The Moonstone Legacy

About Diana De Gunzburg, Tony Wild

Diana, by Tony
I first met Diana at a party in her Yorkshire mother's house: I thought she was lovely, a great dancer – and a total fantasist. She told me tall stories about her childhood in northern Pakistan, about her great-grandfather having been hanged by the British, about her aristocratic white Russian grandmother who had escaped back to Russia after the Revolution, about her grandfather being murdered in his bed, about the huge cave in her father's mountain with an ancient Buddhist temple inside and about daily life in the Frontier with its cast of hermaphrodite servants being swung from ceiling fans, deaf and dumb butlers, drivers recently gaoled with their camels, and the princely palace she played in.

Looking as she did – more, like a beautiful Swede than my image of a subcontinental – made it all the easier to dismiss Diana's stories as an update of The Arabian Nights.

A few months later I accompanied her Pashtun father from the UK overland to Pakistan. There I found that everything that Diana had told me was in fact true: there actually was a White Russian grandmother, a Buddhist cave, an uncle who was a Nawab with not just one, but several palaces, and even a deaf and dumb butler.

After many creative adventures and travels together over the years we decided to write The Moonstone Legacy Trilogy. Like Diana's childhood tales, it turned out to be more true to life than you might at first think...

Tony, by Diana
I first met Tony at my older sister's 21st.  He had a lot more hair then. He sweetly defended me against my sister's condescending boyfriend, which was a good start!  Since we have shared so many creative journeys physical and metaphysical, musical and visual. The Moonstone Legacy Trilogy is the culmination of pretty much everything we've done together philosophically, spiritually, physically and virtually – such fun! We had to do it, it was written!

Diana de Gunzburg (D) & Tony Wild (T) talk about the question they are asked most frequently – how do you work together? – and how they might respond...

D     It's true that we feed of each other's energy in a very good way and I know that neither of us could have written this trilogy without the other - it's impossible, not just because of writing together, but the whole thing.

T    Yeah.

D     It works on a more metaphysical level - we could talk about metaphysics, it's my new buzzword, I could talk about that...

T    Well go on, talk about that.

D    Well then it's impossible to have come up with this – well no that's a bit... So we certainly couldn't have written this book solo, either of us, not just because we would be incapable of writing the story, either of us, because neither of us would be, but on a metaphysical level the interchange of energy produced ideas and developed ideas in motion that couldn't have developed without that exchange (pause) that wouldn't have developed without that exchange.

T    Yeah.

D    And that's a good thing to say as it's very much what we're talking about in Lizzy's (authors' shorthand for The Moonstone Legacy Trilogy ) too.

T    Exactly.

D    And I get my favourite word of the moment – metaphysical – out there. So that's what I'd say. Whaddya say?

T     Well yes, I agree but I also think it's um...it's a matter of personalities as well...

D    Also I think because it's a male female writing partnership.

T    Yeah.

D    That's special, an essential part of it.

T    I said to Thoby (mutual friend) who was asking about how we work together ...I said that you make sure that everything is live and direct and in the present which is not my strength at all...

D    Yeah.

T    And so you sort of drag it back into the present. I attend to the nuts and bolts,  stuff like that, and make sure it's all tickety-boo and running smoothly...

D    Yeah, yeah

T    Then you come and mess it up and make it live as a result.

D    Well that sounds pretty good, say that.