Author of the week: Isabel Fonseca

last updated 8 January 2015

Isabel Fonseca still isn’t sure what her husband thinks of her first novel, said India Knight in the London Sunday Times. Her resulting anxiety is understandable. Fonseca’s Attachment is a tale about a 46-year-old American expat who suspects her older and more charismatic husband of having an affair. What’s more, Fonseca happens to be a 46-year-old American expat, and her husband is 58-year-old Martin Amis, the acclaimed novelist and merciless critic. “He read it at proof stage and gave me some useful notes,” she says, “but I don’t really know what he thought. He didn’t say much.”

Attachment isn’t Fonseca’s first book, said Charles McGrath Jr. in The New York Times. She published an acclaimed study of the Gypsies, Bury Me Standing, in 1995. By then she was already notorious in the U.K. as the head-turning grape-juice heiress who had broken up the novelist’s first marriage. “It’s not that hard,” she says, “to be glamorous in England.” Though Fonseca didn’t intend to let more than a decade pass between books, motherhood intervened. Attachment grew out of a short story she started working on just to get herself unstuck. Now that it has been published, she’s not at all surprised to be answering questions about parallels between her life and that of her heroine. Many surface details line up, she admits, except that Amis has never cheated on her. “Why would he?” she says, laughing. “He’s married to me.”