What Alan Bennett has stopped worrying about at 90

This week we interviewed two literary greats: twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and memoirist Deborah Levy, and Alan Bennett, who, in his 10th decade has published a new novella. For today’s newsletter I spoke to Mark Lawson about interviewing the author and playwright, and in honour of Collins dictionary naming “brat” as its word of the year this week, deputy music editor Laura Snapes is recommending her pick of the brattiest books.

At 90, acclaimed playwright and novelist is still writing – his new novella Killing Time, set in a home for elderly people, has just come out. And he’s working on turning the diaries he has “always kept” but “in a haphazard fashion on scraps of paper” into a book, he told Lawson in an interview for this week’s Saturday magazine.

Yet there was a time when Bennett didn’t even expect to reach 70 – a cancerous growth was found in his colon in 1997. Had it been terminal, then his most famous play, The History Boys, would never have existed. “It is a slight surprise that I’m 90,” Bennett told Lawson.

Lawson was first in touch with Bennett almost three decades ago, after receiving a postcard from the writer complimenting him on an interview he’d done with Tony Harrison, another Leeds-born writer.

“With professional ruthlessness, my grateful reply asked if Mr Bennett would ever consent to be interviewed,” Lawson tells me. “He had long been a favourite writer of mine: not only because I also grew up in Leeds – the people and speech of where he captures so exactly – but for a range of work in theatre and, especially at that time, television: including the extraordinary monologues, Talking Heads.”

When Bennett replied to say that he would only do an interview when he had new work to talk about, Lawson took it as “an elegant brush-off”.

But a few years later, another postcard arrived from Bennett, saying there was something new and he would be happy to talk Lawson interviewed him for Radio 4, and then again later for BBC Four and the Guardian.

This time around, Bennett was “frailer”, but “remains fiercely intelligent, funny, modest – in all our interviews he has contrasted himself with ‘proper writers’ – and insightful about society and politics”, Lawson says. “Remarkably, when we first talked in that radio studio, he was in recovery from cancer he had not been expected by his surgeon to survive. So a big theme of our latest conversation is his three ‘bonus decades’ – all the plays, films, novellas and nonfiction collections that have come in this time, as well as key personal and professional relationships.”

And what has Bennett learned over the years? To “dispense with self-consciousness”, he told Lawson. When he once would have worried about what people thought of his work, he says he doesn’t “care any more. You just think: well, at least I’ve got them down on paper.”

It is obviously the height of beg behaviour, and thus not very brat at all, for Collins to give its word of the year to the title of Charli xcx’s sixth album, which you can’t have failed to notice has slimed 2024 in a particularly acid shade of green. Brat, according to Collins’s new additional definition, means “characterised by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude” – or as Charli put it, “pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”.

The two protagonists of Marlowe Granados’s debut novel Happy Hour, published in 2021, certainly fit the bill: fresh in New York, surviving on nothing but their wits and a suitcase full of clothes they flog at a market, they live on 7-Eleven hotdogs and hors d’oeuvres filched from the glamorous parties they inveigle their way into. (They may be the exact prototype of the nihilistic It-girls Charli sings about on Mean Girls.) Sixty-three years earlier, in Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, Sally Jay Gorce swapped NYC for Paris, and in quite an understatement for the amount of romantic, debauched and legal scrapes she gets herself into, declares herself “rather fond of excitement”. Like Charli, however, she is no but a gimlet-eyed observer of her surroundings with high standards for hijinks.

But there’s another side to brat – behind the hard exterior lies a festering mass of insecurity and uncertainty, as Charli’s song I Think About It All the Time shows. About whether the star should give it all up to have a baby, it’s the synth-pop equivalent of Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, the Canadian writer’s own inquiry into the pros and cons of procreation. Guardian critic Lara Feigel called the book “replete with ambiguity and contradiction” – a fairly perfect way to sum up the spirit of brat.