Arts: Unhappy families

NO WRITER is quite so ecological as Deborah Moggach. She has two dramas on television this year, a saga on each popular channel. For Seesaw, which was on ITV in March, she recycled the script from her own novel. Close Relations, which begins on BBC1 tomorrow, she reused as a novel once she had completed the script. And yet for all her careful husbanding of resources - 12 novels and five television dramas - Moggach is not quite the household name she might be.

This may be because no one knows quite where to place her. Even in appearance, she sends out a mess of signals. One year shy of 50, she is gawkily tall, like a ball-breaking Virago novelist. But the scraggy bohemian mane: is that airport bestseller's hair? In fact, she's somewhere in the middle. The boarding-school laugh and the posh vowels mark her out as the metropolitan cousin of Joanna Trollope, and that is roughly where you find her on the literary map, neatly bisecting Booker and bonkbuster.

Moggach's subject is the rickety edifice we call the family, which she comes at armed with both a wrecking ball and an insatiable curiosity to note the particular way it collapses. Moggach may as well have taken Tolstoy's dictum that no two unhappy families are alike as the epigraph to her career. The tension in her work derives from her inability to decide whether or not the family as an institution is in inexorable crisis. "I've got two opinions. One is that a family is a fragile thing that has been blasted to pieces, and the other is that actually families are surprisingly resilient and will adapt like some new form of germ to changed circumstances, and it will re-form in different permutations but actually is quite stubborn and strong. I can't decide between those two things, but I constantly write about the chaos of it."

Consider the chaos in Close Relations. Gordon, a builder, and his wife Dorothy have three daughters variously scattered throughout the landscape of maturing womanhood. Louise is a rich country housewife, Pru a publisher stuck in a demeaning affair, while Maddy is just back from two years roaming Africa. Before anyone can say Bouquet of Barbed Wire, we're up to our armpits in a quagmire of broiling passion in which everyone is excavating the underwear of the person you least expect them to.

Up in town, Maddy finds out what it's like to have her breasts nibbled, while the casually racist Gordon hops into bed with the young black nurse who cares for him after his heart attack. Meanwhile, down in the country the drippy keeper of the doomed corner shop has a hopeless pash for local chatelaine Louise, and her horse-mad teenage daughter has the hots for the horny-handed blacksmith.

Pru, the only member of the family who brings a complicated emotional life into the story ready-made, entangles it further when she jumps into bed with her lover and his wife. (This may be the place to mention a bizarre coincidence of casting: Pru is played by Amanda Redman, her lover by Lorcan Cranitch, and both are best known on television for playing characters called Beck).

Moggach's own experiences in the field of marital breakdown can be seen as involuntary research. Out of perhaps 200 people in her circle of acquaintance, she claims she knows of only three successful long-term marriages. "One of my measures is that if they come to dinner and I hear them talking as they come up the path, they've still got things to say to each other." Her parents, who are both writers, failed this particular test after three decades of marriage, and have since remarried. Her own marriage lasted 14 years, after which she spent 10 years co-habiting at weekends with Mel Calman, the Times cartoonist. Then three years ago he died in circumstances that, again, no novelist would dare invent: he had a fatal heart attack while watching a Brian de Palma film in the Empire, Leicester Square.

"It was during Carlito's Way," she says, "which is a very violent film. A man's throat was cut at the beginning and I think that's what did it. I don't know why we went to it because he hated violent films. But we wanted to watch Al Pacino and there was nothing else on. They took him to the hospital but I knew he was dead in the cinema."

Three months later she started living with a Hungarian artist 15 years her junior called Szaba Pasztor, a charming artist-artisan with a wispy black beard, both of whose names mean shepherd. Moggach sold her house in Camden and moved into an old servant's cottage next to Hampstead Heath. With Hungarian friends, Pasztor has refurbished it into a richly detailed warren of small dark-walled rooms stuffed with wood and marble and gorgeous detritus rescued from skips.

Moggach's fiction and the facts of her life are close relations. She was brought up in Stanmore, went to Bristol University, married, went to Pakistan with her husband, then settled in Camden and had two children. Her first book was about a girl who grew up in Stanmore and went to Bristol University, her second was about a young mother with two young children in Camden, her third about Pakistan etc etc. After her divorce, the family trees in her plots began to look more baroque, and the novels tackled subjects in which she has no direct experience - child-snatching, child abuse and, in Close Relations, lesbianism. "I've never been a lesbian," she says, "but I've got people lined up if I'm ever going to be one."

Recently she returned for the first time to the cinema where Calman died. "I had to give a talk at the London Short Film Festival. At the end of it the chairwoman said, `If you could write any film what would it be?' And I said in front of this audience of two or three, `You'd walk into a Dutch 17th-century painting and a woman's reading a letter and we'll go in and see who the letter is from and what's happening to her.' The next day there was a phone call from a production company saying, `We were in the audience. What a wonderful idea for a film."'

Needless to say, she started writing it as a novel first, from a 1660 domestic interior by Job Berkhyde that is hanging in her sitting-room. She finished it this week. When she comes to write the screenplay, she'll be able to recycle the plot from the skip of her own imagination.

`Close Relations' begins tomorrow at 9.20pm on BBC1.