Mendelson, Charlotte 1972-

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Mendelson, Charlotte 1972-

PERSONAL:

Born 1972, in London, England; partner of Joanna Briscoe (a writer); children: two. Education: Attended Oxford University. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England.

CAREER:

Headline Review, London, England, 1999—, became associate publisher. Formerly worked for publishers, including Reed, London, staff member; William Heinemann, London, junior editor; Jonathan Cape, London, editor.

AWARDS, HONORS:

John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and Somerset Maugham Award, both for Daughters of Jerusalem; New London Writers Award; K. Blundell Trust Award; named a Waterstone Author for the Future, London Times.

WRITINGS:

Love in Idleness (novel), Picador (London, England), 2001.

Daughters of Jerusalem (novel), Picador (London, England), 2003.

When We Were Bad (novel), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2007.

Work represented in anthologies, including New Writing 7.

SIDELIGHTS:

Like her protagonist Anna in her first novel, Love in Idleness, Charlotte Mendelson has worked in publishing; she wrote her debut during her lunch breaks at Jonathan Cape. As the story comes to an end, Anna, like her creator, changes her sexual orientation from heterosexual to lesbian. Mendelson told Guardian interviewer Aida Edemariam that she dated men until she was twenty-two or twenty-three and that she met her partner, writer Joanna Briscoe, in 1997.

Mendelson's second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, is set on and around the Oxford campus, where Mendelson grew up from the age of two while her father taught international law. She told Edemariam that Oxford was "incredibly retro. We really did spend our first 20 years in navy corduroy, mixing interesting paints out of broken bits of brick and feeling very fashionable if we listened to the Beatles." Edemariam noted: "It was a good place to grow up, ‘full of lots of other brainy weirdos,’ but hermetic and stifling too—a fact she mocks in Daughters of Jerusalem." The novel is the story of an academic family, including a professor father, his wife, and their daughters, Eve and Phoebe. The bright but fearful Eve mutilates herself, while beautiful and rebellious Phoebe is the most normal of them all. Edemariam noted that Mendelson was also somewhat rebellious and constantly tried to prove her worth by taking on nearly impossible tasks. She took up the French horn because it is so difficult to play, took A-level Greek, and she cried when her grades were less than perfect.

Jean Lux, the wife in Daughters of Jerusalem, is the observer of the eccentric characters who populate it, including the botanist next door whose beard becomes entangled in a hawthorn tree. Her husband, Victor, is a historian and is jealous of his colleagues. Jean is tired of her life, but this changes when she succumbs to the seduction of her friend Helen. Guardian reviewer Helen Falconer pointed out the themes that seem to interest Mendelson, including "isolation, hidden emotions, awakening sexuality, and the comical etiquette of certain social strata. And what interests her, she made more than interesting for me. Funny, exciting, lyrical, poignant, redemptive—it was a privilege to review this book."

Like the family in When We Were Bad, Mendelson is Jewish. Her maternal grandparents immigrated from Prague to England in 1939. In an interview with Bookseller contributor Benedicte Page, she said that her own family were atheists and that she has never been inside a synagogue. She added that her Jewish cultural identity, however, has always been integral to who she is. "My family was always different from the families of my friends. They are so much noisier, so much more screaming or laughing or crying. There's an emphasis on food and on family, and one of the things I wanted to write about was how that's a wonderful thing, and how that's an incredibly claustrophobic and inhibiting thing."

When We Were Bad is about Claudia Ruben, the beautiful and successful rabbi of New Belsize Liberal. Her perfect family proves not to be so great when eldest son, Leo, leaves his wedding to run off with the wife of the officiating rabbi. Frances, to whom younger siblings Emily and Simeon look for advice, is herself miserable because of her boring and practically arranged marriage; furthermore, she is unable to bond with her baby boy. Claudia's memoir and handbook for families is about to be published, and she is depending on sales to bring income to the family, but her husband, Norman, also has a book coming out, an exposé about which he has not yet told Claudia. Spectator reviewer Matthew Dennison described the novel as "an ample, generous book, fast-paced but not rushed, consistently engaged with its troubled cast but funny too, absorbing and certain to linger in the imagination—sharp and aromatic as the Jewish dishes that on Claudia's table struggle to bind hearth and heart."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July 1, 2007, Michele Leber, review of When We Were Bad, p. 31.

Books, June 2, 2007, Kristin Kloberdanz, review of When We Were Bad, p. 7.

Bookseller, July 7, 2006, "Picador's 2007 ‘Mega Lead’ from Mendelson," p. 13; January 26, 2007, Benedicte Page, "Breaking the Ties That Bind; Charlotte Mendelson, Associate Publisher at Headline Review, Talks to Benedicte Page about Exploring Her Jewish Background for Her Third Novel, When We Were Bad," p. 22.

Guardian (London, England), February 22, 2003, Helen Falconer, review of Daughters of Jerusalem; May 8, 2007, Aida Edemariam, "I Wasn't Posh and I Wasn't Confident, and I Was Really Hideous," interview with Charlotte Mendelson.

Independent (London, England), June 8, 2007, Matthew J. Reisz, review of When We Were Bad.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2007, review of When We Were Bad.

Philadelphia Inquirer, August 19, 2007, Sarah Weinman, review of When We Were Bad.

Publishers Weekly, June 11, 2007, review of When We Were Bad, p. 38.

Spectator, May 26, 2007, Mathew Dennison, review of When We Were Bad.

Times Literary Supplement, February 28, 2003, Katherine Duncan-Jones, review of Daughters of Jerusalem, p. 22; April 27, 2007, Natasha Lehrer, review of When We Were Bad, p. 23.