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1. You've travelled to, and written about, some fairly unusual places; do you think that this had an impact on your fiction?

This isn't something that occurred to me before but as an idea I find it interesting. The quirky, the extreme, the offbeat, the ever-so-slightly comic, have always appealed to me: places, as well as people. In my twenties, for example, I wrote a guidebook to Lebanon, a country and a people that have lived through some of the most extreme and terrifying events of the 20th century. You could argue that I put the characters in The Family Tree through a Lebanon of the emotions, and then examined the psychological impact upon their lives. I'd like to think that like the Lebanese, they retain their spirit and their humour in spite of everything.

2. Is The Family Tree based at all on your own family life?

Everybody assumes that first novels are autobiographical but The Family Tree is more like anti-autobiography. I stole the suburban background from my own childhood, but Doreen is the antithesis to my own mother. When I was growing up, I thought my family was incorrigibly dull----there were no divorces, or deaths, or huge family dramas----just camping holidays, and chops for dinner, and the sound of lawnmowers on a Sunday. It's only as I've grown older that I've realized how much effort goes into providing that dull, but stable, background. And having lived in my head with the ups and downs, and ins and outs, of the Monroe family for the duration of the writing this book, it's a lesson that has been hammered home for me.

3. Did you conduct any research that inspired the idea you explore in The Family Tree that fate plays a lesser role in our lives than genetics?

I wrote a large part of The Family Tree before I noticed that it was about the nature-nurture argument. And when I realized that I started to read around the subject and to think about how I could give the domestic drama of one family, the universal resonance of all families.

We all come from somewhere. But whether our character has been formed by our parents' genes or their parenting (which of course is a product of their parents' genes and their parenting) is something that everybody must have wondered about at one time or other. When I was at university, for example, I went to visit a friend's house. His father was a semi-famous jazz musician, and the house was entirely decorated in different shades of purple. I thought this was incredibly exotic and bohemian and I remember thinking, If I'd been brought up in a purple house would I still be me?

At the moment, the pendulum of fashionable opinion has swung back in favour of the nature argument. And I think it's something we all believe in, without even necessarily realizing that we do. When I rang my parents, for example, to tell them my novel was going to be published, my dad's response was very amusing and very apt: "Clever girl!" he said. "Well, well, well. It must be in the genes, eh?"

Of course, if I'd told him I'd been arrested for serial murder and narcotics abuse, I doubt he'd have had the same response. In this, I think genetics is like astrology: you believe what you choose to believe.

4. Have you ever researched your own family tree?

My father has a very complicated bit of paper with Cadwalladrs and
Cadwalladers and Cadwaladrs scattered over it (as a family, we only learned to spell a generation ago). But genealogy has always struck me as one of those very male hobbies like model-boat building or stamp collecting. I tend to have rambling conversations with my mother which go along the lines of her saying, "You know, your Great Uncle Geoffrey, who was my mother's brother, who was married to Barbara who lived in Derbyshire and had the farm and whose brother was your Great Uncle Noel who went to Canada. Anyhow your Great Uncle Geoffrey . . ."

After I'd finished the book, I was having one of these conversations when my mother said, "You know, your Great Uncle Geoffrey who was my sister's brother, who was married to Barbara, who was his first cousin, whose sister also married her first cousin . . ."

I obviously hadn't been paying as much attention as I should have. When I wrote The Family Tree, and decided to have two first cousins marrying, I had no idea it was something that was so close to home.

5. You make many pop culture references in The Family Tree. Were you influenced very much by television during your childhood?

I think television influences us in all sorts of ways we don't fully understand. When I was growing up, women on TV were either wives and mothers, secretaries (whose main role seemed to be to wear short skirts and sit on the boss's lap), or game show hostesses. Female equality is one of the most dramatic social changes to have occurred, ever, and it has taken place over the course of my lifetime. When I watch TV programs from the seventies, I'm always alarmed that at some level I absorbed all that, and it must, in some dark recess of my brain, still be a part of me.

TV has played a role in my life in other ways too. In Britain in the seventies, we only had three television channels, so inevitably we all watched the same programs, and the big televisual events, such as the shooting of JR, or the Royal Wedding, were really big events. As such they lodge in the memory every bit as vividly as a friend's birthday party or a family holiday.

In my house, television viewing was split along strictly traditional lines----the females watched soap operas, the males didn't. It was only half way through writing The Family Tree, that I realized that my plot was much like the television of my childhood; it revolved around families and relationships, and the big events weren't murders or bombings but marriages and births. And this, too, I think I learned from TV.

6. There was a strong bond between your character Rebecca and her grandmother Alicia. Whom in your family do you identify with most?

I think that everybody tries to figure out who they look like; which bit of what they've inherited from whom. Uncle Sidney's nose, or Aunty Mabel's chin . . . And with Rebecca, she's obviously her grandmother's granddaughter both in looks and in temperament. I suppose theirs is a relationship that has a certain sort of mystique for me as it's one I've never had. I can't remember either of my grandmothers----one died before I was born and the other when I was three years old----and as such I've never had any real sense of whom I'm descended from and what they've bequeathed to me. It's a family joke that I'm some sort of genetic freak as I don't really look like anybody. Which is perhaps why----although it certainly wasn't a conscious decision----it's these very ideas, about genetic inheritance and familial similarities, that I've explored in the book.

7. Rebecca's mother, Doreen, is famous for her "Doreenisms." What were some of the bits of wisdom from your family?

In Britain, at least half of all human communication seems to take the form of stock phrases. If you ever have a piece of good news there's always someone around to say, "Well, it's alright for some!" Or (more unusually), "It couldn't happen to a nicer person!" You'll be walking down the street, and a total stranger will say to you, "Cheer up love, it might never happen." (Which tends to have precisely the opposite effect: you don't cheer up, you just want to punch them...)

I think sayings are hereditary though. I was at a friend's house the other day making a salad and she asked me if I thought she should wash the lettuce. Without thinking about it, I found myself saying, "You'll eat more than a peck of dirt before you die."

You can trace this back to my mother and her mother before her. These things are hard to shake.