The writer Meg Rosoff is disarmingly modest about her success, but the death of her sister from breast cancer, followed by the diagnosis with the same disease of another sister and, finally, herself, put rocketing sales of her first novel into perspective, she tells Rosita Boland.
Meg Rosoff doesn't know how many languages her first novel, the hugely successful crossover book How I Live Now, has been translated into. She thinks it is twentysomething, and she discovered only the previous day from her publicist at Puffin how many copies of the book have sold: 250,000 in Britain alone, and rising.
If you got this answer from other first-time novelists, you might suspect that a self-conscious laissez-faire was at work, a studied indifference that just didn't wash. You wouldn't believe for a second that they didn't know exactly how many languages their first books had been translated into, or indeed which languages they were.
But Rosoff, who is tucking into eggs Benedict in a Dublin restaurant, after a talk at the Children's Books Ireland summer school, doesn't have time for anything but the truth. She simply doesn't do false modesty. When you've seen one of your sisters die of breast cancer at 40, followed by another sister falling seriously ill with the same disease, swiftly followed by your also being diagnosed with breast cancer - well, it makes things such as books seem of relatively little importance, no matter how successful they are.
"I'm always amazed when people say 'Why me?' when something happens to them. I've always thought 'Why not me?' It had always seemed to me that you have to be very lucky to get to the end of each day alive," Rosoff says disarmingly. "Then we sisters all started getting ill . . ." She smiles wryly.
Rosoff was born in Boston in 1956. She studied English and fine art at Harvard. "Then I became a sulky minion," she says, deadpan. She held various posts at the New York Times, doing research and promotional writing. She moved on to advertising, which she did not enjoy, even though she was successful at it. Nor did she much enjoy the rampant materialism of 1980s New York, as best typified by Tom Wolfe's satirical 1987 novel, Bonfire of the Vanities.
In 1989 she moved to London, where she now lives with her husband, a painter, and nine-year-old daughter, Gloria. For most of that time she continued to work in advertising. She was 48 when How I Live Now was published. She wrote it in three months straight while her sister, to whom she dedicated it in 2004, was dying. Rosoff may have waited a long time to write her first book, but its success was the stuff of every writer's dreams.
How I Live Now was sold at auction, and it has been raved about ever since by critics and readers in every country in which it has appeared. The film rights were sold before it was even published; shooting begins next spring.
It is the compelling and beautifully told story of Daisy, an American-born 15-year-old who comes to live with her four exotic cousins in rural, modern-day England for a summer. She falls inappropriately in love with one of the cousins, 14-year-old Edmond, and he with her. When war breaks out, the family are split up, and forced to survive using their courage and ingenuity.
Big themes - life, death, war, underage sex, anorexia - are handled with originality, subtlety and imagination. It's a haunting book with a deceptively spare style that has found a readership with as many adults as the teenagers it was originally pitched at. This is a book you tell people about once you've read it.
"I feel I never grew out of that intensity you experience during adolescence; that part of me is still an adolescent, even though I'm almost 50," says Rosoff, "which is maybe why I can write about it."
Her second book, Just in Case, due out in August, is about a boy who is convinced that fate wants to kill him, and who devotes his time to trying to escape death. She wrote the book between chemotherapy cycles during a year's cancer treatment. It's a very different book from How I Live Now - set in prosaic, literal urban Luton rather than bucolic, nameless rural England - edgy and rather uneasy, with a wobbly plot. But it's still an extremely good read, with ideas that make you keep thinking once you've finished it.
"All the illnesses informed that whole idea of fate in my books, to a large extent," she says. Rosoff is unsure what the critical reception will be to the second book, and admits that she is far most interested in depicting characters than building a plot. "Stories are much less interesting to me than characters."
She has already written her third book, The Dark Ages, which is set in a 1960s boarding school in East Anglia.
Earlier in the day, talking to the audience at the Children's Books Ireland summer school, she admitted to being nervous about the critical response to her second book. "Writing is not a relaxing career," she told her audience, "which is why I finished my second book before the first one was published, in case I got too put off."
Parents are usually absent in Rosoff's books. Daisy, whose mother is dead, is sent to England by her father and newly-acquired stepmother, who is about to give birth. In England, her Aunt Penn disappears to a peace conference in Oslo on page 24, never to return. There is no mention of her nameless uncle. In Just In Case, Justin has both parents, but he leaves home early in the book, and they become very shadowy presences thereafter.
In The Dark Ages, Rosoff says, "I've done away with parents completely - it's all set in a boarding school. It's a basic element of children's literature: you want to get the parents out of the way so the children can get on with it. I'm actually not interested in parents."
Rosoff loves her new profession. "The minute I started writing, I fell in love with just about everyone I met. In 15 years in advertising, I never made a single friend, which I think is rather odd, since I'm quite a sociable person," she says. They must all have been very dull and very busy in the advertising companies she worked at, because Rosoff is terrific company: funny, smart and charming, with a kind of natural integrity that's impossible to hide.
She's starting her fourth book, a reworking of the Greek myth about Pegasus. "A rape features in it - so it's typically cheerful stuff from me again."
So how is she now, after the chemotherapy? "Well, who knows? Because my younger sister had died, they treated me and my other sister much more radically than they had ever treated her. The chances of our survival are better," she says, matter-of-factly. "They say if you survive 10 years, they give you a clean bill of health. But it's in your head, it's there, that knowledge.
"So I just live with it. I'm doing what I want to do, and I appreciate more than ever what is really important in my life. And to be able to find a happiness because of what you have, rather than missing what you haven't, is a bit of a gift really, coming in a very strange guise. I would like to survive long enough to see my daughter grow up, and write more books and all that, but, if I didn't, at least I'm doing now what I've always wanted to do. I've never been happier in my whole life."
How I Live Now is published by Puffin, £6.99. Just In Case is due out in August, £10.99