North London Reading Group

We had our best Bookstock yet in September. Everybody seemed to have their own highlights, and one of mine was Anna Stothard reading from her second novel The Pink Hotel. In the book a London girl jets to LA for her estranged mother’s funeral, swipes a suitcase full of personal items from her mother’s bedroom in said hotel, and then travels around the city to hunt down the men who knew her best.

After one celebratory whisky too many I managed to lose my signed copy somewhere between the venue and my front door. So I caught up with Anna – fresh back from the rainforests of Borneo – to secure a replacement and find out a little bit more about what inspired The Pink Hotel whilst I was at it.

Anna, so how was Bookstock?

A fantastic atmosphere. A wonderful crowd and great speakers.

Tell us about The Pink Hotel, which you read on the night. What inspired it?

Finding a pile of love letters belonging to my mother, as a teenager. Years later I moved to Los Angeles and spent my first week in a huge pink hotel on Venice Beach and thought: this would be the perfect city for a coming of age story. And I remembered my Mum’s letters and wrote the first notes for the book on the back of an envelope. The novel didn’t happen until two years after that, after I’d returned to London.

Morrissey said “I normally live in Los Angeles, if you can call it normal living.” Would you concur with that? What was it like being English in LA?

Every nationality lives in LA. I lived between Little Armenia and Thai Town, where it was “normal” to come out of my apartment on a Saturday and push through a thronging Armenian wedding procession, then trip over Thai women crouched on the sidewalk peeling oranges or lighting incense at a multi-coloured shrine outside a massage parlour. And that’s Hollywood, just not what people think of when you mention having lived in Hollywood.

Anything goes in LA – it is what you want it to be. I went to film school there and we made a lot of short films: on fake suburban streets or fake New York streets, turning “real” Korea Town pet shops into surreal fairy tale stage sets, painting sound-stage sets to look like apartments in an apocalypse. Everything’s malleable, everything’s surreal, so I certainly agree with Morrissey.

Glamour magazine called The Pink Hotel a “love/hate letter to LA” – what did you love and hate about the city?

Nathaniel West calls Hollywood a “dream-dump” and a “Sargasso of the imagination.” Isherwood describes it as a “hateful neon mirage of a city”. It’s a make believe place in so many ways: the movie shot on that junction, the actress who lived in that apartment block, the unsolved murder on that street corner, the diner where those fictional characters decided to investigate that fictional mystery.

Everyone arrives in LA to reinvent themselves – bracing themselves to become a star, keeping their screenplay under the bar in case Spielberg comes in for a beer, or they’re desperate to be an actor (practicing their alter-egos in their lunch break). It’s a story-tellers city, which is simultaneously fascinating and terrifyingly mercurial. On some days the constant fiction was what I loved about the city and on some days that seemed terrible and insincere and draining.

Same with the weather. It’s this perfect clear desert sunshine, but the perfection becomes eerie after a while. It feels like being in the eye of a storm and there are no seasons, so no sense of time passing. It’s just this timeless, fictional bubble.

The moment I realised I needed to leave Los Angeles was when there was coroner’s tape around my local liquor store my first thought wasn’t ‘I hope nobody I know has been hurt’, but ‘I wonder if I can make any good contacts from this film set?’ And then, when I realised it wasn’t a film (a convict from the half-way house down the street had cut his friend into little pieces and left some of him in a suitcase outside the liquor store) my second thought wasn’t “how terrible” but “how interesting, perhaps I can use that as a plot device some time.’ I figured it was time to go home. But, after I left, I missed LA and started to write The Pink Hotel…

You say on your website that there is a real Pink Hotel in Venice Beach. Describe it for us…

It’s a stucco-pink creature called The Cadillac at the edge of Venice Beach, an art-deco backpackers’ hotel looking out over the sea, near where the beach’s homeless population camps out at night. It has mythic dimensions, in my head. It’s where I first stayed when I moved to Los Angeles.

I actually went back for the first time six months ago and felt completely unhinged stepping inside. It was more like walking into my own imagination than revisiting a memory. I felt illogically disturbed that it really existed, like I’d conjured it: art-deco lobby, stained staircases, corridor corners with fire-escape doors thrown open wide, trance music on the staircase – it didn’t feel like I was remembering a place but like I was walking around a stage set for The Pink Hotel. I kept expecting the androgynous protagonist of The Pink Hotel to be skulking around a corner with her red cap slanted over her eyes, or the Giant taking photos of strangers.

Is there any of you in Lily, The Pink Hotel’s protagonist?

Probably. Less in Lily, the ghost-protagonist, than in the daughter, though, who I don’t give a name (a nod to Rebecca), but there might be a little bit of me in both. Friends and acquaintances tilt their head knowingly to the side after they read The Pink Hotel and say: “is that really how you see yourself?” There are similarities and connections, but that girl is not how I see myself.

Writing The Pink Hotel was more like peeling off a particular side of my personality – the most anxious and ghostly part, most adventurous and unsure and sleepless, in the case of The Pink Hotel – and then developing that sceptre into a whole new person. She walks places I walked – the Venice Beach hotel, Thai town (where I lived), the buses of LA (I didn’t drive), bars I went to, a film set I worked on – but she isn’t me.

Isabel for Isabel and Rocco was different from the girl in The Pink Hotel, but still a part of me. The character I’m writing at the moment, for my next book, is completely different again, but people will still tilt their head to the side and say: “is that really how you see yourself?” One of the great things about writing is that you don’t have to decide on a personality for your life and stick to it. You can play with all the different possibilities of all the people you might have been under different circumstances.

Your acclaimed debut, Isabel and Rocco was written before you went to university and published back in 2004. That must have been incredibly exciting…

It was, very exciting, although also slightly terrifying. I remember they showed me three different possible covers and they were all nearly exactly the same picture, of a girl taking off her top, but each picture had a different quantity of nipple showing. They asked me to choose. Because I didn’t write that book with any thought of it getting published, the publication seemed particularly odd, but it was incredibly exciting.

Is the Anna Stothard of 2011 a different writer to then?

Yes. I’m not sure in what way – more grown up, I suppose, although both novels are coming of age stories. In a way, though, aren’t most novels coming of age stories? My next novel could be described as a coming of age story, although my protagonist is now in her mid-twenties.

Was the cliche about a second novel being more difficult true for the Pink Hotel?

Isabel and Rocco was written in snatched moments, in cafes while skipping class, in school holidays. The Pink Hotel was written while trying to keep various jobs. Both novels had their difficulties, but a very enjoyable, obsessive kind of difficulty.

Which writers do you most admire?

Margaret Atwood, Truman Capote, Graham Greene, Daphne Du Maurier, Milan Kundera…

Find out more about Anna on her website at www.annastothard.com