Deborah Meyler

I was born in the grim but friendly north, in Manchester, within sight and hearing and inhalation distance of the M62, one of the busiest motorways in the country. You can also see the Pennine hills from my bedroom window, which is still my bedroom window because my mum still lives there. Things ticked along merrily for 17 years and then I went to Trinity College, Oxford. I chose it because the photograph in the Oxford handbook looked nice. I didn't think I had a chance of getting in really, and nor, encouragingly, did my teachers. I like to think they thought that this was more about class and previous lack of good schooling than innate dimness. More later...Now, where was I. Oh yes, I went to Oxford, and it was immensely pleasurable. I fell in love, and remain in love, with Oxford. So let me plunge headlong into the cliche of Brideshead, and quote Evelyn Waugh, where Charles is talking of the texts he has neglected; "I remember no syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient, lore which I acquired that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour."After Oxford I did an M.Phil at St Andrews University, under the supervision of Phillip Mallett. It was on the commodification of women in late nineteenth century American fiction, supposedly, but actually became a thesis on Edith Wharton. St Andrews is another place that it is easy to fall headlong for. Next I won a scholarship from The Guardian to go to City University, to do a post-graduate diploma in journalism. And after that I messed up a bit by coming to America, where my husband had been offered a job by Cambridge University Press. I wasn't allowed to work at first, which caused some loneliness, but then I got a job in a bookshop, and all was well. After that I had three babies, and decided, in my great folly, that it was a good idea to stay off work entirely while they were little, and so resent them wildly for the atrophying of my mind. I'm kidding. I didn't resent them. I did resent the piety and wrongheadedness that made me think it was a good idea to opt out of working entirely - it works for lots of women but I found it very very hard. I don't know if this autobiography is too long, but I am enjoying myself. My two older children got bigger and went to school. I put my littlest daughter into nursery for two hours or so a day, and decided I would write in good earnest. I wrote a book that is under my bed, because I was just warming up and it is all right but not quite good enough, and then I wrote The Bookstore. I enjoyed writing it hugely, despite the difficulty of overcoming idleness every day. Through the very kind offices of a friend named Siobhan Garrigan, I got an agent, who is a tremendously wise person despite her great youth, and she took it from there. Now I am organising my thoughts and ideas for a new book.I work part time in a parish church in the middle of Cambridge.