funny, carefully composed three lines on a postcard—in Sue’s distinctive bold black handwriting—almost the next day. I now know this was typical of Sue: she was never interested in a person’s status, she took everyone she met on trust and with the same level of kindness and curiosity.

She was agented by the late Giles Gordon, whom she loved, and was already a literary superstar—Adrian Mole had taken the 1980s by storm. Even then, Sue seemed hardly to be affected by all the attention, plaudits and money—although she did love the literary world and its denizens, a night of good gossip at The Groucho, or a trip to Selfridges. (She never kept hold of her clothes or her handbags for long with two daughters, Vicky and Lizzie, and four granddaughters. Sue was always a ridiculously generous giver.) She had no false modesty and took pride in her work, but at the same time she was always far more interested in how you were doing, any news to be had, and talking through the possibilities she had in her mind for what her characters might do next.
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