Sophie Dahl, granddaughter of writer Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal, has her second book, Playing With the Grown-ups: A Novel debuting in the United States tomorrow. Publishers Weekly describes the novel this way: “The full-length debut by the granddaughter of Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal centers on a dreamy, romantic English woman who hasn’t quite escaped the thrall of her fabulous mother, Marina. When Kitty, now married, pregnant, and living cozily in New York City with her financier husband, receives the call that her mother has been hospitalized after a breakdown, Kitty flashes back to her magical youth, revolving around her Swedish grandparents’ Never-Neverland of a country home, Hay House, shared by her mother and aunts. When Marina’s guru insists Marina move to New York City to pursue her painting, Kitty eventually joins her on Park Avenue, and her mixed-up adolescence begins. Wearing her mother’s clothes, flirting with her handsome boyfriends and swept into parties where her mother chops the cocaine, Kitty comes through a number of charming yet troubling moments, as well as foreshadowings of Marina’s future breakdown. There’s plenty of texture to Kitty’s remembrances, but the result reads more like a fictional memoir than fully plotted novel.”
I couldn’t help but remember this was similar to what critics said about her mother Tessa Dahl’s first novel, Working for Love when the book hit American shores in early 1989. Publishers Weekly wrote, “Described as “semi-autobiographical,” this debut novel by the daughter of actress Patricia Neal and writer Roald Dahl seems more factual than fictional, recapitulating as it does the three tragedies that struck the Dahl family in stunning succession. More importantly, though, it reveals the author as a capable writer with a strong, distinctive voice. In short, intense, alternating chapters that are a cri de coeur, narrator/protagonist Molly tells of her efforts to please her dominating, manipulative husband, and, in flashbacks, recalls her earlier efforts to win love from her equally cold, controlling father. The tragic events she recallsthe accident that left her brother brain-damaged, the sudden death of her adored sister, her mother’s strokeare played out against Molly’s attempts to become important in her parents’ eyes and, later, to deflect her husband’s cruelty. Her accusations against Jack, a marital monster extraordinaire, unfortunately become a diatribe, a crescendo of outrage and pain. Molly’s agonizing journey to self-confidence is more credible than her continuing, obsessive need for her father’s approval; at the end of the novel, she still calls him “that giant of a man, my love, my life.” Surprisingly, in view of the bitterness Dahl expresses, the book’s dedication reads: “To my father.”
Below, Sophie Dahl talks to The Book Show about her family and her new novel.
