The Making of Us

1. Which writers or books have inspired you?

As a child I read anything and everything, from the children’s classics to Dickens to The Thorn Birds, The Grapes of Wrath, and every single Agatha Christie ever published. I read four or five books a week, so on a deeply fundamental level I have been inspired by a huge and eclectic raft of writers. More specifically I do love Nick Hornby and Maggie O’Farrell, both of whom make what they do look so easy. It was a conversation with a friend about High Fidelity that resulted in me writing my first book and you don’t get much more inspiring than that!

2. What made you want to become a writer?

Reading made me want to become a writer. I had a vague idea about being a journalist as a child, but life took me far away from that and by the time I was in my twenties I was a secretary. I’d married young and started reading a lot again and my husband told me he thought I’d be able to write a book that other people would want to read. After that marriage broke up I signed up for creative writing lessons to see if he was right. He was.

3. What’s the best thing about being an author?

On a practical level it is so nice not to have to wake up every morning and go to the same place and see the same people and do things for someone else that you’re not really that interested in. I love working from home and making my own schedule. On good days it is possible for me to do a whole day’s work in an hour. Then I get to have fun. It’s also a brilliant job to have when you’ve got kids as you can work your days around them and not miss out on anything. Beyond the practical though, I do love it when I’m talking to someone who’s really up on themselves and they ask me what I do and I tell them I’m a published author. It’s very satisfying!

4. The Making of Us is your ninth novel. Have you found that your writing has changed since Ralph’s Party (1999)?

I hope so. It’s hard for me to be objective. My readers would probably be better placed to comment on that. I definitely have to try harder and harder with each book to avoid repeating myself, which results in new ways of using language and describing things. I have also discovered the joy of a proper story line. My first few books were very much jumping in at the deep end and seeing where I ended up. These days I’d rather have a structure in place and a solid concept behind the characters.

5. Do you have a particular routine you follow when you write?

It does tend to change a lot, but at the moment I am enjoying having both my children in school and having the run of the house again. Before I used to have to rush to the gym to get my youngest in the crèche and then rush to the café to meet the child minder then cloister myself away in my room at the top of the house. Now I’m free as a bird, currently writing this in the kitchen. Such joy! But I do most of my writing in the café next to my gym. I like the white noise and people watching and not having any access to the internet. They also make much better coffee than me.

6. Which character in The Making of Us did you enjoy writing most?

All of them. Genuinely. In fact, when I delivered the manuscript to my editor I said to her that it was the first book I’d written where I was equally excited about writing from each character’s perspective. Every time I got to a Maggie chapter I’d think, “Ooh, goodie, it’s Maggie.” And the same with all the others. That was the joy of writing the book for me.

7. Your fans often comment on how much they love your characters and how relatable they are. How do you make them so “real?” Do you base them on people you know, or are they purely fictional?

All my characters are entirely fictional. But also entirely real. They do just tend to arrive in my head fully formed, and I just have to find a good name for them (I’m anal about names) and then decide what to do with them. There’s no trick to it. At the risk of sounding a bit airy-fairy, it just sort of happens.

8. What is your next novel about?

Well, once again it’s nothing like the book I thought I was going to write. It was going to be a 1990s Britpop rock chick fluffy love story. But it had no intrinsic structure, and, like I say above, I do need that structure these days. (Must be getting old!) It is about a young girl named Betty who arrives in London in 1995 to try and trace the mysterious beneficiary in her grandmother’s will, a woman called Clara Pickle whose last known address was in Soho. The story is threaded through with flashbacks to her grandmother’s secret life in London in the early 1920s. So it’s part coming-of-age, part romance and part mystery. It’s called Before I Met Her, and it will be published in the U.S. summer 2013.