Kate Scelsa, whose first novel has just been published, explains in yesterday’s Guardian how her book was inspired by Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. She was given the book by a college housemate but read it only several years later. As a Lesbian herself, she was at first charmed by Waugh’s positive treatment of Sebastian but then was disappointed when he was allowed seemingly to fade away from the story. As Scelsa grew older
…Brideshead and Sebastian came with me on this period of transition from childhood to actual, bonafide adult life, they came to symbolise something for me about an intensity of feeling and emotion that you encounter most strongly as an adolescent, but catch glimpses of later in life, maybe when you fall in or out of love, or experience victory or defeat, or simply live with a kind of unexplained longing for a while. And there’s something very beautiful and human about those moments of return.
In writing her own novel for young adults, Fans of the Impossible Life, Scelsa was influenced by “Sebastian and what he had meant to me in this place of beginning to understand what it means to lose things and to get lost and, if you’re very lucky, to find your way back.”
Scelsa also watched the 1980s Granada TV adaptation and was less impressed than she was with the written version:
The narrator Charles Ryder’s yearning is so extreme that… Jeremy Irons’ voiceover sounds like Eddie Izzard making fun of Merchant Ivory movies. “Those were the days… when we were young… when it seemed the summer would never end…”
