Everything about Kit de Waal is cool. From her signature quiff to her no-nonsense attitude and sentences punctuated with swear words, she seems to be one part punk-rocker, one part sagacious matriarch. She’s speaking over Zoom from her light-filled home in Leamington Spa, not too far from Birmingham, the city where she and her four Irish-Caribbean siblings grew up. She says Leamington Spa is a bit “up itself” because it’s “pretty and expensive”, but after 20 years of living there it is definitely home. De Waal’s work often talks about home with a capital H, along with its associates “identity” and “belonging”. As the mixed-race daughter of immigrants, she knows a thing or two about it. Her new novel, The Best Of Everything, returns to the theme of belonging among many others, including grief, infidelity, resilience, race, kindness and caring. Set in England in the ′70s and ′80s, it tells the story of single mother Paulette and her son Bird, along with their troubled neighbour Frank and his neglected grandson, whose lives have been brought together by a tragedy. When the book opens, Paulette is working as a young nurse and dating the handsome Denton. She wants to get married and have a baby, but Denton seems content with the status quo. When Paulette discovers not only is she one of many women, but that Denton is already married with children, she has to grieve not only for the man she loved but also for the dream she had of their future together. “Grieving for your dreams is really hard and really necessary,” says de Waal. “Don’t pretend there’s no grief involved just because someone didn’t die. Your dream died. I got divorced when I was 55 – and I’m more than over it, I’m overjoyed to be single. However, what comes up from time to time for me is the imagined future. I was married for 25 years believing there’s my ending. When you find that’s not your future, there is definitely a grieving for it. I found it very difficult.” READ MORE In the nine years since the publication of her debut novel, the prize-winning and bestselling My Name is Leon, she has amassed a considerable body of work. She is also a sort of literary activist, campaigning for more marginalised voices to be published. Why is it so important to her to support working-class voices? “Mostly it’s important because we aren’t telling the truth about life and love and loss — which is what most books are about — unless we are including everybody in those conversations. [ Without Warning and Only Sometimes by Kit de Waal: delightful, harrowing, life-affirmingOpens in new window ] “I love the classics, I love works by white, middle-class men, they’re fantastic writers, but it’s only part of the story. Let’s tell the whole story. History is written by the victors, so in 100 years’ time imagine there’s no working-class voices, what will people think life was like? Will they think everyone had a Volvo and a detached house and went skiing?” De Waal’s body of work includes novels, short stories, young adult fiction and perhaps most notably her 2022 memoir, Without Warning and Only Sometimes, which chronicled her chaotic childhood as the daughter of a Caribbean father and an Irish mother who was a Jehovah’s Witness. By the age of 16, de Waal had left home and eventually found her way to criminal and family law. She was a magistrate for several years and advised social services on the care of foster children. She adopted two children of her own. It was only when her son got sick and she gave up work to look after him that she began writing. She was 55 when her debut novel was published. Unsurprisingly, she is also an advocate for older voices in publishing. “Sally Rooney? Fantastic, she’s talking to her generation and people are saying that’s what it’s like to be single, that’s what it’s like to have sex. That’s not my experience, and we need the experience of the other end of the spectrum. We still have desires, by the way. We still have the mad, passionate sex, by the way. We still have an opinion on politics, by the way. We aren’t all making jam. We need to have as many voices as possible out there in the conversation about what life is about. Let’s not always just be in listening mode; I like to be in speaking mode.” ‘I didn’t intend to write a book about kindness, but I just think in a world gone absolutely mad, kindness and goodness are sometimes overlooked qualities in people’ Does she think being older adds an extra layer of insight to her writing? “I think what I know now is how little I know. The older you get, the more you realise how complex even the most straightforward situation is. I think what I really do know now is to stay in the grey. I was brought up in a religion in which there is no grey – there was what God said and what Satan said – and so the bliss of living in the grey is heaven.” De Waal’s mother died in 2019, and I wonder did her death bring any sense of closure, or peace. “I think we had [already] exorcised a lot of the demons of our childhood,” she says of herself and her four siblings. “So when my mother died I had found a way to be kind and respectful to her. She still preached to us about the end of the world, and you should be a Jehovah’s Witness… We never said, shut up mum, it’s bollocks. We would just change the conversation. So I’m glad for her that she had the children that she did, she had the five of us loving her, respecting her and looking after her, which she deserved. She was a very unhappy, very mentally ill woman.” [ ‘Never swear, kiss a boy or moan’: Kit de Waal on her Irish Jehovah’s Witness mum and West Indian dadOpens in new window ] When asked about her writing, de Waal says she considers her first duty to entertain the reader and tell a good story – “you’ve got to be as good as Martin Scorsese” – but she has noticed the concept of “mothering” keeps coming up. “Not mothers, but mothering. I had that typical Irish mother who fed everybody and I grew up with the concept of mothering going way beyond your birth children. I think that’s why, when I found out I couldn’t have children, I never considered IVF, not for a moment. I was like, okay, I’ll adopt, because I had been brought up on this tradition of mothering children.” Her new book undoubtedly addresses the idea of mothering, and of caring for those in need. “I didn’t intend to write a book about kindness, but I just think in a world gone absolutely mad, kindness and goodness are sometimes overlooked qualities in people.” The book is also a timely reminder that we can be personally conflicted about people and still able to help. “Can we find that level of compassion for people that have perhaps wronged us? I hope so.” While de Waal says she would never write about her own experience of infidelity, she explores the subject from many angles in The Best Of Everything. “The very idea that I would be sympathetic to somebody who had an affair with somebody, I’m amazed at myself,” she laughs, “because I am judgmental about that. I suffered because of that so I have a massive view on the woman who – with open eyes – has an affair. And yet, I’m quite sure that not every woman that has an affair with a man is a home-wrecking bitch.” Almost a decade on from her writing debut and the end of her second marriage, she says life is good now. She’s working on a sequel to My Name Is Leon – “He’s 37 now and that’s all I can tell you” – and she’s seeing someone romantically. She doesn’t call him her partner. “I like him in the boyfriend space. He has not left anything at my house and I don’t leave shit at his house either. We meet and we have a date and we separate.” Her children, now 24 and 30, both live nearby, and she sees them regularly. The rest of her time is spent gardening, cooking, and yes, making jam. She says if she wasn’t writing books she’d be running a small restaurant. “I’m pretty domestic. I’ve got the Windsmoor gene,” she says, referring to the old-fashioned tweedy brand. “I think you have to own your desires when you get older. I think you realise as a woman it’s a case of if not now, when? I’m a bit L’Oréal about it… because you’re worth it.” The Best Of Everything is published by Tinder Press