BESTSELLER:Now that she has made a name for herself as a writer interested in the murkier depths of the family laundry basket, people tend to tell Kate Morton their life stories, writes Louise East
THE STORY OF how Kate Morton comes to be sitting in a Knightsbridge apartment talking to the world's press is pleasingly akin to a plot she might dream up herself. Beautiful actress grows disenchanted with Brisbane's theatre world and decides to write a novel.
Publishers reject it. She writes another. Publishers still say no. She decides to forget about being published but writes one last novel, The House at Riverton, just for herself. It is published, bought by 26 countries, wins the Richard and Judy SummerRead 2007 competition and sells well over half a million copies.
Kate Morton shakes her head and looks faintly astonished at the events of the past four years.
"I am, if not innately pessimistic, then at least someone who plays things down. People told me that getting on the show would be helpful with sales, but I had no idea about the Richard and Judy effect. It only really hit me when I started receiving emails about the book being in the top 10."
Morton is in London to publicise her second novel, The Forgotten Garden, before she heads to the US to launch The House at Riverton. Despite the stratospheric success of the book in the UK and Ireland, this trip is the first time she has met any of her overseas publishers. The reasons for that are called Oliver (4 years) and Louis (three months) and they are currently in the park with their father, Davin.
The House at Rivertonis one of those novels which act on the reader somewhat like Pringles crisps. You may not intend to stay up until 3am, but there you are, turning the pages faster and faster, pretending the alarm clock isn't set for 7am.
It all hinges around a glamorous house party in 1920s England at which a brooding young poet takes his life. The two sisters, who witness his death, never speak again and at the end of her life, a housemaid still nurses a dark secret. Oops, there goes 4am.
"I love to read page-turners and when I decided to write a book, I wanted to recreate that sensation I had as a kid of flipping down a rabbit hole into a story and not coming up for air until I got to the end."
Secrets, dark or otherwise, are Kate Morton's thing. In between writing best-selling novels, she's doing a PhD at the University of Queensland on the uses of the gothic in contemporary fiction. "I don't mean the supernatural, but books like mine where past and present relate and people are haunted by events from the past."
Now that she has made a name for herself as a writer interested in the murkier depths of the family laundry basket, people tend to tell her things - in supermarkets, on airplanes, in the hairdresser.
"Part of me is saying, 'Don't tell me, I'm a writer, I'll use it,' but even when I give them the disclaimer, they say 'No, I've just got to tell you'. We've all got them, skeletons in the closet, and I think people just like to read about other people's."
Morton's grandmother kept just such a secret, a version of which forms the heart of The Forgotten Garden. If anything, this book is even more satisfying than The House at Riverton, with wonderfully implausible levels of coincidence and intrigue unfolding as four generations of women attempt to untangle their knotted family history.
"Like Nell, my heroine, my grandmother discovered when she was 21 that she wasn't who she thought she was. She kept it a secret and didn't tell her daughters until she was 80 . . . It spoke a lot to me about how times change because when I found it out, I just thought, 'Wow, that's so cool. Why didn't nana tell us?'
"Yet she was so ashamed because the man she thought was her father, wasn't. She couldn't bear to tell anybody so she burned all the evidence and kept it a secret, not even telling her daughters until shortly before her death."
Morton, who is close to both her grandmother and her own mother, has been pregnant during the writing of both her novels, and it shows. Each, in its own way, is about motherhood; the strength of its bond; the power of its absence.
"I think the books definitely went in certain directions that they might not have done had I not been pregnant. All writers have obsessions and that certainly seems to be one for me, that connectivity between the generations."
Both she and Davin, a composer, work from home: a house set into the side of a hill in Brisbane in the shadow of an old movie theatre. Morton used every detail of it, right down to the concrete path and the frangipani at the bottom of the garden, when she needed to describe Nell's house in The Forgotten Garden.
Mid-morning, she and Davin confer on who is having the least productive work day to decide who will do the kindergarten run. Although her densely plotted books take only nine or 10 months to write, they are the result of months of research, plotting and dreaming. "My favourite thing is to find a coffee shop with a dark corner I can occupy with my notebook. I write myself questions and answer them, all in long hand. It's quite neurotic, I guess, but I need to see it all there."
Hitting a plot impasse is, she says, "like having a knot in your shoulder that annoys you the whole time until suddenly, it's gone. That's what it's like, but it's in your brain." Chopping carrots for the family supper has been known to work wonders.
With a large portion of The Forgotten Gardenset in Cornwall ( the Lost Gardens of Heliganwere an inspiration), Morton originally planned an extensive research trip to England but, laid low during her pregnancy, she was forced to call it off. This meant writing a novel set in a place in which she'd never set foot. "My sister lives here [in London] and I used to poll her office to find out whether they thought someone who lived in such-and-such a place would use a certain phrase. Then, too, the world is such a small place now. I was able to access blogs by local newspapers to find out what the weather was like."
The finer details were supplied by her mother who had already planned a trip from Brisbane to Ireland to research her roots. After tracing her Cork grandfather (she now has the Irish passport to prove it) she popped across the Irish Sea, took the train to Cornwall and reported back to her bed-bound daughter on such pressing matters as whether or not the mist gets colder when you went up a hill.
The Morton female line must be particularly observant because the Cornwall of The Forgotten Garden,while noticeably short on hoodies and ASBOs, is nonetheless vividly realised.
If Morton is not more nervous about how Britain will receive a novel about Cornwall written by an Aussie lass at a distance of 10,000 miles, it's only because The House at Riverton, a novel as English as cucumber sandwiches and tea, was received with such open arms.
"When you're writing purely for your own pleasure, you write about where you want to be in your imagination. I wanted to be somewhere cold, with cobbles and old buildings," she says simply.
"Enid Blyton books were the first ones I could read by myself. I'm sure the books which spark that love in you, dictate what you end up writing as a grown up. Whenever I think I'm being a bit twee, I think, that's Enid's fault."
The Forgotten Garden is published by Pan, priced €12.15