As a literary publicist who became a novelist, Monica McInerney embodies much of why people resent 'media types' - the minders, flacks and hacks who once hung on the edge of the spotlight but are now joining the show.
Many have sneered this year at how the people hired to lubricate the arts machine often make it too slick for the gristle and rough edges of 'real writing'. To wit: Jonathon Coe's defence of B.S. Johnson in his recent biography of the avant-garde novelist, Like a Fiery Elephant.
'It's not the reactionaries or the old fogeys who pose the greatest threat to the novel,' Coe writes. 'It's the dilettantes. The gentlemen [and women] amateurs. The resting actors and the bored journalists and the ubiquitous media people hungry for kudos and the talented but directionless Oxbridge graduates who've all got agents queuing up to take them out to lunch. And because it's so easy for these people to get published, we end up with bookshops piled from floor to ceiling with novels that aren't really novels at all, written by people who haven't given the form and its possibilities a tenth
of the thought that B.S. Johnson gave to it before he even set pen to paper.'
That's fine, says McInerney, sitting in the Palace Cafe, outside the IFC Cinema in Central, but such gripes fail to consider that many people go into the media and publishing with a love for literature and an eye for ways to become writers. McInerney says she has written constantly since she was a child. She wrote a novel at the age of eight. Called The Smith Family Go to Perth on the Train, it was bound and placed on the shelves of her school library in the Clare Valley, South Australia. One of her first jobs was writing scripts for Here's Humphrey, a children's television show starring a mute bear. After working as a press officer in the music industry, she had stints for publishers in Australia and Ireland - in editorial, research, marketing and, mostly, as publicist for the likes of Roald Dahl, Tim Winton, Edna O'Brien, Toni Morrison, Carol Shield, Harold Pinter and Roddy Doyle.
Does a publishing career give her an advantage as an author? 'I don't think that's fair,' she says. 'I doubt it's particularly true.'