Jane Warren

Daily Express, July 2001

Susie Boyt has written three novels about people in a serious muddle trying their best to resolve their lives. the latest, The Last Hope of Girls, tells the story of Martha and the complexities of coming to terms with her family, in particular her brilliant but reclusive father. Martha has relatives whose parenting techniques “border on the surreal” and the character copes by seizing normality. “The odder the sitaution...the more ordinary your behaviour needed to be,” Susie makes Martha say.

Susie is the youngest daughter of Lucian Freud, Britain’s pre-eminent living artist, and his Slade pupil and mistress Suzy, with whom he had five children. It is interesting to learn that Susie reacted to her own Bohemian background by adopting a similar mode of anti rebellion to the heroine of her novel. She wore her hair in bunches until she was “thirteen or fourteen”, her favourite item of clothing was a kilt. “I wanted everything nice, I was always arranging ornaments symmetrically. I liked my world ordered.”

Before she was born her mother bought a cargo ship and took her older children round the world. Susie says she was relieved to have been born after the boat had fallen into disrepair. Instead, she was tantalised by normality, in particular Middle England. Three piece suites and neat garden fences seemed almost glamorous. “I envied my best friends family, her father was a policeman, it was all fish and chips and everything was matching-and that seemed great to me.” Her mother, who she adores and describes as ”very unconventional in a truly genuine way” cleverly sent her daughter to an old fashioned London school “where everything was all deportment badges and tidiness cups, which I loved.” From the security of this vantage point Susie developed her unique painterly view of the world, focusing her novelist’s eye from a young age. She was as captivated by her friend’s family as she was by the “seven rough boys” who lived near her North London home and were “off robbing houses.” She said that she learned from a young age that “very different strands of experience were equally valid.” One minute the family were off on a CND march, the next her mother was musing on how much better the country might be if it was run under the House of Lords. When Susie was unsure about what to study at University her mother just said: “Darling have you ever thought of becoming a country and western singer?” “Wild suggestions are useful, they make you think you can do something crazy”, explains Susie giggling.

But Susie was not particularly crazy. “I was hypersensitive I’d have little arguments and become inconsolable.” Her sensitivity meant that being the youngest child, by five years, was often challenging. “It was hard to define myself, especially having older sisters with very strong personalities”, she explains. “I sometimes felt as though all the personality types were taken, and what was left for me? I couldn’t be the artistic one or the one who liked travelling. neither did I want to be a pale imitation of all of them. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll be the nice one, really nice all the time.’

As she grew older she realised that personality isn't about making decisions. “I do believe in being kind but you cant legislate for your nature”. She said she was nine or ten when she knew she had to toughen up. The sincere 32 year old novelist is till litmus paper sensitive but her warmth can be underscored by a brittle intelligence. Susie doesn't seem to enjoy being interviewed. Despite considerable acclaim as a novelist - Tatler called her “The most natural young writer we have” - she will be forever her father’s daughter. She is very proud of him, but all the same, it must rankle.

I am duty bound to ask her reaction to reports that her 79 year old father’s new muse is 27-Emily Bearn, a journalist. Susie says loyally, “If he’s happy, I’m happy.” She is so sincere that you feel dreadful asking such a cheap question. But we get over it. Friends say that of all her family she looks most like her great grandfather, philosopher, Sigmund Freud. “I’m really proud of old Sigmund” she says. “I know it’s a bit embarrassing but I do think of him as a superstar”.

She talks of his influence, the way she is constantly psychoanalysing people and says, “I’ve flirted with Jung but, when it comes to psychoanalysts, I suppose I’m a bit partisan.” She is known among her friends as a queen of puns. I ask if there is anyone in particular with whom she engages in repartee and she giggles: ”You mean a pun pal?” She was attracted to her husband Tom’s quick wittedness- but it with her father Lucian, that she most enjoys verbal sparring. When Susie was little, Lucian would pop round for tea and recite cautionary tales, before disappearing again. “I think that’s what he imagined Daddies did”, says Susie, amused.

She really got to know her father when she was 17 and like her elder siblings began sitting for portraits, for which she was paid. “There was a slight feeling of a summons about it”, she recalls, “but we would discuss books, exchange gossip, listen to Cole Porter and eat delicious things.

“When i first sat for him, I remember thinking that I must arrange my limbs so they looked beautiful. Then I realised that what you actually need to do is arrange your limbs so they are extremely comfortable.” The portraits of his children are said to be more tender than his others. her favourite is her head in repose. “It’s really me”, she enthuses.

When she first started writing and tried to mimic Lucian’s 15 hour days, she “practically had a nervous break down.” She now believes that “if you hit a problem with work and just keep going at it you’ll come through.” It is a metaphor for her life really. She may have spent her childhood in thrall to her older sisters but now in her early thirties, she has found true contentment with a baby, husband, home and career. This perspective enables her to rate highly the value of growing up in an unconventional family.

“When we had O levels coming up my mother would promise to buy us a new bike if we failed. It showed that whatever you did was really cool, which I appreciated.”