Thursday 5th December 2024
It was a rainy night, but in the Institute there was a fire and the warmth of home as Gill Lowe welcomed India Knight. India had brought along an actress friend, Ann Bryson, and halfway through the evening Ann gave us an amusing reading from India’s most recent novel, Darling.
Gill began by asking India about her Substack, Home, which India explained is an online equivalent of a magazine and with a narrative voice that ‘is like talking to me across a kitchen table’. Gill described her as ‘an influencer before there were influencers’. Later India was asked about her thoughts on Suffolk, now her home county. India said that she began here as a weekender, but found more and more that she and her family didn’t want to go back to London. India pointed out that Suffolk is in fact just across the sea to the place where she spent her childhood, Belgium. Her pen name is a name based on her mother’s origins and her step father’s surname. India is a journalist as well as an author, although she said on her UCCA form that she wanted to be a spy and ‘hung around bridges but nothing ever happened!’ Her education was mainly in French and in getting to know the English, as an outsider, she was fascinated by the way the class system plays out here.
India said that when asked to write a modern version of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, she felt impertinent and could hear Mitford’s voice being sarcastic about her even attempting to undertake such a task. She waited more than a year and a half in a blind panic with the idea percolating and then suddenly woke up and knew what to do. The narrative voice took ages to come. India put in references to the original for fans of Nancy Mitford, but she also wanted to be irreverent and change things, for example, the way Mitford talked about race. She is proud of the way her Linda is more of her own person, and less malleable than Mitford’s Linda. However, she won’t be adapting the following two books in the trilogy because they are more problematic.
In response to Gill’s questioning, India talked about her own evolution and said that as you age you acquire many layers and that in her early to mid-fifties she was rediscovering herself and felt like an old house that had been improved over time. She was now comfortable with herself. Her Substack is where she feels most herself and she said that she believes that traditional media is dying. She is delighted that in her online writing she owns her own copyright, and shared with us the news that Home is now to become a book.
Tricia Gilbey
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