JACKIE McGLONE

A YOUNG GIRL in a neatly frilled white party dress balances precariously on a tightrope. A large black crow perches on her left hand. It is a dramatic dust-jacket image that perfectly sums up the high-wire act that the novelist and columnist Susie Boyt performs to dazzling effect in her latest book.

Love & Fame – Boyt’s sixth and most accomplished novel – is the literary equivalent of a daring trapeze act and is as wise and witty as Boyt’s devoted readers expect of her work which rarely fails to delight. It is a seriously comic novel about grief, the death of parents and the risky world of show business, with a heroine “as highly strung as a violin factory.”

Eve Swift is a nervous actress, only child of a celebrated acting dynasty, who has had to pull out of a West End production of The Seagull, in which she was to play Nina. A second strand of the book features two sisters, Rebecca, a tabloid journalist still mourning the death of their mother many years ago, and Beach, a bereavement counsellor – “a deathspert, with degrees and diplomas in loss, in loss adjustment, lostness...” Eventually, the three women’s lives collide.

This daring, stylishly-written novel opens, however, with an angst-ridden stream-of-consciousness monologue as Eve prepares for her wedding to even-tempered Jim, who is writing “a biography, a history, a geography of anxiety (an algebra?), a rich complex, far-reaching work.”

Over a “pouting pizza” on their first date Jim tells Eve, “I’m kind of putting worry on the couch if that makes sense.”

You could, of course, say that the psychoanalyst’s couch looms large in 48-year-old Boyt’s own background since she is the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud. She is also one of several daughters of the great artist Lucian Freud, the youngest of four children he had with her mother, the artist and great beauty Suzy Boyt, who died in 2015. A single parent, she was “quite heroic, with a joyful approach to life.” Boyt’s super-glam siblings include novelist Rosie Boyt, while another novelist, Esther Freud, and fashion designer Bella Freud are half-sisters.

It comes as no surprise therefore that Boyt’s books rarely give Freud the slip, so to speak. They almost always offer a Freudian viewpoint – her characters’ parents and parents’ parents are ever present in her work, which includes her gorgeous, deeply affecting memoir, “with a dash of sequin-studded self-help,” My Judy Garland Life, which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize, serialised on Radio 4 and later staged as a musical at the Nottingham Playhouse.

She has just returned to writing – deliciously – about art, fashion and “the morality of glamour” in a monthly column for the Financial Times. Recently, she edited The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories by Henry James, with whom she is “a little bit obsessed.” Since university (she has an MA from University College, London) she has remained intrigued by the Jamesian question of how one can be good and live fully in the world without taking on any of the taint that the word “worldly” creates – a constant theme in all her books.

A director of Hampstead Theatre, she confesses that she is drawn to the thrilling excitement of the theatrical life and grew up, like Judy Garland, longing for the stage, even if it meant being a dresser in the wings. “If I had my choice I would have been a chorus girl,” she sighs. But, even though she sings beautifully, it was not to be.

When we meet in a Viennese cafe in Marylebone, near the home she shares with her film-producer husband, Tom Astor, the youngest son of another legendary dynasty, and their two daughters, Mary (16) and Cecilia (11), Boyt, ever the bluestocking fashionista, is beautifully dressed like a glamorous librarian in toasty shades of shimmering cashmere and tweed paired with six-inch strappy sandals. “I wanted to dress up for you, but didn’t quite succeed,” she sighs. As if.

I ought to declare an interest here since I first interviewed Boyt a dozen years ago and we meet from time to time for afternoon tea or a glass of champagne. She is perhaps the most spiritual person I know. A trained bereavement counsellor for the charity Cruse following the death of her boyfriend in a climbing accident when they were students at Oxford University, she has, however, been taking a rest from it. She’s had a difficult couple of years since the loss of her single-parent mother, whom she adored, and still mourns her brilliant father, who died in 2011.

Loss, its memory and its anticipation, lies at the heart of human experience, she has written in the past. Loss, with lots of very good jokes, certainly lies at the heart of Love & Fame, which began life as a short story. “The first chapter started that way, but then it just got more involving and involved,” she reveals. “I can’t even remember why because it is so long ago since I began writing it, but I know I wanted to start where romances usually end, with people getting married. I got the character of Eve quite early on, someone who is pretty impossible but you can’t help liking.

“I am interested in the idea of the rebound. Eve gets married on the rebound after a professional disappointment when she leaves the Chekhov play, but I wanted the women in my novel to be defined by the work they do, which is very true of Rebecca and Beach. And I feel Eve will always be an actress.

“Also, I definitely wanted to write a book about grief and the different ways it can take one. It is possible that we are not allowed to grieve at all now. I think there is an epidemic of unspent grief. Within seconds of someone dying people are telling you to keep busy, to be productive. If you are not, it is going to be the end of the world. I was thinking this morning that telling someone who is grieving to keep busy is like telling someone with a nose bleed to put their head back and it’ll stop. It works for about two minutes then your mouth fills with blood.

“If you do keep busy, everything you do will be done wrong and have to be done again. I think when you are in grief ordinary things are difficult and difficult things impossible. You have to navigate things differently. It is like having a new baby when you spend time just holding it close. As you grieve you have to spend time holding that person close, thinking how you are going to be a person without them.”

Nevertheless, I tell Boyt her book is very funny, it’s a cheerful book that puts the fun into dysfunctional despite being about coping with inconsolable grief. Like Eve’s great actor-father, I prefer humour tinged with tragedy. “Oh good! I am so glad you said that because that was always at the back of my mind. My husband actually said to me, ‘Why don’t you write a comedy to cheer yourself up?’ There are of course matters of taste to be considered when you write a merry book about very sad things but I hope it just stays on the right side of that. There are lots of jokes in it – I love bad jokes, the worse the better!”

Another challenge she set herself was to write a novel that, unlike her previous books, did not have one overarching figure. “I wanted to have two storylines, two strands that came and went, something I had never done before. I was very much inspired by contemporary American women novelists, such as Karen Joy Fowler and her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, with lots happening on every page, people going off and having adventures and coming back, and with tons of dialogue. I also love the Canadian writer Miriam Toews’s book All My Puny Sorrows, a really inspirational novel.”

Pausing, she says quietly: “It’s very flattering that a lot of people seem to like Love & Fame and lots of lovely quotes have come in from people, such as Tamsin Greig and Deborah Moggach.” Indeed Andrew O’Hagan has written: “Love & Fame is so rich and insightful, and the writing is beautiful. Reading it will help you survive your own personality. There’s a special sort of merriment in this book and such a feast of particularity.”

“Isn’t that lovely,” murmurs Boyt. “I really like the fact that so many people seem to find the book very funny. That pleases me because I have always wanted to add to the gaiety of the nation – particularly now. I think we all hope that the future must prove happier and better than the past.”

Love & Fame, by Susie Boyt (Virago, £14.99).