Debra Oswald tells us what inspired her new novel and its eponymous heroine Betty.
A&U: Tell us a little about your new novel One Hundred Years of Betty.
DO: This is a ‘whole of life’ novel about one woman. A sort of fictional autobiography, I suppose. In her own words - passionate, candid, sometimes funny - Betty tells us her story from the moment she takes her first lungful of air in south London in 1928. She relates her adventures and sorrows and discoveries and delights right up until the party to celebrate her 100th birthday in 2028.
Through the decades, Betty faces hardships, terrible losses and obstacles but she also encounters great friendship, many joys and sudden surprising opportunities. Through it all, she remains curious, ready to laugh and game for anything (most of the time).
My hope is that there’s a special sort of satisfaction in devouring the entirety of a character’s life: Betty as a child, teenager, lover, worker, friend, mother, activist, writer, recluse, phenomenally old woman, angry woman, loving woman, all of it.
A&U: How did the idea for Betty originate?
DO: I’ve always loved stories with a long sweep of time. I found myself thinking about my mother and how much the world changed during her lifetime – a long ride that was surprising, sometimes inspiring, sometimes infuriating. So, in this novel, I set out to travel with one woman over a hundred years.
Of course, I also love a story with a tight time-frame, focusing on one acute pivotal episode in the characters’ lives. But there are certain things we can understand by staying with characters for decades and there are some subjects – like enduring friendship – where a long timeframe is the most powerful way to handle it. And I’m interested in the way childhood experience is still active inside us, like unexploded ordnance, influencing how we think and behave even as much older people.
I’m fascinated by the how crucial moments fit into the whole fabric of a life. What matters is not just one key romance or our childhood origin tale or a career crisis, an illness, etc etc – it’s about all that stuff mulched together, events interrupting each other and compromising what happens next. That feels like the messy truth of most of our lives, especially for women.
There are subjects that don’t get written about much in fiction and for which a long span of time is essential. For example, motherhood over many decades - the experience of having small children and then navigating the relationships as they become young adults, make mistakes, suffer, build their own lives; our guilt that we’ve damaged them, the dilemma about when to intervene, when to say something and when to shut up.
A&U: Betty has two wonderful lifelong friendships with very different but equally impressive women. If you could be friends with anyone from the novel, who would it be and why?
DO: How can I choose? I love them all! I would count myself lucky to have Athena as my friend – a smart, strong, clear-eyed, loyal woman. She’s stubborn, sometimes too prickly in matters of pride, but she would never let wounded pride stop her from supporting and loving her friends.
The Pearl Jowett character is a very different kind of woman to me and that is part of the appeal. It’s fun and illuminating to be friends with someone who thinks so differently. And it would be delightful to be friends with Pearl because she offers her heart so generously, and sees the world from such a buoyant, sunny perspective.
If I can sneak in one more, I’d also love to be friends with Rex Lightfoot. A stalwart, thoughtful, loving bear of a man.
A&U: Did you need to conduct any specific research into the times in which Betty lived?
DO: Some of the early events in Betty’s life were inspired by my own mother’s experiences – growing up in a large, poor family in south London, wartime evacuation, migrating to Australia as a ten-pound Pom, working as a secretary in the 1950s and 60s. Betty certainly shares my mum’s fierce feminist energy and the frustration of being an intelligent woman born too early to use her ability to the full. Then again, Betty is a very different person to my mum and her story develops in wildly different and hopefully engrossing ways. I also raided my own life for material (including working as an artist’s model and working in 1980s television drama).
But of course, I had to dive into a lot of research to cover Betty’s one hundred years - books, oral history sites, documentaries, interviewing people, etc etc.
The research was thrilling, and every era threw up so many story possibilities. Any one of those eras is worth a novel of its own - a hundred novels - so it was frustrating to be forced to choose some bits of story material and not others from the feast on offer. But I wanted to stick with the project of a long timeframe, which meant I had to sacrifice stuff so the book didn’t end up impossibly long.
One method I used to help me enter the mood of the various eras was to play the relevant music. Especially so because Betty loves to dance and enjoys music all her long life. I ended up making a playlist for myself: tracks that follow Betty’s life, from 1930s swing tunes, Nat King Cole, Rosemary Clooney, Elvis, Greek music, mariachi numbers, the ‘Get Smart’ TV theme, Joan Baez, Eartha Kitt, Carole King, Dolly Parton, Queen, Archie Roach etc etc.
It became my ‘Betty Playlist’ on Spotify.
One Hundred Years of Betty
by Debra Oswald
One ordinary extraordinary woman living through a century of massive change, from the bestselling author of The Family Doctor. Meet Betty: storyteller, feminist, eternally curious and phenomenally old. On the eve of her hundredth birthday party, Betty tells us her story.
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