Beware, author posing

Being a new author, and naïve to the ways of the industry, this week’s great excitement was the arrival of the Photographer to capture the Author’s likeness. I felt about this rather like remote tribes are said to feel — a vague unease suggesting my soul was to be stolen. I hate having my picture taken.

Why? Just about every photograph through my career as a broadcaster has revealed that I am in the wrong profession. Instead of a sensitive but tough-minded journalist, the face beaming back at me from the picture is unmistakeably that of a jolly barmaid.

She often seems a bit tired — I think she probably owns the pub and works long hours — and these days she’s definitely worn around the edges, but you can tell she likes nothing better than downing a couple of babychams and having a laugh over a naughty joke. On a very jolly evening, she might even jump on the bartop and lead the company in a chorus of Down at The Old Bull and Bush, because there’s something just a bit Ealing Comedy about her and her pub, one of those hostelries where the ceiling is nicotine yellow and the soles of your shoes leave the floor with a slight sucking sensation.

Lately she’s had her hair highlighted in that shade known to us Bristolians as Bedminster Blonde, and her bosom requires roughly the same amount of engineering genius to support it as the Clifton Suspension Bridge. She’s a lot of fun and she doesn’t put up with troublemakers — but I’m not sure she’s ever read a book.

The trouble is that regardless of the evidence in the mirror every day, I persist in thinking of myself as a thin, dark-eyed, soulful type. I know I’m not, in fact never have been — at no time in the history of the known universe did the Mills bum squeeze itself into anything smaller than a size 14 pair of jeans, and to be truthful it doesn’t even manage that now. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly want to be thin, certainly not enough anyway to suffer to become so — but actual jeans size is irrelevant because I know my soul is that of a thin woman. Until I look at a photo, that is, and find the Changeling Pint-Puller grinning back.

Jolly Barmaid was, surprisingly, an asset in my broadcasting career. I would turn up to do an interview and people would be lulled into a false sense of security. I’m sure that’s why so many were prepared to pour their hearts out. (“How do you do it?” asked a friend when I came back from recording a rather moving chat with the actor George Lazenby. “Dammit, you even made James Bond cry.”)

But to return to the question of the Author Photograph — clearly we needed to call time, gentlemen, please, on Jolly Barmaid. No way could I allow her on the cover of Crow Stone for strangers to say: blimey, how did she write this? Although the narrator Kit can find humour in the grimmest circumstances, it does end up very dark indeed.

No, I had to find a photographer so brilliant he would allow my Inner Soulfulness to emerge, instead of carelessly snapping away and catching me giggling at all the wrong moments. Besides, I had my Instructions. “Mysterious,” said Annabel, my editor. “Moody. Atmospheric. Remember, the book jacket will be black and gold.”

So earlier this week a very nice man called Charlie Hopkinson turned up. “Black leather coat, I think,” he said. “Smile? Of course you don’t have to smile. Writers don’t, usually.”

Not smiling is harder than you think. The very first photo Charlie took, I was grinning like a hyena, Jolly Barmaid yo-ho-hoing from my eyes in spite of a trip to the hairdressers to tone down the highlights and give me a more sober, writerly appearance. It didn’t help that in the middle of autumn’s rainiest week, Charlie had somehow brought the sunshine with him. We spotted some abandoned railway tracks and a looming, black brick warehouse. Charlie led me through mud and knee high brambles — that took the smile off my face as I realised what it was doing to my suede boots. In the next few pictures, Jolly Barmaid metamorphosed into Rosa Klebb, part-time concentration camp guard, with tight lips and a mad hostile stare. “You’re scaring me,” said Charlie.

The problem, as Frances Wilson wrote last year in a Guardian article about author photographs, and why they should be abolished altogether, is that women have no clear role models in this department. “Male authors, like dentists, should be both trusted and feared…the face is crevassed with shadow, propped up on a fist, the brow furled…We have almost no idea what a generic female author should look like, short of wearing a mob cap like Jane Austen.”

Oh how true. I knew what I didn’t want to look like — J.B. — but who to aspire to? I’ve worked in television and I know that what a woman looks like there is, depressingly, a factor in her eventual success. You don’t actually have to be young — witness how many articles the Daily Mail runs on icons like Felicity Kendal at sixty — but you’d damn well better look well-preserved.

I really wanted the smooth sculpted loveliness (alas, unattainable) of a Zadie Smith, but should I aim towards a UK version of Patricia Cornwell’s groomed, ageless gloss? Unattainable as well, I decided, unless I employed the services of an image consultant and a TV make-up artist. Interestingly, one of my television friends tried to persuade me to do exactly that, and I really was tempted, but then I realised it might be seen as a bit sad. Besides, he worked for Casualty, so I could have ended up with a bleeding wound and a bruise or two — appropriate, but not flattering.

Luckily Charlie proved to be rather clever at his job, and by Location 3 I had stopped worrying so much what I looked like, and was concentrating instead on what he told me to do. “Turn your head to the right, collar up, sweep that strand of hair off your face — now hold the position but let your eyes look into the lens…” If I thought at all about anything, I remembered what Kit in the novel says about looking at Gary: “There are miles of tunnels in that look.”

As Annabel remarked when she saw the pictures: “Not a jolly barmaid in sight.” Vanity is served, my best friends will still recognise me, and the Author will gaze intensely at her readers from the back flap, not hostile, not mad, not grinning inanely, but looking as if she might actually have written the book.

So why did I get so het up? Does it really matter? Afterwards, Mally in Publicity came up with the Guardian article — not a hint, I hope, that everyone at HC thinks I’m a pain in the ass about having my picture taken — and I found myself wondering whether Frances Wilson is right to call for the abolition of author pictures.

Are we moving into an era where the way a writer looks really will determine her ability to sell? (Not, I think, his ability, but then I am an old-fashioned feminist — that’s Ms. Mills, please – and therefore historically jaundiced in my view.)

I do hope not. It’s bad enough for female authors to know Posh and Jordan can outsell us, admitting to have read nothing much heavier than Hello magazine since they left school.

But one of the cheering things about publishing — unless I am being very unperceptive — is that nobody seems to give a toss about age. In television, you are effectively dead once you reach 35, and I have grown used to being treated like a walking corpse. It was a breath of fresh air to realise I certainly wouldn’t be the oldest first-timer ever published, by at least a couple of decades, and even if I can never aspire to join the Best of British Young Novelists, some of those who do are close to if not past their TV sell-by-date. Anyway, didn’t I hear they’ve got a Best of British Wrinkly Novelists list now?

Charlie, trying to make me feel better, I think, or at least prepare me for the fact that he wasn’t going to be bribed to retouch the photos, said: “I’d much rather photograph an older woman. There’s so much more in the face.” He must have seen that didn’t quite do the trick. So he added, bravely: “And read a book by an older writer, too.”

Actually, for me the point is that in writing, age doesn’t matter. It’s the book that counts. I admit I couldn’t have written Crow Stone at twenty, or thirty, but that’s me — late developer in the writing department. Some authors do their best work when young, others grow into it.

But there is still a curiosity to know something more about an author than the book gives away — background, married, kids? Are they like us? Might they even be twin souls? (The answer is probably not on your nelly, but I always hope my favourite authors are the kind of people I’d feel comfortable having a coffee with.) So I can’t quite bring myself to agree with Frances Wilson. I want to know what the writer looks like, though it would never be a determining factor in whether to buy the book.

By the way, anyone who has visited this site before might notice that a certain Jolly Barmaid has done (or is about to do) a vanishing trick. Kate, get that photo of me replaced pronto.

Ed: Righty-ho Jenni, it’s done. Unfortunately, and this is perhaps a worse crime than even the make-up artist on Casualty could enact, it has to be square, so I’ve chopped the top of your head off. Publishers: harsh.
In the interests of doing your photo justice, and for those fans who can’t wait for Crow Stone to appear, here it is, in full: