Review
“In the beginning, this story is quirky and thoughtful, just what one would expect from the pen of a granddaughter of Roald Dahl, beloved author of startling children's books. What's more, it's funny and moving, and worth devouring on its own as an Eccentric Mother Knows Best kind of tale. But this is no children's story. Read far enough, and the pages darken with a kind of coming of age that is only slightly more palatable than, say, Augusten Burroughs' in Running With Scissors. Playing With the Grown-ups grows beyond charming child's play to a clear-eyed compassion for the world's limitless store of tragic human comedy.”
–Bookpage
“Captivating…Playing with the Grown-ups is rooted in biographical seeds but grown over by lush imaginative sentences that wear their seriousness lightly, in the manner of Nancy Mitford and Esther Freud…. Dahl’s profound empathy resonates most poignantly in Kitty’s relationship with her enchanting yet troubled young mother, Marina. With a fairy-wand touch, Dahl rouses some of the ogres–unspoken rivalries, boundary-crossing confidences–that lie between many mothers and daughters who are both emotionally close and close in age.”
–Vogue
“In a captivating, eccentric new novel called Playing With the Grown-ups, Dahl blurs the line between memoir and fiction with her portrait of an appealing, resilient girl named Kitty. Whisked around England, New York and distant ashrams by her loving but incompetent-at-life yummy mummy, Kitty shuttles between glamorously chaotic households, playing cool big sister not only to her half-siblings, but to her mother, Marina.”
–New York Times
“Sparkling, poignant, beautiful–I loved it”
–Cecelia Ahern, author of PS, I Love You
“A lyrical coming-of-age classic . . . A marvelous evocation of what it means to be a teenage girl, and the journey to womanhood.”
–Justine Picardie, author of If the Spirit Moves You
“A haunting story of an intricate mother/daughter bond.”
–Redbook
“A poetic love story…part Love in a Cold Climate, part Edith Sitwell and part any one of her grandfather Roald Dahl’s books.”
–Vogue (UK)
“Deftly written. Peopled by great British eccentrics, it is oddly ageless.”
–Guardian
“Dahl has genuine talent as a writer . . . the boarding-school sequences have a compelling emotional clarity.”
–Time Out London
“Packed full of bumbling aristocrats, boarding-school romance and American suitors proffering martinis, [Playing with the Grown-ups] proves Dahl has inherited her grandfather's talent.”
–Eve magazine
“Dahl is really very funny. I love the hopeless parade of Marina's men and boys…genuine and touching.”
–The Independent
About the Author
SOPHIE DAHL lives in England. In 2003 she and the illustrator Anne Morris published a small book, The Man with the Dancing Eyes. Ms. Dahl has written for the Guardian and Vogue, and is at present a contributing editor at Men’s Vogue.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
The phone is ringing. In her sleep Kitty hears her own voice on the answering machine, husky, as her husband laughs at the serious tone of her message in the background. Then there is the beep, and another voice, a voice tinged with a panic that is familiar.
"Kitty, it's Violet. I'm sorry to ring you in the middle of the night, but it's Mummy. Something's happened."
She sits up, scrabbles for the phone in the dark.
"Violet?" she says.
***
She packs methodically, already in a different place, distancing herself from her bedroom, the cartoonish skyline that she has loved from the moment she first saw it as a little girl. The city is sleeping, although it has the reputation of being one that never sleeps.
She looks at her husband's broad back, every inch of which she cherishes.
"Coffee," he says as greeting, disappearing to their kitchen.
She laughs. She has always been able to wake, her brain engaged from the moment she opens her eyes. He needs to be cajoled from sleep, with coffee and tendresse, something she has joked with his mother about. His mother maintains it's a Southern affliction, a by-product of sugary heat, dawns so hot they make the pavement steam.
"The sleepy South," his mother calls it.
***
They sit next to each other at the round walnut table. He drinks coffee and she drinks tea.
"What time is it?" he says. "I feel like we only just went to bed."
"It's four-thirty," she answers. "The flight's at seven."
"You're sure you don't want me to come? I can figure it out. I hate the thought of you being there on your own."
"I won't be on my own. The others are all there. I'll be fine. It's what I'm good at, remember? Good in a crisis, that's me." She smiles at him.
"I don't think crisis management suits you. You were made for calm. You're my little Buddha." He cups her stomach gently.
"At least her timing was good. Three months more and I couldn't have got on a plane if I'd wanted to." She looks at her belly with rue. "Poor baby. There she was minding her own business in New York, and now look. Let's hope it's character building, and I won't have scarred her for life before she's even out of the womb."
***
At Kennedy she turns to him.
"Mark?" she says. "About the baby . . . You don't think I'll damage her before she's even left the gate? I wanted it all to be so perfect."
He wraps her in his arms.
"What's perfect, Kitty? Life is flawed. She has to meet her loopy relations sometime. Why not now?
Life is full of imperfect, my old sweetheart. Just say the word and I'll park the car and get on that plane with you."
"I'll be fine. You can't take the time if we want a summer holiday," she says, gathering herself.
As he drives away she looks at him from the kerb like a child with big serious eyes, and he feels his heart lurch.
She steadies herself, places her hand on her stomach as if for luck, and walks into the terminal, her overnight bag hanging from her arm like a charm.
Her grandfather, Bestepapa, had hands that were true as butcher's blocks, and his voice was like the beginnings of a bonfire.
"Will you be quiet, small child?" he roared, his huge hand banging on the wooden table, a full stop to the meandering chat around him. "A hen house; I live in a hen house! All of you women talk too much . . . peck, peck at my poor ears! Men do not like this endless feminine banter. Men like women with mystery, don't you know?"
Starling chatter lulled, the chorus (Kitty's mother, aunts and grandmother) practised looking like enigmatic women with secrets, until someone, likely her Aunt Elsie, spoiled it by laughing.
"Sexist," Kitty muttered, her second favourite word. Since she turned eleven it had been replaced by "alacrity."
Her mother and her younger sisters were considered to be spectacular beauties. Not just valley beautiful, but beautiful all the way to London. The telephone rang for them incessantly.
"Who is it? Which one do you want? Speak up, young man. How do you think I can bloody help you if I can't bloody hear you?" Bestepapa made a distinctly unhelpful face. "Ah. You want Marina. Well, you'll have to call back, we're about to have dinner." He finished with his antidote to lecherous pursuit: "She does have children, you know."
Kitty thought the routine was riotously funny. Her mother and her aunts did not.
Her mother said, "You know, Papa, you can't keep us here forever."
"But I can try," he answered. "You're safe here."
One out-of-wedlock baby born to his eldest teenage daughter was quite enough for him. Kitty saw it in the grim set of his mouth as he hung up the phone.
***
"Why is she crying now?" he asked her grandmother, who was stroking her mother's shuddering back as Kitty watched from the hall.
"She is sad, Harald," Bestemama answered, always with Scandinavian simplicity.
"Well, what does she have to be sad about, woman?! She is beautiful and she has this one, and the other two . . ." He motioned angrily in Kitty's direction. "Give her a gin and tonic, and let's be done with the tears. Exhausting stuff, all of this crying."
Marina flashed him a look of sodden fury.
"Come on, you," he said to Kitty. "I've had enough of this. Let's take Ibsen for a walk in the bluebell woods."
Ibsen was his mongrel, fast as a blade. His sleepy-eyed demeanour belied a sly murderous instinct. The farmer at the top of the lane crossed himself when he saw him.
"Do I have to wear shoes, Bestepapa?" Kitty said.
"No. It's good to harden up your feet for the summer."
He loped out of the front door, sighing as his hip gave a twinge of protest. Kitty skittled out after him like a shadow.
"What are you reading at school?" he asked her. She was in the third-form reading group, though she was in the juniors.
"Go Ask Alice," Kitty said. "It's about a teenage drug addict."
He grimaced.
"No lovely Fitzgerald? No Steinbeck?"
"I think they're trying to warn us against perilous ways," she said, rolling her eyes to indicate that she thought perilous ways were beneath her.
"I had an aunt who was a drug addict in Sweden. Well, actually a pair of aunts. Opium smokers the both of them, raddled their brains . . . Never understood it myself. I'd much rather have a lovely gin and tonic any day."
"So would I," Kitty said.
"That's the stuff." He leaned on his stick, and they walked in warm silence up to the woods, Ibsen hungrily regarding the chickens, who gazed at him, their black eyes sharp like stones.
***
Hay House was the very centre of Kitty's universe. She grew up with the fields in her eyes and the woods in her nose. Her mother said Hay was her Never Never Land, and why would she ever need somewhere else? A house with a mortgage, and a roof that might one day fall in? Kitty thought it sounded horrible, and understood her mother's choice to stay at Hay in their whitewashed cottage in the garden with the yellow roses that hugged the outside wall, falling asleep under a roof that was as sturdy as their Irish nanny, Nora.
Kitty's brother and sister, Sam and Violet, were twins. They had a different father. Theirs was a magician called Barry. Kitty's was the husband of someone who wasn't her mother and his name was Mr. Fitzgerald.
She heard the grown-ups say her mother was his kept woman, which didn't make sense to Kitty, because he hadn't kept her. He paid for Kitty's school, and sent her vast amounts of pocket money which she never knew what to do with.
Her mother called Mr. Fitzgerald her "one great big love." Their affair began when she was very young but because he absolutely couldn't marry her (the contributing factor being Mrs. Fitzgerald, a solid pre-nuptial agreement, and the iron grip of the Vatican on his conscience), he was perfectly happy when she gave birth to Kitty (Mrs. Fitzgerald was unable to have babies) and because of having "pots of money" (said in a whisper) he was perfectly happy to give her mother some of it.
It was an arrangement that worked, at least for them. Kitty read Daddy Long Legs and thought it might be about her. She was compelled by shadowy, mysterious men; in particular, detectives.
When she watched her favourite programme, Bergerac, on television, she couldn't decide whether she wanted him to be her father, or kiss her passionately, as they chased criminals together. It was what Bestepapa called "a conflict of interest."
***
Nora came into Kitty's life when she was six months old, and her mother had banged the door shut on her affair with Mr. Fitzgerald. Her mother said Nora saved her life at this time. She did not say how but Kitty knew it must be true, because Nora was the kindest person in the world and very tolerant. Her mother made Nora laugh mostly, but when she made her angry, by having "FANCIES," such as, "Nora, I think we should all go and live in the medina in Marrakech," or, "Nora let's give the children a firework party just because it's Monday, and they do hate Monday," Nora went silent and pursed her lips and refused to leave her room. Her mother left flowers outside in the hall and made butterscotch Angel Delight to curry Nora's favour. In general this worked.
When her mother ran off with Barry the magician and married him after three weeks, Nora was so angry she didn't address one single word to Marina for a whole month. Kitty knew this was torture, because ...
