On researching the history of Jews in 18th century Paris
"I did go to Paris and went to the museums and walked the streets. But before that, I found a wonderful researcher named Max McGuinness. Together we really had to try to crack the case of Jews in Paris in the 18th century, because there were so few. There were about 500 of them. Most of the evidence for their lives is the police reports, because there was a particular policeman who was the inspector in charge of Jewish affairs at the time whose job it was to really record the comings and goings and, in fact, the character and occupation of every single male Jew in Paris. And sometimes, if they had families, who they lived with in their apartment, whose apartment they lived in, what they sold, if they had been arrested for being in Paris without a passport. They were very strictly monitored. And so those police reports really were like a gold mine for me. And in fact, I used a lot of the actual names of the Jews; I used the name of Inspector Buhot, which was in fact his name. So I grounded my writing in reality."
On imagining Jacob's Folly as a film
"It's tempting. It's very visual and it could be funny, but I think I need distance. In the past I always had the technique that I would not let the scab form. I would write the book, and then immediately, if I was going to write the screenplay, write the screenplay. I always had this feeling that you can never go back. You're not the same person five years [later]. You might not even understand it anymore, what you wrote. But with this one, I have a feeling that if I ever do it, it would be better if I have a little distance."
On how much her artistic background (as a painter, actor and film director) and artistic lineage come through in her writing
"I think certainly I'm a very visual writer. I tend to try to communicate emotion and ideas through visual means so that you see it in your eye of your mind. And I think I have an ear for dialogue, which, I remember listening to my father read his plays out loud all the time, and I think I might have inherited certainly a fascination with dialogue and character. But it's always difficult to know where everything comes from."
Read an excerpt of Jacob's Folly