Stella Duffy: 'I was in so much pain about not having kids'

Stella Duffy answers the door of her south London terrace covered in flour. "I've been baking biscuits for you," she smiles as she heads down the narrow hallway. I scurry after her into an airy kitchen filled with the scent of spices. Cooking is a passion for the diminutive writer. "The thing about cooking is that you get applause immediately and, when you do what I do, even if you just write a piece for a magazine it will take at least two weeks to come out and a book takes years."

In the case of her latest novel, The Room of Lost Things, the applause took even longer. The tale, which meanders through a ragged cast of south London characters, took five years to write. Or rather to rewrite. At one point, she exclaims, head in hands: "I have written this book so many times!"

The cause was a complex narrative and two reticent male central characters. "I had no idea what a stupid thing I was doing. I set out to write about two men because I thought it would be more interesting." She laughs, refusing to take her struggle too seriously. "It didn't occur to me that men don't reveal their feelings as easily as women do. I had written three-quarters of the first draft when I went, 'Argh! They're not saying anything!' And I couldn't send them to the pub because one of them doesn't drink. It took another four drafts to get them to talk to each other."

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The two men are 67-year-old Robert Sutton, who is selling his dry-cleaners in Loughborough Junction, a crisscross of roads at the shabby end of Brixton, to Akeel, an ambitious young east Londoner. As the two negotiate the lease and Robert's departure, the older man reveals a room of lost things, detritus from pockets: customers' secrets.

Interwoven into this are the stories of Stefan, a gay personal trainer with intimacy issues; Helen, an Australian nanny having an affair with her boss's husband; Dean, a good-hearted drug dealer; and Marylin, a health worker. The narrative luxuriates in its revelations, characters and location. It is a spellbinding love song to a part of London usually demonised as home to muggings, shootings and feral gangs. "I despise that we live in a city which is divided into four," the London-born and New Zealand-raised author rages. "I wanted to write about a south London where, yes, there is violence on the streets – there is anywhere – but people slag off the area without knowing it."

Inspiration came from two sources: a conversation with Faisal, her local dry-cleaner, and the death of her mother. "Faisal said, 'You should write about dry-cleaners; we know people's secrets,'" she recalls. "He was talking about stuff that had come in people's pockets a good year before I started writing it. Then my mum, who was born in Kennington and loved south London, died."

Though she had no wish to write about her mother, her mother's love for the city was a different matter. "My love of London utterly came from my mum and came from her being a homesick Londoner in New Zealand," Duffy explains. "She just adored the river. It was her river." Her voice breaks. Her mother pitched up with Duffy's New Zealander father, two children (Duffy and a sister – the other six children remained in south London) in the "rough as guts" timbertown of Tokoroa, which gave her a taste for diverse, gritty communities that has continued in her life as well as her writing.

Looking back to her childhood, it feels inevitable that she would fall in love with a place like Loughborough Junction. "I am not going to do a Julie Burchill and say that I was born working class and have stayed working class; clearly I haven't, but I do feel that at least where I live there is still a mix of people," she says. "I don't want to live where there is only one accent of shopkeeper or one type of food on sale."

In The Room of Lost Things, conversations between Robert and Akeel, whose parents are Pakistani, touch on issues of racism and class from which many white writers shy away. Duffy doesn't flinch from portraying characters that not only challenge any assumptions readers may have, but also explore attitudes to ethnicity among a group often dismissed as beyond redemption: white, middle-aged, working-class men.

Robert Sutton is a racist, and his openness when talking to Akeel about "your lot" makes uncomfortable reading, but the affection that develops between the two men, and Akeel's wife Rubeina, challenges those prejudices. "Robert is as racist as any other white, working-class man of 67, which is to a degree," Duffy admits. But, citing intermarriage and population movements, she adds that he reflects a community that has also experienced more racial integration than others. "You don't get half a dozen Albanian families moving into a chi-chi part of Islington or the Chilterns."

The issues are not simple, she says, and cites black playwright Roy Williams's troubling piece Sing Your Heart Out for the Lads, "a fantastic play, but one of the few that gives a voice to that group". "I am as old-fashioned, left-wing socialist as they come," she adds, sensing she is on treacherous ground. "But part of the problem is that that class is not getting heard in Britain and that is why those ghastly groups like the BNP get away with what they do because they seem to be the only ones 'speaking for' them."

Equally invidious, she says, is the rampant Islamophobia infecting society. In Akeel and his partner she challenges stereotypes of Muslim religious devotion, showing it as more complex than it is often portrayed. "We have had about half a dozen young Muslim terrorists, that is it. That is it!" She claps her hands triumphantly and sits back. "We have had a damn sight more Irish terrorists and home-grown terrorists and yet every writer of TV, books or whatever has jumped on the bandwagon." But racism is not the dominant theme of the book. "I think this book is a lot about shame. I didn't think that until I had written about three drafts, but I realised there were lots of touches like that," she says referring to how Stefan reacts to a homophobic attack. "I could write about a gay man who reacts and storms the barricades like Peter Tatchell, who is an amazing character, but most gay men aren't like that," she says. "Most people want to just have their little lives and not let anyone in."

Duffy is not one of them. A long-out lesbian, she shares her house with the playwright Shelley Silas, whom she married in a civil partnership as soon as they became legal. The marriage was an important step in her recovery from a particularly invasive form of breast cancer that left her infertile. Parenthood has been a painful issue for the writer. IVF treatments for her and Shelley failed, and now at 45 and 49 respectively, hope of children of their own has all but faded. Given the painful associations of the subject, it surprises me that parenthood should figure so much in the novel. Robert's relationship with his mother and daughter, Akeel's forthcoming family and the tangled family around the nanny Helen, in which she seems to have assumed the role of mother as well as mistress, are just some of the family-related storylines.

Duffy regards this a sign of her recovery. "I couldn't have written that when I was in so much pain about not having kids," she admits simply. By her own admission she is "resolved about the issue now", though it has involved "a lot of grieving". Was writing The Room of Lost Things part of that process? Her mother's stories, especially about family, infuse it. The most moving involves Robert's mother Alice. During wartime Alice is shipped out to a maternity home in the country to give birth. Though she has a healthy son, the woman in the next bed has a stillborn baby and grieves the night away. In a crass attempt to offer solace, Alice observes: "Strange int't? There you are, wanting a baby... And you didn't get him. Here I am, never much fancied a kid."

"That story is true," Duffy explains. Her mother had been offered the cold comfort by the woman in the next bed following a miscarriage and had never forgotten it. "The woman wasn't being horrible; she just had this loud mouth. I have heard that story all my life, which is why I stuck it in so early on."

The book is more personal than others she has written. The struggle to complete it has left her feeling vulnerable about its reception. Every compliment about it is worried over. "Do you really think that?" she says frequently. It is a book that may divide critics and her fans, but it is also a book of great sensitivity and passion. Five years may have been a long time to wait for applause, but in the case of The Room of Lost Things, the wait is worth it.

The extract

The Room of Lost Things By Stella Duffy (Virago £14.99)

'...Robert smiles, disappears behind a shelf, comes back a moment later with a wide, flat cardboard box. He shows Akeel the label on the side. Plastered over the exact number of Jammie Dodgers the box is meant to hold, it reads in Robert's careful writing: WEDDING SPEECHES, JUNE '76–MAY '02.

"This, son," Robert speaks quietly... 'this little lot, is what people leave in their pockets."'