How We Met

Sunday Independent

Susie Boyt, 32, is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, The Normal Man, The Characters of Love, and The Last Hope of Girls which was published last month by Review. The daughter of artists Lucian Freud and Suzy Boyt and the great grand daughter of Sigmund Freud, she is married with a one year-old daughter.

‘I really like the fact that although Darian is a very successful
psychoanalyst, he’s always phoning me for advice on everything from what to buy his nephews and neices to how best to cook a 6 pound windfall turbot that came his way quite recently . He’s very
modest and he never implies he has all the answers. Although he can give extremely good advice himself, when pressed. We met five years ago at a dinner party at the writer Alain de Botton’s house.

When I heard Darian was a psychoanalyst I was instantly intrigued. .But when he talked a little about Lacan’s ideas about psychoanalysis I was horrified. I had never heard anything like it. When Darian said a Lacanian psychoanalytic session could last anywhere between fifteen minutes and an hour and a half it was the analyst’s decision when to end it each time, I thought it was scandalous. I choked on my food. When it transpired that the analyst decides to break each session at moments of greatest significance in order that thy are fully emphasised and put to best use, rather than soothed away, I almost felt like calling the police. You must lose a lot of patients I thought.

And yet as he continued talking it became clear how conscientious he was and also that rather than being clinical and distant in his attitudes towards people he was extremely hopeful and warm. Sometimes when I see him waking along the street and he's looking especially cheerful I'll know it's because his patients are all doing well. I wasn’t on the lookout for a new friend, but Darian asked me out for lunch and we chatted about what we were reading. My first novel The Normal Man had recently come out and
he talked to me about it in a lot of detail. He started coming round for supper and got on really well with my husband Tom.

As a writer you work quietly at home and it gets lonely and boring- you yearn for office life such as the running joke at the photocopier or the raucous Christmas party. Darian lives nearby and in a our relationship isa bit like that of close colleagues. We sometimes might meet for a drink at the end of the day or talk on the phone and compare notes. Darian is a great telephoner though a lot of our conversation is based on him saying, “I can’t talk now, I’ve got a patient coming” and me saying, “I can’t talk now, I’ve got a blazing row between two ex wives to finish or I cant talk now because we' re late for the zoo.

Darian has a way with words and a lovely turn of phrase. He uses words you're always happy to hear like spat and stymy and prink.
Once when he wanted to illustrate an idea in psychoanalysis, he used a character in my book and that seemed really courteous-becasue it implied my heroine was completely real to him, down to her very mental disorders! And he’s a phenomenal listener. I think that’s the way his curiosity manifests itself rather than by asking
lots of questions. I once found myself telling him about a dream in which I was reading a review of a French book in the Herald Tribune. In the dream the reviewer complained, ‘This is a bad and uninteresting book whereas the author led me to believe it was as delicate and rare as tartare de papillon!'

Darian has lots of admirers. I think people are attracted and sometimes quite overwhlemed by his being so good at listening. Often people tell him things they’ve never told anyone else. I do feel protective of him. He’s vvery good natured and sometimes that leads him to think more highly of people than is wise. But it’s also a very nice quality. Darian is not at all cynical. He's always fair-minded and easy going.

We both have quite a highly developed daft side with lots of recurring jokes and word play. The only thing I don’t share is his love of The Big Lebowski - his conversation is often peppered with quotes from it, which drives me mad. I know the entire script of The Wizard of Oz and the Philadalphia Story, and as far as I'm concerned there's no competition.

Selfridges has a strange gravitational pull for us both. Quite often if he rings and I’m out, he’ll leave a message saying, “You must be at Selfridges, I'll see you there.” In fact Darian is such a regular customer that a few years ago he was once invited to a
special buffet breakfast of champagne and lobster there for people who'd bought something every day for the last three months. So unfair!

Recently I helped him curate an exhibition of contemporary art at the Freud Museum - with half the proceeds going towards the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research to fund psychotherapy for people who can’t afford it.

I know it meant a lot to him seeing all his friends in thier best outfits, rallying round, manning the door, handing out drinks and selling raffle tickets. The show was very successful although we did have to disappoint one or two people who were keen on buying Freud's couch. Sometimes I do think about training as a psychoanalyst. I'm very interested in what happens in
relationships and what, exactly, they are for. All my novels explore the myriad ways in which family life does and doesn’t really work. Nothing interests me more than how and why people try to adapt thier present day situations in a mistaken attempt to alter something they were unhappy with in the past. I know these
are things that interest Darian as well. He has explored these themes from every angle in the books he has written, which are sometimes so fast paced and loaded with incident that they almost read like thrillers.

I’ve always been very ambitious about my quality of life. After having experienced a very raw teenage, I learned that there aren’t many things that can’t be surmounted if you take them seriously
enough, give them the attention that is their due. Both Darian and I really believe in kindness and in the power of words to transform lives.’

Darian Leader, 37, is a psychoanalyst who practices in London and a founder member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research. He is honorary visiting academic at the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University and author of the cult texts 'Why do women write more letters than they post?' and 'Promises lovers make when it gets late’. His new book 'Stealing the Mona Lisa: What art stops us from seeing', is published by Faber. ‘Ironically, I didn’t realise that Susie was a member of the Freud family for quite a long while. When we first met, we got on well and, apart from thinking she was very nice, I noticed she was very well informed about psychoanalytic matters - which is quite a rarity outside the trade. When I did finally find out that she’s the great grand daughter of Freud, it made the connection even more special. Susie is one of the rare people who really gets psychoanalysis. She understands the dark side of human nature
that is so often denied or left unexplored. We meet up at least twice a week. I’ll join Susie and Tom and their daughter for breakfast or we’ll bump into each other in Marylebone. Whenever we meet something comical or bizarre happens> Last time I saw her i was struggling with an enormous fish that I' d been given out of the blue, 'I see you've been having a whale of a time' she quipped. The time before that I saw her just as a huge display of foil wrapped easter rabbits collapsed on her in the local
supermarket.

Whenever me meet there's always a bit of slapstick. Susie likes to see the absurd side of things. And she has a real love of
unusual words and salty expressions, which I really like. '

When Susie is in the middle of a book, we’ll talk about the characters. She’s a very careful, almost painterly writer. You continually have information or resonance or colour generated through a tiny detail or by a character’s slip of the tongue. In her books she doesn't try to spell things out, laying on adjective after adverb but uses subtle and unexpected details to give the
characters depth and to get the reader thinking. Another thing I like is that Susie talks about her heroines as if they’re real people - she’s very focused on them. As she is working on the drafts she'll refer to the characters as if she were speaking about our mutual friends. When you read them you can see the amount of care that has gone into each one. We’ve done a few readings together where we've tried to make make interesting links between psychoanalysis and fiction.

Susie is very wise about human relationships. She trained as a bereavement counsellor and she worked as an agony aunt for a website. Even in her non-writing persona, she is always discussing what makes people tick - whether it’s politics and current affairs, the arts or soap opera. Susie’s modest, but she also has a very glamorous side. She does adore nice things and she has great taste. I often ask her advice.

My telephone relationship with Susie is often like a sitcom. Quite often if she calls I'll pick up the phone that I can’t talk because
I’m about to see a patient. And when I call her there is a high probability that she’ll say, “Sorry, cant talk, I’ve got 55 people coming round for breakfast.” She’s a brilliant entertainer and her
cooking really is top restaurant quality. You go for supper and you’d really think there was a team of top chefs in the kitchen. Susie is meticulous and generous when it comes to hospitality. I do feel a bit protective about Susie when I see the way the media is
obsessed with her family background. Everyone has got a background.

Susie is a novelist who writes very intelligent and insightful books that are also extremely funny. If you read them searching for the autobiographical element they will yield much less than if you look to them for what they can tell you about the nature of your own family relationships. Why not see what they can illuminate about yourself rather than the author?

Susie’s most glaring character defect is that she doesn’t appreciate the care and genius that went into creating The Big Lebowski. How a novelist who explores relationships with such subtlety can
remain immune to this classic film is a mystery to me. This is the only serious threat to our friendship.

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