Repairing Rhona - Rhona Cameron interview

Asked to choose a seat for our conversation, she heads to the far corner of the Gilded Balloon's Loft Bar, where, with her back against the wall, she can survey the room. "The safe chair," she jokes, but having met her previously, I know that emotional safety is no laughing matter. Cameron's unease in the world is palpable and sometimes that rawness makes you want to wrap her in bandages.

At other times she can seem belligerent, though it strikes me that taking umbrage is a prerequisite for a career in comedy. Perpetual outrage inspires a hilarious string of pronouncements about rules she'd institute as queen of all she surveys. These include a ban on high-visibility vests as worn by the hoi polloi, strictures against small talk, and a rule disallowing any Eton graduate from holding public office.

Ahead of a week's worth of Edinburgh gigs that began last night, she's nervous and tired. It's been a rough few months. Jean, her 78-year-old mum, had her fourth heart attack this summer and Cameron's been running back and forth between her home in London and home town of Mussleburgh. After Edinburgh she's embarking on a tour, and fitting in some promotion for her novel The Naked Drinking Club, which is now out in paperback.

By her own description she's neither literary nor a big reader, but this is her second book. The first, Nineteen-Seventy-Nine: A Big Year in a Small Town, is a memoir recounting the year she turned 14, covering everything from sexual confusion to bullying and the death of her dad, William.

The Naked Drinking Club is set ten years on, in Australia. It's a tale of sexual and alcoholic excess, but more poignantly, its heroine is also hunting for her birth mother. Fiction it may be, but with autobiographical overtones. Once dubbed "Scotland's most famous lesbian", Cameron, too, was adopted, and has often spoken about her years as a serial shagger.

Comics, she says, are rather serious, and it's not surprising so many write novels. "I wrote a lot at school and entertaining people became a manifestation of my insecurity in a group. To me, I haven't done enough or done something to the best of my ability yet. Nineteen-Seventy-Nine is the only thing in my entire life that I actually feel proud about. The only thing! Possibly because it was also about my father."

But answers are never simple with Cameron, whose mind whirs like the springs and jewels of a clock. Now she starts again, filling in and shading. "A book requires that you get into a zone. My whole psyche is tied up with the process. There's no awareness of what people might think or feel. You feel the warmth of an audience with stand-up, whereas writing is insular. Your self-esteem becomes tied up with what kind of day you had. If you had a bad writing day you feel shit about yourself, and when you have a good writing day you don't care about anything else.

"Writing two books has had a big influence on my particular psychological make-up, with regard to my adoption. Adoptees are great at conceiving, but it's often the pattern that they can't look after things and give them away – houses, lovers, jobs. This is the stuff that's quite complex to mend in your life. Writing the book from conception to, if you want, pregnancy, to looking after it, and then giving it over to the publishers has a huge effect. It's helped mend me. I've learned to go through the whole gestation period. Stand-up, in a way, is still feeding into the one-night stands. It's transient. You're in, you're out."

The trouble – or blessing, who's to say – with a late awakening is that Cameron is still deciding what she wants to do with her life. "I think I can do anything I put my mind to. My difficulty is finding the discipline. I have to start shaping my career. If I am really going to go back to stand-up I need to be committed, doing all the festivals, working around the clock and thinking as a stand-up."

Other options include directing and writing a play, a film, or both. Whatever she tackles will be based on personal experience, much in the way that artist Tracey Emin's work – which Cameron loves – is based upon her life and psyche. I tell her that one on one, Emin is both fascinating and intense. Anyone else might quail at the thought of all that hard work, and it's interesting that Cameron has the complete opposite reaction. She's excited.

"I love intense people, they're so refreshing, relaxing, I'm not afraid of intensity; I'm afraid of small talk. I was brought up in a world of small talk and cannot bear it. There should be a word that eliminates small talk; you say that word and wave. It's a polite word that means, 'I'm acknowledging your presence. I still like you, another time I may want to talk to you, but now I don't want to'. "

Not long ago she was stopped in the street by a man who told her the old neighbourhood was proud of her for waving the flag, but Cameron doesn't feel hugely nationalistic or patriotic. "Why should I? I've lived a lot of places. I'm adopted. My blood's all mixed."

She feels as tied to London, after 20 years, as she does anywhere, but admits that when she's travelling, because it's so embarrassing, sometimes, being British, that she always emphasises that she's Scottish. What she likes best, she admits, is "being a Scot … in London."

"You get a lot of Scottish people who say, 'Oh, you think London's the centre of the f***ing world.' It does feel like the world. You sit on the train and nobody looks the same as you. You can walk round on a Saturday evening and go through about 25 different cultures in the space of five minutes. I always think about people in my home town: if one of you guys landed here it would blow your f***ing mind."

Yet she rates the Scots (and the Irish, she doesn't differentiate) as warmer, more emotionally evolved, more trustworthy, dependable and loyal, especially in contrast to the English middle class of the Home Counties, who are too "held in" for their own good.

Even so, there's baggage. "I like being of a Scottish temperament, but I have spent a lot of f***ing time and money in psychotherapy trying to undo the cancer that is Presbyterianism, which I don't think people even understand or acknowledge is seeping out of their pores. I also think the Scots and the Irish are institutionalised by alcohol, and I don't understand why, when we're so warm in nature. And I don't understand the obsession with eating badly."

Jean's ill health might draw her back for a time, but Cameron says Scotland is too parochial to hold her for ever. "If it was like it is during the festival all the time, then I could live here. I like the fact that people and performers come from all over the world and make the city a bit more vibrant. Otherwise I feel that austere, dark thing – that beautiful melancholy – can get the better of you. It's different for everyone, though. I'd never want to slag it off because I've had such fantastic support from Scottish people."

What really calls to Cameron are this country's natural advantages, especially the sea, space and fresh air. Unsurprisingly, these are the selfsame attributes that draw her to the far side of the globe. "I was in New Zealand for the month of April. I love Kiwi people and it's a beautiful part of the world. I have a view to maybe, in a couple of years, living half the year there, half here. I've been before – it's not like I haven't travelled. I've been round the f***ing world, I just can't remember. Before I went I was so fed up with London. But after two weeks I missed the cultural depth of Europe. I missed the angst."

Funny, that, because clearly Cameron brings her own angst wherever she goes. Looking up now, apologising for rambling ("You always ramble," I tease, "It's one of your most endearing qualities."), she offers a summary character analysis: "I am a paradox, a complete contradiction, I always have been and my work reflects that. My feelings about my work and the place where I belong are a complete contradiction."

• Rhona Cameron is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot through 25 August (not 21st). 0131-668 1633. The Naked Drinking Club is out now in paperback from Ebury, 7.99.