Lynne Truss, who became an unwitting star in 2003 thanks to her little book about punctuation – Eats, Shoots & Leaves – is today on a very different plane as she discusses her first novel in 10 years, a horror yarn. Cat Out Of Hell is a gothic horror novella with lots of funny bits, written as part of a series collaboration between horror film brand Hammer and Arrow books.
“I’m a fan of the old classic gothic style,” she says. “Growing up, we’d go to all-night horror flicks and think we were above it all, but as you get older, your imagination is much less robust in that way. Now I’d never go to see a horror film unless I had to.”
Her story concerns a missing woman, a talking cat called Roger (who sounds like Vincent Price), a remote seaside cottage and an amiable retired librarian with a dog called Watson.
It begins with an academic recovering from the death of his wife, who goes through papers and manuscripts given to him by a colleague. Through these, he is introduced to Wiggy, a man who says he has been visited several times by the mysterious talking cat, Roger, who claims to be a member of a feline conspiracy spanning centuries.
The story has its fair share of deaths and lots of supernatural shenanigans, but there’s plenty of humour too.
Truss, 58, seems glad to have left behind the tub-thumping writing for which she is most famous, firstly in the punctuation book and later in her examination of rudeness in the modern world in Talk To The Hand.
Her rise to fame began after she gave up her job as a sports writer at The Times in 2000, due to stress linked with the death of her eldest sister, Kay, from lung cancer.
“She needed help, but my job kept me away from her a lot and I felt very guilty about that,” says Truss. “Even when she was obviously dying, I was at Euro 2000, phoning rather than being there. I think I gave up work far too late.
“After she died, I went quiet for about three years. But [Kay’s] death changed my life and created the conditions for the book to be written.”
First came her radio programme about punctuation called Cutting A Dash. Andrew Franklin asked her to write a book for Profile Books based on the show – Eats, Shoots & Leaves. “People often say that the genius of the book was the title,” she says. “I’m glad they think so. I came up with the whole proposal for the book – including the title and the idea for the cover – in just a single afternoon.”
Truss enjoyed the process of writing Eats, Shoots & Leaves and found punctuation to be the ideal subject matter. “It turned out that punctuation was the perfect subject for a book, because I could describe it, trace its origins, give the rules and also mount a staunch defence of it.”
In the book Truss bemoans the state of punctuation in the UK and US and describes how rules are being relaxed in today’s society. It became an unexpected bestseller, selling more than three million copies worldwide.
“It took up about three years,” she recalls of the furore that surrounded the book. “I had to keep touring and talking about it. It was ‘pinch yourself’ stuff. I keep thinking, ‘It did happen’, but it all still seems very unlikely.
“While all the promotional work was going on I found it stressful, and I also thought, ‘I’ll be so happy when this is over’. I would say to people, ‘This isn’t going to last forever, I’ll get through this’, and I’m so happy that I have.”
Why did she find the success and fame so stressful?
“When something’s as successful as that, people make assumptions about you,” she says. “They start saying, ‘Oh, you’re only interested in the apostrophe’, but I’ve had a very versatile career.
“I’d written novels, plays, I’d done sports writing, and there I was with what I thought was a fantastic portfolio of interesting things to write about.
“It was like I was deliberately scuppering my whole career, because suddenly people were thinking that I was only interested in punctuation.
“What was depressing was when people would say to me, ‘I wrote this very carefully because you were going to read it and I hope there are no errors in it’. But I made a policy never to criticise anybody else’s punctuation and I never have.”
The daughter of a milkman and a self-taught accountant, Truss grew up in a council house near Richmond, Surrey, UK, in an environment where good manners were equated with not upsetting anyone.
She has said that when she was a child, she wanted to be invisible and tried to keep out of family rows.
On leaving University College London, she became a freelance journalist for newspapers and radio, and later wrote books such as her take on the single life Making The Cat Laugh (1995). You can see why she was unprepared for her most celebrated title’s overnight success.
“When I wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves, I lived in a very quiet world of correct stuff, because I worked in print. Most of the people I corresponded with were educated at the same time as I was and had the same rules,” she observes.
Nowadays, punctuation inaccuracy doesn’t bother her as much and she has avoided going on television shows that require a talking head on the subject.
“I could see that there was a role that was open for me to be this kind of Barbara Woodhouse figure that turned up on telly and just told people off about their punctuation – something I absolutely didn’t want to do.”
Despite the circus that surrounded the book, she doesn’t regret writing it. “It set me up in lots of ways,” she says. “I had much more money than I ever expected to make and actually, I still love the book.
“The main thing was not to do any more, even though lots of people thought I should keep writing books to tap into the same audience.”
Talk To The Hand was the follow-up, which focused on the subject of rudeness within the modern world, and was again a bestseller.
After that, publishers wanted Truss to write other books on modern language but she refused.
She understands that she’s still best known for Eats, Shoots & Leaves, but it doesn’t worry her.
“I’m not ashamed of it,” she says. “It was a phenomenon, but I felt that it was up to me to make sure it didn’t ruin my life.”
The last non-fiction book she wrote was Get Her Off The Pitch: How Sports Took Over My Life, in 2010, about her time as a sports reporter. She also writes a column for The Sunday Telegraph’s Seven magazine on everything from being a golf convert to the state of her garden.
“There’s been a weird diversion into me sharing my opinions. Now I can get back to writing novels,” she says.
Truss, who is single, lives happily in a large house on the outskirts of Brighton with her dog, a Norfolk spaniel called Hoagy. She’s obviously much happier staying out of the limelight.
“I’ve learned how to talk to an audience and I do monologues for radio, but I don’t want to be on TV.”
However, there have been moments of joy from the recognition, she recalls, such as the time she watched a David Attenborough programme on pandas.
“There was a bit where the panda put down a bamboo and walked off, and David Attenborough said, ‘So you might say he eats shoots and leaves’. That was nice.”
With only her dog for company, Truss hints that she’s perhaps not settled down with a partner because she’s too much of a romantic.
“I’m not a loner, but the problem is that I want things to be perfect and lovely and exciting.
“I still hope I’ll meet someone and fall in love, but I’m not waiting. I just get on with my life.”
Cat Out Of Hell by Lynne Truss is available in UAE bookstores now.
