Cultural Life: Linda Grant, Author

Theatre/music

I have no cultural life, I now realise. I rarely go to the theatre, and have been to one concert in the past 12 months – Martha Wainwright at the Royal Festival Hall. I'd never heard of her, but a friend asked me to go. I'd have liked to have seen Leonard Cohen.

Film

I saw Sex and the City last, though later than everyone else.

Visual arts

I went to the private view of a small and not very interesting show at the V&A last week, on sport's relationship with fashion – an Olympics tie-in.

Television

What I like are the big US drama series, hard- or soft-boiled. I am still grieving for the end of The Sopranos and drumming my fingers against the table waiting for the next series of Desperate Housewives, for its gloss and the divine Gabrielle. It's all in the scripting. American screenwriters were quite right to go on strike: "Money doesn't bring you happiness. That's just something we tell poor people to stop them rioting."

Books

I read all the time. Around three weeks ago I saw a screening of the Joseph Losey adaptation of The Go-Between, which took me back to a re-reading of the 1953 L P Hartley novel. I don't think it's quite a forgotten masterpiece, but masterpiece it is.

And from Hartley, I thought I'd take another crack at Henry James, but then the Booker longlist came out and I was on it, and that meant I wanted to read the rest, so I have read Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. I've just started The Spare Room by Helen Garner, whose publisher feels that it was unfairly left off. I remember her in London in 1978. She had already published a novel. I was awestruck. Beautiful, crisp prose.

'The Clothes on Their Backs' by Linda Grant, published by Virago priced £11.99, has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize