British author Will Self draws on his mother’s diaries in his latest novel, Elaine

In 1988, when Will Self’s mother, Elaine Rosenblum Self, died of cancer, he and his brother discovered her hidden diaries under her bed in her North London flat. These diaries comprised over 30 spiral-bound notebooks, detailing their mother's inner life from the 1940s to the present, spanning four decades.

During their mother’s comatose hospitalization, the brothers flipped through the diaries, but soon put them aside. “It was too heavy,” Self said on ABC Radio’s The Book Show. “She wrote everything; she was as unreserved on paper as she was in life, and reading these diaries was emotionally exhausting.”

Self, an acclaimed author whose 2012 novel “Umbrella” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, revisited his mother’s diaries years later. These diaries now form the basis of his latest novel, “Elaine.” “My mother was a very charismatic and compelling woman,” Self said. “Elaine,” drawing from his mother's life, depicts a frustrated housewife in the 1950s who embarks on a disastrous affair.

Some have criticized the author for writing a “sex novel” about his mother. But Self is unfazed, having previously lost a job covering the UK general election for being reported to have taken heroin on the British Prime Minister’s plane. He dismisses claims that his use of his mother’s diaries is exploitative or unethical, or that it harms her in any way. “I don’t believe in life after death, sadly,” he said. “She is really, really dead. And she’s been dead for 36 years, so there is absolutely no way she could be upset in any way.”

Self says his mother would most likely have been pleased to be the subject of a book. “I think she would have been very pleased to be rendered as a fully credible character; a living person.” More than three decades after his mother’s death, Self still hasn’t finished reading her diaries, which are now housed at Cornell University. “I still find it too disturbing,” he said. In “Elaine,” he draws from the first ten years of the diaries, from 1947 to 1957. During this period, Elaine's relationship with her first husband—an Ivy League literature professor—unravels as they become romantically involved with another couple. Self immediately saw the narrative potential in this complex relationship. “The sheer purity of its plot has a kind of tragicomic quality, which always appeals to novelists. It’s concise,” he said.

The diaries describe a world reminiscent of “Revolutionary Road,” Richard Yates’ 1961 novel that condemned the conformity of 1950s suburbia. It was an era when the independence that women had gained during World War II was rescinded, and they were confined to their marriages in the postwar period. “Mom at least on the surface conformed to that type,” Self said. “She represents a generation of women who should have had careers…and the fact that they didn’t ruined their lives.” In the novel, Elaine’s dissatisfaction with her life manifests in various dysfunctional behaviors. “She has hysterical outbursts. She clearly drinks too much. She feels murderous towards her children, which is not a good look for childcare. She is very contemptuous of her husband and feels trapped by the marriage,” Self said.

More complicated were her relationships with men: she valued their sexual interest “while also despising herself for being economically dependent on them.” “This is a classic mid-50s thing for an intelligent woman, finding herself heated up in this way.” While the 1950s was a time of sexual repression, Self’s mother was relatively experienced sexually. Her diaries reveal that she had affairs while her first husband was serving in World War II. “Mom was a sexual being,” Self said. In the novel, Elaine and her husband John—like their real-life counterparts—attend “petting parties” with their friends, where they swap partners and engage in “kitchen-based fondling activities,” Self said. The sexual experimentation of the 1950s was a precursor to the swinging, sexual liberation of the 1960s. “These people in their 30s…wouldn’t have had much sex,” he said. “They’re the generation that ultimately serially married and divorced.”

By the late 1950s, the real Elaine had remarried to British academic Peter Self and was living in North London. Self was born in 1961, two years younger than his brother Jonathan (he also had a half-brother 13 years his senior from his mother’s first marriage). Self always felt that Elaine was unlike other mothers. “She was very wild for a woman who was already in her 40s then. She was 41 when I was born, which was old in the early 60s. She had been through all of this in America…,” he said. “Both my parents had been married before, which was also unusual in the early 60s. They were older, they came from different backgrounds and had lived another life…which was heretical for the time.” As a Jewish American, Elaine had a certain allure. “Compared to the rather buttoned-up English people we grew up around…she seemed exotic as an American, and sexier. Americans seemed to represent the future,” he said.

However, Elaine had a volatile temper, which created a sense of instability in the home. She experienced bouts of mental illness throughout her life, referred to as “nervous crises” in the novel. “She was very quick to anger…but I also remember her as a parent as being very, almost excessively, demonstrative of love,” Self said. Despite their tumultuous relationship, Self partly credits his success as a novelist to his mother’s influence. Growing up, Elaine refused to have a television in the house, so her sons had to read to pass the time. In the evenings, the family would gather for reading dinners. “The rule was you could only talk about the book you were holding. You couldn’t go off-piste,” Self said. “My mother was very passionate about the virtues of reading. It was a big deal for her.” Elaine wanted to be more than just a reader; she also wanted to be a writer. However, this was a dream she never realized. She was active in literary circles and worked in publishing and book production, but her literary output was confined to the voluminous diaries she kept throughout her life. In these diaries, she expressed her disappointment at not becoming a writer. The Elaine in the novel also feels a similar frustration: “The thing that most bothered Elaine was this: she could quickly find a phrase when making a quip, but stringing these phrases together into a pleasing passage of prose completely eluded her.”

Self’s mother died before he became a published author (his first collection of short stories, “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” was published in 1991, three years after her death). “In a sense, it makes me sad, because it’s absolutely the thing she trained me to do,” he said. “Even though she would have hated it at the same time, it would have been very gratifying to her…[in a] contradictory way.” “Elaine” is published by Grove Press.