How can you turn one person's poor punctuation into another's bestseller? Author Lynne Truss meets Shane Hegarty in the land of pedantry.
Success has not yet mellowed Lynne Truss. Before we talk, she has been browsing through a cruise brochure and spotted that it boasts a trip to "Greece: Land of Gods and Heroes' ". She is piqued. "I can't sanction that apostrophe! I'd have to go around all day striking it off posters." An intolerance of bad punctuation has brought her unexpected success and mild panic to go with it.
When she wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation she presumed the book would be read by only a handful of like-minded pedants. Instead, it became a publishing phenomenon, going straight to the top of the Amazon chart.
Originally, 15,000 copies were printed, but it has since sold 500,000. When the 48-year-old author's finances were bordering on the perilous, she was paid a £15,000 advance, but now she awaits cheques that will make her quite rich. She feels the need to stop the world and ask it if it is quite sure it has picked the right person, the right book.
"People say, have you dreamt about this, and I say no, of course not. Who could ever say that this is even a possibility; that something could do so well? It's very hard to take in."
Chatty and good-humoured, Truss has, however, been anxious about the success. "Everyone thinks that you skip about fluttering £5 notes around saying 'good for me'. I just didn't react that way. I kept thinking, this can't be happening, and I felt that the attention of journalists and radio was very flattering and nice but also quite a strain. As well, I kept thinking I mustn't count on this because it might end tomorrow. I suppose that I've just read too many Greek tragedies that the minute you start to say, hurrah I've made it, something terrible happens."
Truss was a journalist with the Times before becoming a freelancer, and writing three comic novels as well as several plays for BBC radio. It was from presenting a BBC Radio 4 series on punctuation that Eats, Shoots & Leaves emerged.
There are good reasons for the book's success. It is small and witty and was an excellent Christmas stocking filler. But it is also a learned polemic, as Truss turns punctuation vigilante. What is the meaning of the apostrophe in the name of the pop group Hear'Say? And where has the possessive apostrophe gone from the movie title Two Weeks Notice?
Truss is fully aware of her fixation with proper punctuation - which she refers to as a seventh-sense - yet manages to be both self-deprecating and unapologetic. She also infects the reader with at least the milder symptoms of her obsession. Suddenly, one finds oneself dawdling over semi-colons and commas where previously one might have charged straight through, either dropping them in everywhere or not using them.
"I don't want people to be unhappy or to give them my agony," she laughs. "I think that the thing I objected to, as much as people not knowing about correct punctuation, is that they didn't care, that they thought that it really wasn't important. I think that what's heartening about the book doing so well is that it will make people reconsider. It would be lovely to have an effect on that apathy. And I just think that maybe when someone comes next to write a letter or put a sign up that they might think twice about whether to put that apostrophe in."
The book arrives at a time when correct punctuation is in danger of being flattened in the rush towards the pithy communication of e-mails and text messages. "This is an absolutely crucial moment for punctuation and for the written word in general because of the impact technology is having," she says. "There is obviously a generation of young people who don't know that the word 'today' doesn't begin with the number 2. They just write that way automatically. Certainly, spaces between words are disappearing. 'Everyday' as one word is an Americanism. As is 'anyday', but that's coming a lot over here now. With e-mail, people use the lower case. So a lot of the conventions of the printed word are just being thrown away."
Does she feel that punctuation pedants are fighting a losing battle? "I think it will change. I think it's going to be a horrible mess while it's happening. Perhaps, though, it is always undergoing change and I'm just drawing a line at a particular moment."
She is well aware that some would persuade her to sit back and let the language evolve, if only to lower her blood pressure. "I'm beginning to realise that the old, descriptive linguists who just watch it happen rather than prescribe are the only sane ones around, because if you really care about preserving it, it does lead to unhappiness."
Of course, having raged against sloppiness in the English language, she has left herself open to scrutiny. She received letters quibbling over her use of "literally" and insisting that she shouldn't begin sentences with "and" or "but". She gives an ever-so-slightly tired chuckle. "I am in the world of pedantry!"
Truss is delighted that her publishers will reprint her novels later in the year. She believes that is the real bonus of her recent success. She plans more radio work, has a couple of fiction ideas and would like to write a stage play. She will not revisit what the Eats, Shoots & Leaves phenomenon will most likely make well-trodden territory. "I do think that I won't write another book about grammar. I think that there will be a lot of people who will. I think there's going to be quite a rush to write funny books about grammar and I think it would be much more dignified not to be part of that."
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss, is published by Profile Books (£9.99)