I first met Wendy Perriam six years ago at a literary festival in Devon. She was sitting at a communal writers’ lunch table in a pale lemon jacket with sharp shoulders, toying with some salad leaves. She looked forbidding to me, like a retired ballerina with her exotic dark colouring, her highly strung thoroughbred air and immaculate posture and I hesitated to speak to her. But I had long been a fan and I told her so. Her face lit up with delight. Her first novel,Absinthe for Elevenses (1980), about a married woman’s guilty love affair with a flamboyant psychoanalyst, was the first grown-up book I read by a writer who wasn’t dead. Perriam’s investigations of the moral tensions between duty and pleasure and selfishness and extravagance and restraint appealed to me hugely then and still do. I could tell its author shared my obsessions with food and issues of mental health and I could see she was as interested as I was in how to be a good person in the world without being ground down by it or taking on a worldly taint.

The verve and originality in Perriam’s work stems from an ability to present people in very acute states of mind as if this is the most ordinary fact of everyday life. Her courage in treating subjects that are terrible, like the despair that comes with psychiatric illness or insurmountable human loss, is accompanied by such a fluid and easy writing style that her characters’ turmoil is rendered as clearly and vividly as if it were your own. Perriam is a master of emphasis and understands that a book will sink if an author, lurking behind the covers, seems to know a great deal more about life than her characters. Her books are fused with an energy that results from all their jostling tensions but they are also haunting and humorous. Her novels do not feature the elevated prose style, the halts and starts of other works that examine extreme mental states. Perriam draws her characters in and out of conventional domestic situations and then, without judgment or shock or warning, allows them to do and be their worst.

Today we are meeting for lunch in a rather soulless Marylebone café that we like because one of the waitresses is so sensitive that her eyes well with tears if people say they are not quite ready to order yet. A lone father playing elaborate games with his toddler at a neighbouring table is the only other customer. Perriam watches them with wonder as if they’re zoo specimens. In front of us is my copy of The Anxiety of Influence, which I am reading as research for a book of my own. It strikes me that a more fitting title to have brought to the table would be The Influence of Anxiety, for Perriam’s anxiety is so recherché and spectacular that her portfolio of worries has an almost distinguished air. She finds absolutely everything worrying: we have had 34 intricate conversations recently about an informal picnic a friend is organising for her; even going to bed is fraught with anguish because she might not be able to sleep or she might die in the night and go to hell as her school nuns told her she would when she lost her faith as a child. Shortly after this she was expelled from her convent boarding school for heresy. “I was told I was in the devil’s power,” she says. “It was really really dreadful. I had such a vivid imagination that when I was told I had put Christ on the cross I imagined myself hammering in the nails.”

Born in Kew, south-west London, in 1940 to a mother who was a “professional worrier” and an ex-seminarian-turned-management-consultant father, Perriam wrote her first story at five and a full-length pony novel at 11. After boarding school and Oxford, where she read history, she worked as an artist’s model and a carnation debudder and then settled down to life as an advertising executive, her father’s idea. “I worked on fashion accounts and cars but I had no interest in clothes and loathed cars! It didn’t even occur to me that one could choose a career and Dad said advertising, so advertising it was.” In her late 30s, while studying to become an English teacher at Kingston Polytechnic, her tutor’s agent read a story she had written and sent her a note saying, “Stop your degree and write me a novel. I will publish it.” Soon after her 40th birthday the book came out to huge acclaim.

“Do you think that worrying, with all its anticipation and prevention strategies and the army of defences and the pre-emptive strikes and the constant interpreting and analysing, is a bit like what writers do?” I ask. “Did your anxiety make an artist of you?”

Perriam winces at the word “artist”, which she finds pretentious. “Well, I started writing at four, when I wasn’t consciously anxious, and I wrote my first novel at 11 and I wasn’t anxious then. Though at school I did write quite dark poems. One began: ‘I am alone on life’s disastrous sea!’”

“In fact, I lost whole decades of writing time on account of being anxious, so you could say it hindered me. On the other hand, certain states of fear really interest me as a writer, so I want to explore them in fiction. Antonia Byatt said to me that people who grew up in London in the war always have a very anxious disposition because we picked up on the anxiety of the adults. It does make sense. I’ve written a lot about highly nervous or mixed-up characters, which perhaps I couldn’t have done if I hadn’t known the feelings from inside.”

Perriam herself has suffered from psychiatric illness and was hospitalised briefly after the devastating collapse of her first marriage in the early 1970s. Her conversation is peppered almost casually with a huge cast of extraordinary bit-part players: amorous and suicidal psychiatrists, nurses both spiteful and mad, sadistic nuns, louche priests, doctors who said to her at 20 that she’d not long to live, an obstetrician who pronounced her child would be stillborn (miraculously, not true), seducer-tutors who wrapped her up in rugs then played her the harpsichord while cursing their errant ex-wives into the moonlit college quad.

Perriam speaks calmly about these types. She’s not angry. At our very first meeting six years ago, she said her life has been like a bad B-movie and it’s not a boast or a lament, it’s just an observation.

She paints herself as a cuckoo, from the start, in her parents’ highly controlled suburban nest. “It was very netcurtain-ish and there was a lot of talk about the neighbours and the butter knives ... There were lots of secrets. My father’s mother was Bavarian but there was an idea we had to pretend to be completely English and then we were Catholics – everyone we knew were Catholic – but my father had Jewish blood and we had to keep that quiet. And then my father had some sort of breakdown but we didn’t go and stay with relatives, we stayed with some of his work colleagues, perhaps so the news wouldn’t get out. My parents were very serious: they never went to pubs, they thought all sport was a waste of time and comedy was ruled out, singing was ... But I was the sort of child who adored end-of-the-pier shows. If I went to the cinema I would come home and be all the people for the rest of the day, the people in The Red Shoes or the cowboys or anything with romance. Stewart Granger!

“What did for me was my brand of Catholicism. I was very cheery as a child, greedy, noisy, wild, theatrical and rebellious but all that had to be squeezed out; all the things I loved like film and food and dance, even books, were dangerous and had to go.”

Her abstemious ascetic side was created in the convent where nuns were brutal and continually told their charges that they were worthless and wicked and stupid. An entry from her teenage diary has a Miss McVeigh castigating her viciously at school “because I was pretending to be a bookie during recreation and saying, ‘Come along now, ladies, five to one on Prince of Magic.’” Anyone who had a sexual affair (pre- or post-marriage), the nuns instructed, would go straight to hell for all eternity. “I genuinely thought when I got to university that no one in their right mind would risk it.” Suddenly it seemed like everything she had been told about the world wasn’t true. Love wasn’t as it was in the films. School wasn’t like the books. God wasn’t ... “I’d lost my faith. God had always been terribly close and I could talk to him all the time and he was always listening. He knew if a hair fell from my head. I also had all the community of saints who were really real to me, people who understood you. So, if you felt the black sheep in the family, they all knew you didn’t really mean any harm. It was a huge huge loss.”

Perriam’s latest book of short stories, The Biggest Female in the World, her fourth collection after 15 novels, is filled with loss. Yet rather than an instrument of defeat, as it has been in some of her more recent fiction, loss is often presented here as an heroic spur.

In “Suicide” a young woman travelling to see her highly-strung poet boyfriend shares a taxi with three strangers after a body on the tracks delays their train and the experience has a lasting impact on her future decision-making. In “Chloe” a very elderly lady, conscientious and lonely, endures rough treatment at a hairdressing salon where she is manhandled and marginalised to a punishing degree until a sudden flight of fancy rescues and and redeems her.

I think this new book is very sanguine, I tell her.

“But there’s so much loss!”

Yes, but your characters have such well developed inner resources. Not the pioneering American sort but the ability to create their own imagined worlds which the harsh realities of their situations can hardly penetrate. In “Birth-day” a woman who has suffered three late miscarriages spends her days happily playing with dolls. Perriam doesn’t present this as freakish, it’s sort of a good life.

As a writer, Perriam has been compared to Edna O’Brien and Muriel Spark and her gift for humour has been likened to that of Kingsley Amis. “Wendy Perriam was born to write,” Fay Weldon proclaims but the word that keeps recurring in her reviews is “underrated”.

Does she mind?

Better than being overrated we agree, a little too quickly.

I wonder if Perriam is less successful than she might be (and this is relative as an earlier novel, Bird Inside, touched six-figure sales) because the wildness alienates one set of potential readers and the cosiness alienates another.

“What I don’t like is when people come up to me and say, ‘You’re the one who writes steamy books.’ I don’t think that’s what I do.”

Ah, sex. Perriam writes explicit sex scenes in her fiction and is rather amazed that other writers shy away from doing so, considering it is such an important part of human relations. Put like that it’s hard to argue. “We apparently live in a very open society sexually but we hardly know anything about anyone’s sex lives – that’s probably how it should be – yet the way sex is depicted seems totally wrong.

Did she mind wining the Bad Sex Prize for her last novel, Tread Softly (2002), which was largely set in a women’s hospital ward?

“Oh no! A bit of fun!”

The hypersensitive waitress comes over to us – we’ve dodged her gaze for over an hour and she’s been very brave – and I’m stunned to hear my interviewee flagrantly order a hamburger. But once the chips have been cancelled and the bun dismissed and a little steamed spinach requested instead, it doesn’t seem quite so astonishing after all.

......................................................

Fiction of recollection and regrets
Extract from “Pet” from The Biggest Female in the World

Fanning herself with the menu, Margaret glanced surreptitiously at the small girl at the next table, who was working her way through a dish of ice-cream in a curious shade of mauve. It reminded her of Clara again, who was regularly indulged with elaborate ices prepared at home from fresh farm eggs and cream, in unheard-of flavours such as boysenberry and nectarine. Rachael refused to buy the commercial ones, loaded with additives and chemicals (not to mention “lethal” sugar), but would liquidise the sweetest fruits, to provide “natural” sugar, along with vitamins. In fact, the pampered babe had never touched the normal sort of baby food that came in jars and tins. Her doting parents insisted she experience the variety of tastes and textures that only home-cooked cuisine could provide. Devotedly they laboured in the kitchen, making miniature cheese soufflés to tempt her infant palate, poaching salmon with asparagus, mashing up ripe avocados, of swirling puréed blackcurrants with probiotic yoghurt. Their pièce de resistance was what they called Fish Pie Supreme, which included seven different sorts of fish, swathed in saffron-flavoured sauce and with organic mashed potato on the top. Every mouthful swallowed was a triumph for both child and parent. “Well done, my pet!” Ted would coo, spooning in a soupçon more of guava sorbet or courgette mousse.

“Pet,” Margaret murmured under her breathe – the most bewitching word in the lexicon. It actually had a physical effect on her: made her heart beat faster, brought a flush to her cheek – and nothing to do with the menopause, this time. “Pet” epitomised the very heights of affection and devotion, the unalloyed approval of a parent for a child. “Pet” meant your father stayed with you, rather than storming out in fury because under-fives frayed his nerves and drained his cash supplies. There had been no “pets” on her day – the very thought was blasphemous. Even literal pets (cats, dogs, hamsters, budgerigars) were strictly disallowed, as being germy, unhygienic and a source of danger and disease. And as for using terms of endearment to small and self-willed girls, it would only feed their vanity; make them perilously lax. Clara, on the other hand, had been awash in “pets“ since the first moment she drew breath. She was Mummy’s pet and Daddy’s pet, Granny’s pet and Grandpa’s pet and was bound to be teacher’s pet, as well, the minute she started school (still clad, no doubt, in nappies).

Margaret mopped her face with a paper serviette. It was not that she was jealous – she despised jealously not only as a vice but as a sign of unintelligence. Since equality in fate and fortune was obviously impossible, why waste time and energy deploring a basic fact of life? Politicians might strive to iron out gross discrepancies in healthcare and education and all power to them – it was an admirable idea. But no policy on earth could remove the flagrant differences in the upbringing of children, or decree that every baby in the land received its fair ration of “pets”. And yet those very “pets” were more crucial for people’s future confidence – indeed their very happiness and desire to live at all – than any number of government handouts or social welfare schemes.

‘The Biggest Female in the World And Other Stories’ (Robert Hale, £18.99) has just been published. To purchase a copy at the special price of £15.19 plus p&p please contact the FT Bookshop on +44 (0)870-429 5848.
Visit www.halebooks.com for August offer