A Life In 3 Questions With Loretta Rothschild
Author LORETTA ROTHSCHILD considers the childhood stories, hopeful candlelight, beloved characters and self-assurance that have made her who she is today
For Loretta Rothschild, the pleasure of storytelling springs from the joy of listening and observing. Growing up in northeast London, she was the child who kept a deliberately low profile so she could eavesdrop on the adults. Today, splitting her time between London and Italy with her husband, Nat – a descendant of the British arm of the Rothschild banking dynasty – makes a profession of imagining the inner lives of the people she has encountered along the way. Her 2025 debut novel, Finding Grace, was chosen for Emma Roberts’ Belletrist Book Club, became a bestseller and established Rothschild as an astute observer of the complicated choices, relationships and interiority that make up a life.
Now, as she works on her second novel, she joins PORTER’s new A Life In 3 Questions series, reflecting on creating a fictional world she wants to spend time in, refusing to disown earlier versions of herself and learning that intuition is useful but not always infallible.
What are you building right now?
I’m writing my second book. I thought it would be easier with the reassurance of a two-book deal in America and the same editor, but I’ve had to rebuild my approach and accept that no two books are the same, maybe because I have a different perspective now, or because I’ve changed and evolved as a person. It’s a bit like building a house. You don’t know where the leaks are going to be, or how it will unfold, but it’s cathartic and reassuring.
I don’t really know how to be without writing. I grew up in Essex in a storytelling household. I spent a lot of time on the high street with my mum, listening to her gossip, going to my grandparents’ and literally hiding under my granddad’s coat to get into the betting shop because I wanted to be with the adults, listening to all the things I wasn’t really supposed to hear. My mum would start with, “You won’t believe what’s just happened to me,” or, “Let me tell you this story.” I think I got a crash course in how to tell tales.
I once saw a video about forced rhubarb, which grows in a dark shed with just a tiny bit of candlelight. That’s how I think about my work: I want to go into the shed every day, find that tiny light and see what grows. The character I’m writing now is so interesting that I can’t wait to sit down because I love being with her, and I love the friendship between the two women at the heart of the book. Ultimately, I just want to build a world that I can keep going back to every day. Sitting down to read and write is my absolute joy.
What have you outgrown?
I’ve certainly outgrown holding on to past attempts with writing. I’ve learned to identify when I’m frightened of something, when it’s not right and when I should say “I actually can’t do this.”
In other ways though, I’m not sure I want to outgrow parts of myself. That idea has become less appealing to me as I’ve gotten older. People sometimes ask whether I look back at my first book and wish I had changed things, or whether there are periods of my life I would do differently. Of course there are mistakes I wouldn’t repeat, choices I might make differently now, moments when I wish I had reacted another way. But I was doing the best I could at the time. I don’t really want to leave those versions of myself behind. It feels almost disloyal. Everything gives you color and texture. As a writer, especially, all of it eventually becomes useful.
If anything, what I’m trying to outgrow now is the idea that somebody else’s opinion should be able to push me off my own sense of myself. I’m getting better at understanding that what somebody else thinks about me, or my work, isn’t really my business.
What do you know for sure?
If you start to feel that maybe something isn’t right, it’s one hundred per cent not right. I learnt that very painfully with writing. Before this second novel, I was working on an entirely different book. I believed so strongly that it was the book I was meant to write that I kept trying to force it. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words. But somewhere underneath all that effort, I already knew.
So I believe enormously in gut instinct, but I’ve also learnt that instinct needs interrogation. Sometimes what feels like intuition is actually fear, and fear can occasionally be useful because it tells you where you feel vulnerable. You have to work out which voice you are hearing.
The exception, for me, is people. I learned from a friend that being open to people is wonderful. Once you’ve accepted them in and you want to have a relationship with someone, just go all in. It’s quite tiring to be cynical or suspicious of people. It’s better just to see how it goes.