Writers' rooms: Charlotte Mendelson
This startlingly ugly room is where I try to write. But, awful as it looks, the Useless Room, aka the Hopeless Room, represents progress. Until recently, I worked in a sea of Sticklebriks in the sitting-room
Charlotte Mendelson: ‘I live for the moments when something comes into verbal focus’
The author describes her best distraction techniques, the odd people she meets in the British Library, and the occasional triumphs of a typical working day
Salad days: how author Charlotte Mendelson transformed her patio into a garden larder
I grow more than 100 things to eat, including eight or nine types of tomato, five varieties of kale, three kinds of raspberry, various sorrels, 10 kinds of lettuce and a few flowers, all edible
Forty words of love in Hungarian
As a child, Charlotte Mendelson thought her grandparents' native Hungarian sounded ridiculous. But now her tiny vocabulary keeps their memory alive
From the Guardian - writers on the books that helped them come out
Every book I read in my youth spoke to my sexuality, because I was straight: Darcy; Heathcliff; the fondue orgy in Asterix in Switzerland – I longed for them all. Later, when things became more romantically interesting, which was the book which spoke to me most strongly? There wasn’t one.
War and peaceful gardens: in the land of Tolstoy
Springtime can kill you, but autumn is worse. If one’s soul responds to nature – and, as Louis Armstrong said of jazz, if you have to ask what that means, you’ll never know – then its beauty is painful. Whatever TS Eliot thought (the poor man was wrong about so much), autumn is the most painful time of all.
Cheekbones, swimming, madness
More than almost any other writer, she understands the currents beneath the surface. Who knew the human heart better?