GEORGIE: Mum’s very over the top. She really enjoys having fun and
being silly — she’s a child at heart. She was always different from the
other mums, and a lot more fun. Mum always wanted to join in. When my
friends came round, we’d play the shark game, with Mum chasing us all around
the house for hours.
She and I were very close when I was small. She’d come in to my primary school
to read to my class dressed up in weird outfits — a rabbit, the Queen, a
wicked witch — and make us all laugh. But when I was 12 or 13, I started to
feel I was too cool to be friends with her.
I had to say: “Mum, that’s enough!” I don’t think I was
being very nice to her, actually, and she got really upset. “Why don’t you
like me any more?” she’d say.
Mum can be embarrassing. She can make things into a much bigger deal than they
are. If I don’t hug her properly, she thinks I’m mad with her and she gets
offended. When I went to secondary school she tried to get involved, and at
the beginning she’d come and meet me, but I’d either pretend not to see her
or insist she waited round the corner.
People say I’m more like my dad but that I look like my mum. Mum and Dad are
very different. I think I’m a mixture — I can be fun like Mum and serious
like Dad. Mum can be frivolous and extreme. She’s a writer and everything is
exaggerated. If something’s good, it’s amazing, and if it’s bad, it’s the
end of the world. Whereas Dad’s more realistic. He went to Oxford, so he’s
very learned, but Mum dropped out of school at 15, so she’s always trying to
learn from Dad. She has friends like Kylie and Dannii Minogue, who send me
their old clothes. On the other hand, Salman Rushdie and John Mortimer are
my godfathers.
Mum used to go on about how horrible boys are. Now she’s met loads of my
friends who are boys, and she’s fine. But she still fusses over sleepovers.
I have two rooms in our house, one on the fourth floor and a room that used
to be mine on the third, where the boys stay if I’m having a sleepover. Mum
will patrol the corridors and give them lectures, saying she’s the Nazi sex
freak. One friend was a bit nervous when he heard that. “But I’m Jewish!” he
told her.
Mum grew up in Australia and she’s completely self-taught. She had a series of
horrible jobs, working in a bath-plug factory and cleaning bedpans. But
she’s worked really hard and written 11 novels and made a real success of
her life.
Mum gets homesick and really misses her family. They’re all very close. A few
years ago we tried living near Sydney. Life was completely different from
London, and we saw a lot of both Mum’s and Dad’s family. It felt like a
holiday the whole time, even though I was at school. We’d have barbecues for
dinner and go to the beach. Mum and Jules loved it, but Dad and I weren’t so
keen — you feel you’re away from everything. So we came back to England.
What I really admire about Mum is her drive, and the way she gets on with
stuff. For instance, when the roof came down and the whole house was a mess,
Mum just got on with getting it all fixed. And she has great motivation.
Even if it’s stormy outside, she’ll still go for a run because she just has
to work out every day. I’ll never have that motivation, but maybe I’ll have
some of her drive. I’d like to, because I’m really proud of her.
KATHY: I’d just typed the end of Foetal Attraction, which was about
being pregnant. I had a cup of tea, and four hours later I went into labour.
The timing was perfect. I knew the baby was a girl — I’d seen her on the
scan, swinging her handbag, reading The Female Eunuch!
With Jules, I did the whole earth-mother thing and had a horrible 30-hour
labour. Why? I’d been taking drugs all my life, so why stop now? Natural
childbirth is like natural appendectomy. So with Georgie I had a mobile
epidural, rang friends and watched TV, and I remember it as a great birth.
And she was born here, in England, so she’s a pom. Despite my playing her
Australian Play School tapes to try to flatten her vowels, she has an
English accent.
Your children are the greatest loves of your life. Georgie was beautiful, with
delicate little features, and she was a girl, so I had one of each sex and I
could hang up my ovaries, which was great.
As a little girl Georgie was feisty and strong-willed, very like me. When I
used to go to read to her class, she’d pick clothes out of the dressing-up
box for me. Leopardskin hot pants, a tiara, an old feather boa… I’d stomp up
the street looking like an old prostitute — all for my daughter! I’d
read to them while she’d sit in the front beaming up at me and taking all
the kudos.
You think your daughter’s going to be a carbon copy of you, but we’re very
different. Georgie’s very calm, cool and collected, whereas I’m overly
dramatic, explosive and colourful. She’s the only one whose good opinion I
crave and who can really hurt me. So it was a shock that at 12 years old
little girls get taken hostage by their hormones. Georgie didn’t want me
hanging around her friends any more, or to be seen with me in public. I had
to walk 10 paces behind her. If she could have put me in a burka, she would
have done. That really hurt.
And when she was 13 she berated me for writing about sex. I told her to
tell anyone who teased her that her mother writes satires on the plight of the
working mother. But she was upset and said: “Why can’t you just be normal?”
I was wounded to the core. I thought I was being a good, feisty, feminist
role model. Anyway, I threatened to turn up at school in a headscarf and
apron, clutching a Bible. She calmed down a bit then.
Ours was always a flamboyant household. We had Salman Rushdie’s stag night
here, which was all-female. Nigella Lawson, Caroline Michel, Dannii Minogue
and I slicked our hair, dressed up in men’s suits with red lipstick and
played spin the bottle. Salman loved playing tonsil hockey with the leading
literary beauties of London. Georgie was 11 at the time, and it was her job
to open the door to the feminist lesbian magician-stripper. She tells me now
that she found it all pretty weird. She had a friend here who was gobsmacked
at the stripper and the penis-shaped balloons. Georgie told the stripper:
“It’s very nice to meet you, but I won’t be watching your act. Here’s a
glass of champagne.”
There’s a strong Ab Fab quality to our relationship. An old friend of
Geoffrey’s who’s an artist took some photos of my naked bottom. Actually, my
bottom’s quite peachy — it gets a lot of exercise, as I talk out of it so
often. When I hung
a montage of my naked bottoms on the wall, Georgie shrieked: “When are you
going to start acting your age?”
I’m about to turn 50, so a friend took pictures of me in a leopardskin mini,
with two gorgeous men, one white, one black, in chains and rubber collars,
on all fours. I’m kneeling on their naked backs, grinning like a cougar.
Georgie was mortified. But as I was going out she said: “Goodbye, mother.
Don’t get chain-chafe.” That’s wit for you.
If I’m going out to a party, I try to wear very short skirts — my legs are
still good — if I can get past Georgie.
I creep downstairs, but if she hears the floorboards creak she’ll come
pounding down and say: “What are you wearing? Go and change out of that
skirt.” Then
I have to try climbing out of the window.But I don’t think mothers should
pretend to be something they’re not. Even though I know I’m embarrassing, I
still intend to age disgracefully.
Georgie’s instincts are so good. She’s really funny and caring and wise. She’s
fabulous with her friends and my mother. I say to her and her friends,
“Don’t wait to be rescued by a knight in shining Armani.” Of course I want
her to fall in love with a gorgeous man, but also for love not to be the
priority, for work to be important. I want Georgie
to stand on her own two stilettos
Interviews by Ann McFerran. Portrait: Anastasia Taylor-Lind
