Tell us about your latest novel, Sweat, a feminist thriller with themes of body image, coercive control and exercise addiction
The novel is set in a gym, and is about a personal trainer named Cassie, who’s been in a coercively controlling relationship. One day her ex-boyfriend, Liam, comes into the gym where she works, and she realises he’s in a more vulnerable position than he was before, and she has a chance at some revenge. The rest of the book is about what Liam did in the past, whether Cassie can get away with her revenge and how far she takes things. It’s also about fitness and dieting and taking self-control, as well as other things, to extremes.
Your debut, Elizabeth Is Missing, won the Costa First Novel Award 2014 and was made into a BBC film starring Glenda Jackson. Tell us about both
I was very lucky with my first novel. It was a subject that was very much in the public consciousness at the time. Still, I never expected to sell over a million books, or to see an adaptation. I cried at the film screening because Aisling Walsh and the whole production team had produced a piece of art that was incredibly faithful to the book and yet absolutely transcended it too.
Whistle in the Dark (2018) is by contrast about what happens after a missing girl returns home. Tell us more
I’d been interested in narratives made of short sections, flashes of a life, illustrative moments. I wanted to use that structure for a sort of domestic mystery. A mother wants to know where her depressed teenage daughter was when she disappeared for four days, but also needs to find out how to exist when both her daughters appear to be pulling away from her, keeping secrets or just don’t seem to need her in the same way any more.
Both books drew on personal experience: your grandmother’s dementia and your depression?
In both cases I was interested in exploring the perspective I hadn’t had. I knew what it was like to witness someone living with dementia, but I wanted to use writing a novel to try and discover what it was like to be inside my grandmother’s head. Similarly, I knew what it was like to have teenage depression, but I was interested in the point of view of a mother struggling to help her daughter.
Mills & Boon helped save your life, and you met your husband in a bookshop’s sci-fi section. What do books mean to you?
When I was finding life unmanageable, the structure of a Mills & Boon was so soothing. Whatever struggles the characters might face, I knew it would be okay in the end. The books are short and contained and often full of amusing dialogue – exactly what I needed at the time.
I met my husband on my first day at work in a bookshop – he’d been working there a year – and he was frankly sick of meeting aspiring writers. He nearly didn’t ask me out after I told him I was studying creative writing.
You have a degree in bookbinding and a master’s in creative writing. What did you learn?
The degree definitely made me more fussy about how my notebooks are bound – I dislike spiral- or glue-bound books. Actually, I’m fussy about bindings in general and am always checking the spines of books to see how well they’ve been made. The creative writing master’s taught me that it was okay to take my writing seriously.
Which projects are you working on?
I’m working on my fourth novel, which is about extreme parental ambition.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I once hung about in Bungay after I heard Elizabeth Jane Howard lived there. I didn’t stalk her or anything, I just went for a look around the castle ruin and for lunch in a cafe, but I was hopeful I might accidentally bump into her. (I didn’t.)
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Colm Tóibín once said at an author talk that one way of judging your prose is by looking at the shape it makes on the page. That there should be some balance to it – not all a clump, not just a narrow string of short dialogue exchanges, etc. It’s a trick I have used often since.
Who do you admire the most?
The writer Helen Garner. She is so courageous with the way she asks questions in her novels and nonfiction, even when the question or the answer might prove unpopular or controversial.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
There’s an idea that painting all the roofs in the world white would reflect enough sunlight to reduce the global temperature. I’d love to see if it could work. So, I’d rule that every roof had to be repainted/replaced with white materials.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
I’ve been loving Ronald Hutton’s series of lectures on the Gresham College Lectures podcast. He is currently the Gresham professor of divinity and has used his many lectures to trace the history of paganism among many other things.
Which public event affected you most?
The Eurostar opening affected me. My mother was a scholar of the Northern Renaissance and after the Eurostar opened we could easily get to Antwerp, Bruges, Brussels and Ghent for weekend visits to art galleries. I still feel a strong pull towards painters such as Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas Cranach.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
The Daintree Rainforest in Queensland, Australia. What I was most moved by was the noise. The calling of the frogs and bats and insects at night. I could have listened to them forever.
Your most treasured possession?
My rowing machine. It’s a WaterRower and I use it most days as it’s my preferred kind of workout. I love the sound of the blades moving through the tank while I’m exercising.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
When I was in Moscow I mentioned that I was a fan of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. And at an event a couple of days later a member of the audience gave me a copy of Lermontov – Artist. It’s a luxurious collection of the writer’s paintings and drawings, many made while he was exiled in the Caucasus. It’s the kind of gift that makes me embarrassed, because it’s too nice and I don’t deserve it!
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
It’s too obvious to say Jane Austen, but I’m going to choose her anyway. Lermontov, of course, though I probably wouldn’t like him. Helen Garner (see the above answer) and Jim Crace, who I met once and loved talking to (I also love his books).
The best and worst things about where you live?
It’s safe, it has some lovely historic buildings and fantastic food, and we’re only 40 minutes from great beaches, and beautiful gardens. The downside is you do have to have a car.
What is your favourite quotation?
I don’t have a favourite, but I have a least favourite. It is Eleanor Roosevelt’s “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people”. I hate that quote. People, their situations, feelings, actions and relationships, are always going to be the most important thing to me, and I’d take the concrete over the abstract any day. Even though we try to pack our books with ideas and events, novels are always also preoccupied with the human experience, so that quote feels anathema to novelists.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
The unnamed lady in The Diary of a Provincial Lady by EM Delafield. I love how her voice swerves between restrained, even dignified, and overwrought or farcical. She makes everything interesting and relatable, from forgetting hyacinth bulbs in the attic to exhaustedly crossing and recrossing Moscow’s Red Square. I have the complete series on my phone for emergencies.
A book to make me laugh?
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. Despite the first World War looming and the tragic first chapter, this is really a very funny book, the way the characters interact is surprising and curious and there are several moments when the language made me laugh out loud.
A book that might move me to tears?
The Changeling by Robin Jenkins. It was published in 1960 and is about a Glasgow teacher who invites a poor but promising pupil to come on holiday with his family over the summer. There is a lot of hope and beauty in the book, but it has some very bleak and moving moments too.
Sweat is published by Penguin
