Margaret Drabble: Unless you're Hilary Mantel you don't have a chance There is a scene where 80 bobbies march down this rather suburban street and find a tiny amount of ricin. My characters find that hilarious, although it's obviously not very nice. To gain a sense of proportion you have to create a tragicomedy out of the situation, although it's terribly hard when people are being killed. The main focus of The Pure Gold Baby is Jess, an anthropologist and single mother who is tied down because her daughter, Anna, has special needs. Over the decades, we see the response of fellow mothers to her "problem." A quiet sadness pervades the novel; Anna is the pure gold baby and a gorgeous creation who elicits the reader's compassion. There is the heartbreaking realisation that Anna cannot embark on what Drabble describes as "the radiant way," how each of us shape a sort of narrative about our lives. She doesn't have a sense of progress or time. At my age you do see a sort of shape, but you don't know where you're going - whether you're going to die happily in 10 years or whether you're going to end your life in some ghastly place. Anna doesn't see any of that. I ask Drabble, now 74, if she thinks about death. I do. I'm not frightened of it although I don't like the idea of living a prolonged life. The doctors all talk about the Hippocratic oath but really they are terrified of being blamed and being dragged into court. But I think that is changing. I am confident something will happen about voluntary euthanasia in my lifetime. If this sounds dour in print, Drabble articulates it very differently in person. She is a smallish, animated woman with piercing eyes and every sentence she speaks is modulated with perfectly judged phrasing and a faint hint of theatre. Drabble was a fine actress at Cambridge where her contemporaries included Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and her first husband, Clive Swift. She started out at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she starred opposite Trevor Nunn in Twelfth Night. "Trevor is a better director than he was an actor," she says wryly. But she believes she would never have made it. I was good at the dramatic speeches. Make me a willow cabin at your gate" and so on. But I couldn't do comedy. Of course, she is funny, and it seems likely that her limited career as an actress had to do with a reluctance to be in the limelight. It is worth remembering that, in the Sixties, Drabble was a celebrity. Her novels were short, tart character studies reflecting on female emancipation. They acquired a certain modishness and some, such as The Millstone, have never been out of print. God, I suppose I was fashionable. I could have been on TV every night had I wished. I did a bit of Late Night Line-Up but that was it. I was once asked to advertise Magimix. You wouldn't see Zadie Smith doing an advertisement for pasta sauce during the ad break for The X Factor. It probably says a lot about how we now treat our novelists. It's all or nothing now. Rather like London housing where the affordable home has disappeared - now it's as if the mid-list has disappeared. Suddenly it's winner takes all. It's to do with the push of the media, and unless you're Hilary Mantel you don't have a chance. I don't like that. Is Drabble disparaging our current foremost literary novelist? Actually I loved A Place of Greater Safety - much more so than the Tudor ones. I know people like the way she's done it but I knew the plot too well. Shakespeare has already done it and it all felt too familiar for me. Mantel is also an habitual winner of prizes - something Drabble is not. She purposely took herself out of the running for the Booker Prize soon after it was launched (along with Graham Greene and John Fowles). At the time I thought it was distorting the market and a little bit vulgar. I still think that and it's got worse. Writers I know are really miserable because they haven't won the Booker. My sister did [AS Byatt won for Possession in 1990] and I hoped it would make her a happier, nicer person. Did it? Yes, she cheered up no end. It's the first time we've talked about Byatt. The relationship between the sisters has been stirred up by the media for years, though it's hard to decipher what actually happened to trigger such enmity. "I'm not going to tell you the whole story because it would take the rest of my life," she says, not unkindly. It has been a very complicated relationship. I published first and I was younger which is, of course, annoying. Then she won the Booker, which evened things up a bit. Then she got made a dame, then I got made a dame. It's ridiculous, it's like some sort of comedy. Death is the next thing so I suppose that's the next battle! And, as you would expect from someone who finds humour in the most difficult subjects, Drabble starts to laugh heartily. The Pure Gold Baby (Canongate) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.35 P&P