How, when and why did you first start writing?

I was probably about six. I gave myself enough time to master letter formation, and then I was off. At the height of my infant school rebellion, I used to write stories while pretending to get on with my maths, and that pretty much set the tone for life. It just became a habit – an addiction – I never gave up. When we were teenagers, everyone else took drugs. I knocked out a couple of angsty novels. I probably wasn’t that cool, thinking about it. Oh, well.

Where do you get your ideas from?

I usually hunt out my first idea from some other story. I like to delve into myths and fairy tales and Bible stories, or cases from history, and then when I’ve found something that excites me, I start planning a novel around it. That very first idea will probably become a minor feature of the finished work, but it’s a springboard.

The concepts of blame and guilt are the overwhelming messages in Mothernight. While I was reading I wanted to blame anyone but the person I thought might have actually killed the baby. Did you wrestle with who would commit the act itself?

Yes, in the end I made the decision based on what I thought would make the best story. When you’ve grown attached to someone, you refuse to believe that they could do something so dreadful, and I wanted to put the reader through that. But I was at pains all the way through to maintain moral ambiguity. I suppose my outlook is a simple one: ‘Most of us are just well-meaning people doing our well-meaning best, and sometimes, it goes wrong.’ And that was the message I wanted to put in Mothernight.

 

The details in Mothernight ring very true: Did you do a lot of research?

 Yes. I didn’t go to boarding school, and as a considerable chunk of the novel is set in one, I had to find out lots of detail to make it convincing. I even phoned Roedean and pretended I was a parent thinking of sending my daughter there. They invited me for a tour of the school, but as I was only 27 at the time and exuding writerly poverty, I thought I might not be convincing.

 

I also did a lot of research into grief, particularly parental grief.

 

Can you tell us a little about how you write? And has your way of writing changed at all now that you’re nearing the completion of your second novel?

I’m not one of those people who do entire first drafts. I am a dreadful perfectionist. I don’t move on to the next sentence until the one I’m on is perfect. With Mothernight, I wrote until I had the beginnings of a story. Then I went back to the beginning and re-wrote. I kept doing that for a year until I’d written 84 pages about six times. Then it just took off and I wrote the rest in four months. It was a very organic process. I took out main characters and replaced them with others, changed the plot, did all sorts of things as I went along because I was just learning how to tell a story. Now, with my second, I know how to tell a story and I plan far more meticulously. There have still been a couple of surprises along the way, but it has been far less chaotic and taken half the time.I only write in the mornings because that’s when I’m most alert - when my head is clear and the world hasn’t yet invaded.

 

Which book do you wish you had written?

Wuthering Heights, because it’s about eternal love and about people feeling so passionate about each other that they’ll starve themselves to death and gnaw the bark off tree trunks.

 

What are you working on now?

 

My second novel.  It’s set between 1949 and 19353 and is the story of a girl who is kidnapped from her native Africa, taken to the USA and sold to a Missouri farmer.  The novel opens at the end of the story – she is in prison, waiting to be hanged, as she has been convicted of murdering her master.

 

What would be your three desert island books?

Beloved by Toni Morrison.  It astounds me every time I read it - the poetry, the fragmentary structure, the characters.  It's just stunning.

King Lear.  One of my all-time favourites.  The ultimate in tragedy, where it seems nothing can be worse or more heartbreaking, and then you're pushed to your limits when it does, in fact, become worse and more heartbreaking.  (I love that sort of thing.)

War and Peace because I haven't read it and feel I should, and you could kill a lot of time on a desert island with that one.