Home » Interviews With Working Mothers

Interviews with Working Mothers

Meet Roopa Farooki, author and mother of two..

Meeting author Roopa Farooki is a bit of a master class in how to channel energy. She is clearly an intelligent woman, (she studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford) and has written two books in as many years (Bitter Sweets and Corner Shop) with a third completed and one in the research stages.

With two small sons and a house in France that is an ongoing renovation project for her and her husband, life is very busy for Roopa, but that is something she is more than used to. After college, there was a brief spell as a trainee accountant which she left to work in advertising for some of the biggest agencies in London.

However, when she and her husband began trying for a family, they discovered that Roopa had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) which made it highly unlikely they would be able to conceive naturally. After months of invasive and painful fertility treatment, they were delighted to find they were pregnant with son number one, Jaan.

This whole process coincided with a re-evaluation of the intense, long hours nature of her career and what she and her husband ultimately wanted out of life.

"I always knew that I didn't want to be working in advertising when I had a family, as the hours were too irregular and punishing, and I knew too many colleagues who had become resigned to being weekend parents. So it was a happy coincidence that books and babies happened at the same time; my husband and I had tried for children for years, but only reached the top of the fertility treatment waiting list when we'd already made the decision to leave our jobs. I wrote both Bitter Sweets and Corner Shop while I was pregnant."

Even more incredibly, when Jaan was just a year old, they were taken completely by surprise with a second pregnancy and Roopa realised it was time to slow down a bit.

"When my first son was fourteen months old, I would be working on the latest edit of my manuscript as soon as he was down for the night, and then start plastering the walls of our decrepit farmhouse at midnight, often not finishing until 4am. I didn't realise at the time that I was already pregnant with my second child, so I wore myself out and made myself quite ill."

Roopa has made a brave decision to live in France (a small village about an hour from Biarritz) away from her family in London but luckily her husband works from home as well. With the move they took on a renovation, a small family and a complete change of career for Roopa. Ultimately, they are relying on each other to make this work.

"I'm very fortunate in that my husband also works from home, and he looks after our boys for half the day while I write, and then I take over. We also split the housework as fairly as we can (although each of us will claim that we do slightly more than the other!).

"On the occasions when I've had to look after the children on my own for a long period, I've found that I can still get my work done, as they sleep for twelve hours at night, but housework goes out the window, apart from the bare essentials of clean clothes and clean dishes. The only thing I miss about my old career in advertising is being able to afford a cleaner!"

When I met Roopa, she was starting a book tour of the UK to promote her new book Corner Shop at various festivals, a whistle stop tour that would take her away from her family for days at a time which she admitted she found hard to cope with. She's getting alot of attention for her new book, not leats becuase her fuirst, Bitter Sweets, was nominated for the Orange New Writers Award 2007.

"I find the PR events pretty difficult, as the children and I are used to seeing each other every day. My elder son is 3 now, so he's old enough to voice his concern about my irregular absenteeism. When I call from a hotel, he tells me that he'll get in the car to come and bring me home!

"But at the same time, I'm conscious of how lucky I am, as the promotional events are only for a couple of months, and the rest of the year I have the kind of quality time with my children that most working parents can only dream of."

Having read Roopa's first novel, Bitter Sweet's before interviewing Roopa, it's interesting to see where the parallels in her own life are to those of her characters - not just in their ethnicity, but also in their life experiences (in particular, one of the central characters also has to go through a painful series of fertilisation treatments). Roopa says that in her case it is easier to write about what you know and have experienced.

"In my novels I tend to use middle class characters with ethnicity that reflects my own family experiences (my two little boys are a mix of Pakistani/Bangladeshi from my side, Anglo/Irish from my husband's side, and they have been mostly raised in France!). I also tend to use the locations I know best for my novels; my first novel Bitter Sweets, was based in Dhaka (my mother's home town in Bangladesh) and Tooting in SW London, where I lived for several years.

"My second novel, Corner Shop, features a Bengali-French mixed race family in the London locations where I grew up and went to school. The French mother in Corner Shop, who is called Delphine, is from the same part of France where we have our farmhouse - I think it's always easiest to write sincerely about what you know!"

To read more about Roopa visit: www.roopafarooki.com