Interview: Singer-songwriter Charlotte Greig discusses her debut novel

It's a refreshing change to talk to a debut novelist who has really lived, rather than just surfed from school to Oxbridge to a publishing deal. Charlotte Greig may be a beginner in the book world, but as an accomplished singer-songwriter she has five albums under her belt. With A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy, she returned in spirit to her own student years at Sussex University in Brighton in the mid-1970s. Her heroine, Susannah, is studying Nietzsche, Heidegger and Kierkegaard, and applying their lessons to distinctly female dilemmas in a way that would have horrified and perplexed those Dead White Males.

"I picked Nietzsche and Kierkegaard because they're quite a good read - as far as any philosophy is a good read," Greig laughs. " Nietzsche is a great stylist; he's a good writer and so is Kierkegaard. Heidegger is a terrible writer. Don't touch it with a bargepole unless you're really keen to get to grips with something heavy duty. "

Susannah is a terrific narrator, both intellectual and sensual. She wonders why the heavy-duty sex sessions with her somewhat mysterious older boyfriend Jason have diminished in frequency and effect, and lusts after the naive and immature fellow-student Rob. What starts off as a romp of threadbare student life, all clogs, Biba gear and bell-bottoms, turns darker and more serious as Susannah is blown this way and that by her emotions and circumstances. Finally, she has to make a momentous and irreversible decision, and Greig leaves it to the very last moment to reveal what happens. It turns out the Dead White Males have much to say after all about a specifically female dilemma.

"All the great philosophers are men," Greig sighs, philosophically. "There is feminist philosophy now, but most of it is pretty obscure. But you can go back to those writers like Nietzsche - who was pretty misogynist, actually, but even so there's a lot there. Nietzsche's view is that you must remain unattached, which again is a pretty male view. You can't remain unattached if you have a foetus inside you! In a totally literal way you are connected to other people, and that's what I wanted to get across."

The will-she-won't-she cliffhanger is all the more dramatic for the way the author doesn't seem to be forcing her heroine one way or the other. There's no axe grinding in the background, no ideology being pushed.

"I wrote two endings, actually," Greig confesses. "I didn't know when I was writing it what she was going to do. Obviously I had to go back again and change a few things once I'd decided, but I really was with her, I just didn't know what she ought to do, and I think that was the point of the Kierkegaard - just struggle with it. Keeping faith with oneself, ie, not just accepting the social attitudes of the day. I suppose I wanted to investigate what happens when you go beyond that - what do you want? What do you need? How are you thinking about your own life?"

In some folky circles, of course, the 1970s have never gone away. "I go to these folk festivals and they're all wearing their flares and woolly hats, " she groans. "I think, 'Is this a bad dream?' I'd hoped never to see those clothes again."

A Girl's Guide... is full of evocative period detail: the clumpy shoes, the music, the attitudes, the decor. I loved the male characters, I tell her. With the exception of Susannah's calm and wise philosophy tutor, the men are hopeless. The novel ends up thoroughly subverting the chick-lit, I-must-find-a-man genre it superficially resembles.

"I wasn't trying to be negative," she giggles. "They do their best but they're just not very good at it. I wanted to get that across - that she'd got as good a bloke as she could get, really."

Greig was born in Malta in 1954. Her father's navy career meant the family moved around the country continually. She attended a convent boarding school and Cheltenham Ladies' College, then ran off to France becoming, among other things, a go-go girl in a bar, before heading to Sussex University to study Intellectual History ("a combination of philosophy, history and politics; it was a great course, I loved it").

The book's press release describes her subsequent musical career as " financially ruinous, if artistically rewarding". The music world, she found, was just as male-dominated as philosophy. Her own musical icons were the great female folk-singers such as Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins, and particularly Lal Waterson, who died in 1998 and for whom Greig is currently compiling a tribute album.

"She was a great songwriter and she really influenced me, because when I met her she was really at home just being a mother and making albums, and I thought - well, you don't have to be out on the road and you don't have to be living the rock 'n' roll lifestyle to make music."

A Girl's Guide... grew directly out of Greig's experiences with her last album, Quite Silent. "I collected together a lot of traditional songs about the theme of unplanned pregnancy and young women..." I express surprise at this, but she assures me: "There are absolutely masses of traditional songs about that, it's one of the major themes of folk music: these naughty girls who get pregnant and either get cast out and jump off a bridge or they sometimes say what the hell, and just go ahead with it. Some of them are very despairing and tragic, but there are songs about casual sex in a rather offhand way which you wouldn't expect. I was getting good reviews for this album but I don't think any of the critics mentioned what it was about! And that's because the critics are male, and the listeners are male. They love the music, but they don't listen to the words as far as I can tell."

This experience made her want to get in touch with a female audience. " I thought, I'd like to explore this further in a novel. I just think females read novels and they don't listen to music seriously after a certain age. The book world seems the natural habitat for me." It must have helped that Greig's partner is the acclaimed Cardiff-based novelist John Williams, though she says she was "pretty good" at filtering out his comments on her writing if she didn't agree with them.

For all the seriousness of the novel's themes, Greig is keen to point out the underlying humour. "I wanted to get quite a lot of comedy in the book. I felt when I went back to that part of my life, I'd retained a lot of the philosophy that I learnt there but not the politics, which were pretty ridiculous and quite hypocritical really. There was quite a funny side to it, particularly with all that idealism we had, about the 'lecture strikes' and the 'exam strikes' and how they all involved not doing very much work! And what happened to all those ideals, really."

Greig is still involved in music, appearing at the Green Man festival in August. The next novel she's working on is set during a folk festival. " It's called The Music Mistress, it's about a music teacher. She's a happily married middle-aged woman and her children have grown up, and she's become a bit of a pleasure-seeker in her later years. I'm interested in that. She's wondering whether monogamy is all that important. Women's sexuality changes, doesn't it? Whenever I say this it seems to evoke a lot of interest in people my age," she grins. It sounds as though her two careers are destined to run in tandem for some time yet. s

The extract: A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy, by Charlotte Greig (Serpent's Tail £10.99)

'As I finished the last page of Human, All Too Human... I felt elated. I may have spent the whole day lying on the floor half dressed, reading Nietzsche and smoking and drinking cups of tea, but that didn't mean that I was a dosser, or that my life was empty and isolated. It meant that I was a free spirit, and like the free spirits of the past, I had a secret destiny, a task to do. I just wasn't sure what it was yet.'

Set texts: Books for the eternal student in all of us

The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

Campus capers: sexist sociology don Howard Kirk cuts a swathe through colleagues and students at a fictional new university in the 1970s

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Oxford section of this sombre study of Catholic values inspired generations of twerps to sashay about between lectures carrying teddybears

Withnail and I by Bruce Robinson

Withnail and Marwood were really actors, but this is a textbook on how to live the student life: drugs, booze, filth and penury have never seemed so alluring

Jill by Philip Larkin

Working-class shy boy in wartime Oxford invents a sister to boost his image with his more confident peers. The antithesis of toff's Oxford

Nice Work by David Lodge

Culture shock as a feminist English lecturer shadows a portly, chauvinist businessman. The TV adaptation made a star of Warren Clarke

Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin

While London swings, our deadpan narrator Peter is studying Crowleyan occultism, doing drugs and listening to the Stones. Hilarious and horrifying