Deborah Moggach: a life in writing

It's typical of Deborah Moggach that the novel she calls a "love letter" to Mel Calman, her partner of many years who died in 1994, is called The Ex-Wives. Its hero Buffy, aka retired actor Russell Buffery, is a warm-hearted rogue with a labyrinthine private life featuring five‑children and a stepdaughter by four different women.

"He'd been around the block a few times," Moggach says of Calman. "He was a great chatter, very close to his mother and very at ease with women. We could talk and talk, and our 10-year relationship was one long conversation that was stopped by his death. We could have gone on talking forever."

Now she has written a second novel about Buffy, though this time around she says the character bears less resemblance to Calman. Heartbreak Hotel, her 20th book and published on Valentine's Day, is a romantic comedy set in the Welsh B&B that Buffy has inherited from a friend and decides to turn into a business. "Courses for divorces", ranging from cookery to car maintenance, are aimed at recently separated singles in need of life skills. The novel has elements of farce and a soundtrack of the scraping of twin beds being pushed together overhead. "It was a hoot, I laughed at my jokes and I loved writing it," Moggach says. But it is also her third novel, following The Ex-Wives and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, about the change of life that comes with retirement, about ageing and the ramifications of the modern extended family. Especially, it is about the challenge of finding love in later life, when everyone is so weighed down by decades of memories and regrets.

In writing Heartbreak Hotel she drew on her relationship with Calman, whom she never married or lived with mainly because he was not a good fit with her two young children, who were understandably upset that she had left their dad. She says: "I was jealous of his past and I hate that because I think it's very unstylish and completely unprofitable, but what I wanted to explore in the book, and what I feel in life, is that really one is jealous of the person they were before, whom one will never know. It's not so much the other people in their lives one minds about but that younger version of them, the person who rode a motorbike! One mourns the lost world of one's own past and their past."

Born in 1948, Moggach was one of four daughters of a fighter pilot and a Wren who met during the war. Both were writers, and discipline was part of her inheritance. "They both worked every morning, on typewriters on the verandah of the cottage we lived in outside Watford. They were both very unneurotic and unpretentious about it. They tucked themselves away and wrote some really good books, though my father also wrote a few of the old potboilers because he had to keep us all going."

Moggach went to Camden School for Girls, then Bristol university, where a phase of adolescent rebellion lasted until her early 20s and meant she didn't make the most of student life. Instead she moved in with a man who worked as a bus conductor and drank too much. It was only when she married and went to live in Pakistan that Moggach started writing, bringing out two novels based on her own experiences in the late 1970s.

Back in London she kept an allotment, and wrote when her two children were asleep. But she became disenchanted with novel-writing when her fifth book, Porky, a spare, stark story of father-daughter incest on a pig farm near Heathrow, failed to win the attention she felt it deserved. "Her whole life came to me literally in an hour, it was a very extraordinary experience," she says. "My editor sort of forgot about it, she admitted that afterwards. She didn't put it forward for the Booker, she didn't promote it. I was very upset about that, so I decided to give up on books for a bit and start writing for television. I thought I'd have a bit more fun and actors would call me 'darling' and things."

And so began Moggach's parallel career as a script writer, which still produces a regular stream of commissions and had its high point in 2005 when she won a Bafta nomination for her adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley.

It was in a cinema that Moggach lost the man for whom she left her husband. Newspaper cartoonist Calman lived in a Soho studio where she would visit him two or three times a week, and it was on one of their regular date nights that he suffered a heart attack, while watching Carlito's Way at the Empire Leicester Square. Calman was in his 60s, she in her mid-40s. She talks about his death calmly, saying how much it helped that people were kind and behaved well afterwards – a stranger who held her hand while they waited in the dark for the ambulance later introduced himself to her at a party – and that there was no financial wrangling as they had kept their money separate.

Although she has since had a long-term relationship with the Hungarian artist Csaba Pasztor, and has a current boyfriend, it is clear from her recent work that loneliness is on her mind. "All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world," she says. "[The American comedian and writer] Lily Tomlin said 'we're all in it together, alone'. That could be my motto in life. It's not very ambitious but it's what I want to achieve."

Moggach's return to novel-writing was triumphant. In 1999 she published Tulip Fever, a double love story set in Amsterdam in 1636, about a young woman who betrays her husband when she falls in love with an artist who gambles away their future on the tulip market. The subject, in the way that sometimes happens, caught the zeitgeist – gardening writer Anna Pavord published a non-fiction work on tulips at the same time, while Tracy Chevalier published the art-history-inspired novel The Girl With the Pearl Earring – and Moggach's pacy, romantic story became a bestseller.

"Tulip Fever did change my life," she says. "It did that thing that sometimes happens when a book takes off – it opened doors on to whole other worlds. I would go to Amsterdam and suddenly the whole city opened up: people invited me to parties, I went to see the most amazing interiors of houses, I wandered around the Rembrandt museum after hours. It was very magical."

The less magical postscript is that a long-promised film version has still not been made. Stephen Spielberg bought the rights and at one point it was about to go into production. Moggach and Chevalier had a bet that if one of their novels was filmed they would buy the other lunch. It is 10 years since Moggach was treated by Chevalier.

To her delight her 2004 novel These Foolish Things made a speedier journey to the screen. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, filmed on location in Rajasthan and released a year ago, was a nominee in the Best British film category at the Baftas last weekend. Both film and book – renamed to match the film - did well commercially, which Moggach thinks surprised its producers, who hadn't realised how delighted older audiences would be by a romantic comedy about retirement starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy.

But Moggach does not like being described and marketed as a popular novelist, any better than she likes being called a women's writer. She regards the plot of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which involves a group of sixtysomethings outsourcing themselves to a hotel in India, as a possible answer to Britain's care crisis. "My solution – to send the elderly to developing countries – actually makes sense," she wrote at the time. So what sort of writer is she? "Not over-intellectual," she says. "I think John Updike sometimes came a cropper in that department. People spoke and thought too intelligently in some of his books, you couldn't believe a boozy car salesman would have such nuanced and complex ideas, you felt this was Updike imposing them on him."

Beryl Bainbridge was a role model: "I think she's brilliant." And difficult to pigeonhole? "Yes, I would like to be like that! I want people to be surprised by my work. Hilary Mantel was like that, until this latest extraordinary explosion of success. Each book was surprising, you couldn't see it coming."

Moggach wrote another historical novel, In the Dark, set in a London boarding house during the first world war, before giving Buffy his second outing. She says: "I've had a very lucky life because I'm of this generation where everything was possible. We were sexually liberated, we were feminists, we could pick up any job we liked. I liked waitressing, I could always find journalistic work, I bought a house that went up in value – all these things that kids don't have nowadays. I worry hugely about the next generation. My daughter is just starting a career as a novelist."

But even the charmed life of a successful baby-boomer is not proof against shocks. Moggach's parents went through a vitriolic break-up late in life, and her mother Charlotte Hough was imprisoned for attempted murder in 1985 after she admitted helping a very sick old friend to kill herself.

Getting old, Moggach says, is harder for women: "I think it's incredibly unfair, because men my age and even a good deal older, however drooling and toothless and decrepit and boring and alcoholic and faithless they are, will still find a woman who wants to have sex with them – and she may even be a good deal younger! It just isn't the same for women. It's a very unpalatable fact of life."

But she is proud of her life, and proud to have made a living from writing. She took out a mortgage to buy her house opposite Hampstead Heath, and paid a crowd of Pasztor's Hungarian friends to do it up for her. She speaks approvingly of contemporaries prepared to make an effort, even if the world behaves as though they are invisible, and makes it clear she has no time for moaning. Buffy in Heartbreak Hotel may have been modelled on Calman, but meeting her after reading the novel one can't help but feel that there is a good deal of her in there too, struggling to tie up all the loose ends neatly.

"When you're thinking of all these different relationships and marriages, you've been a different person in all of them," she says. "It's a very rich brew that's in your psyche by the time you're in your 60s and I think that's rather interesting. It makes you feel you've lived a very long life, it's like going on holiday to three different cities rather than spending two weeks in Lisbon. You look back on the holiday and you seem to have been away forever."