Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: John Grisham | Kiran Desai
John Grisham was impressively level-headed about success during his first appearance at the book festival, writes Susan Mansfield, while Booker Prizewinner Kiran Desai was honest about the terrifying prospect of writing her latest novel
It’s the National Year of Reading, and Book Festival director Jenny Niven pointed out that few have done more to encourage reading than John Grisham, the king of the legal thriller, who made his debut visit to the festival on Tuesday night. Grisham has sold somewhere between 300 million and 500 million books worldwide, the numbers so high no one has quite kept count, not even him.
A smartly dressed, clean-cut figure, he turned out to be a pleasant festival guest, impressively level-headed about his success. “Sometimes, my wife and I still shake our heads at where we are,” he said. “In popular culture, everything is temporary. We decided to enjoy our success and keep our feet on the ground. It allows us to be generous.”
Grisham was born on a cotton farm in Arkansas, from which the family fled at night to escape debt collectors. Moving frequently, they lived all over the Deep South, Grisham and his four siblings judging each new town on two criteria: the condition of the football field and the number of books they were each allowed to borrow from the library.
In college, he loved sport, and was once given a D-minus for an English assignment because it was so fluently written the teacher was convinced it was plagiarised. He worked as a lawyer for 10 years, and had a brief political career in the Mississippi House of Representatives, before starting to write at the age of 30.
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His first book, A Time to Kill, was, in his words, “a total flop”, and he allowed himself just one more chance at the writing game before taking his energies elsewhere. Happily, his second book was The Firm which sold nine million copies and was made into a film starring Tom Cruise.
A church-going man, he supports a variety of charitable causes, and has a particular interest in The Innocence Project, which campaigns for those wrongly convicted. Of the 2.5 million people in US prisons, he said that between five and 10 per cent are innocent, and deplored the escalation in death sentences being awarded during the Trump presidency.
He is best known for legal thrillers, the latest being The Widow, with The French Illusion published in the UK next month. However, interviewer Ian Rankin was keen to draw out the different dimensions of his writing career: non-fiction books on miscarriages of justice, a basketball novel, Sooley (2022), and a family memoir, A Painted House (2001).
There was disagreement between the two over how much planning a novel requires. Grisham is a planner and believes that, without a detailed outline, a writer can go off track and “write themselves into a corner”. Rankin prefers to “hang on by my coat tails and see where it goes”. Amicably, they agreed to differ. If Grisham were a house guest, he’d be welcome back any time.
Another writer that does not plan her novels is Booker Prizewinner Kiran Desai. The Indian author described how she worked for 20 years on her latest, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, ending up – about nine years in – with 5,000 pages of fragments in no particular order, a situation she described as “terrifying”. “I read them looking for some sign of life and pounced on it whenever I found it, then I gradually understood how I could construct the novel.”
Published last autumn, the book travels across several continents, and three generations of Indian families, to tell the story of the eponymous couple. Desai says she drew on elements of her own life for the character of Sonia, who is a writer. “It leaves you feeling very vulnerable. It is easier to write a political book like The Inheritance of Loss. But it is a gift because you deepen your writing. I would not have been able to write this book 20 years ago. It took a lot of life experience to be able to do this.” Susan Mansfield
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