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interview
1.This is your first novel written on your own, but you've written a number
of bestselling thrillers with your husband Sean French. Was it difficult
changing genres and writing a novel about family life, rather than a
thriller, and on your own?
Writing is almost always hard, and it requires a strange mixture of being
full of doubt and yet having faith in oneself. Whenever I - or we, when Sean
and I are writing together - finish a book I have a moment of sheer panic
when I wonder if I'll ever write anything again. But one of the things about
writing in collaboration with Sean has been that we can encourage each other
to believe in ourselves and protect each other against anxiety and gloom.
The hardest part of writing on my own was believing that I could do it. It
took a long time, years actually, to start on the story that I'd had in my
head. Once started, it wasn't so difficult to continue - in fact, I felt an
urgency and a compulsion about it. The writing took me over, which is one of
the best feelings in the world. Anyway, I couldn't have written a thriller on my own. Nicci French
writes thrillers. I wanted to produce something entirely different in my own
personal voice.
2. The 70s has been a frequent subject for fiction eg The Ice Storm or The Rotter's
Club, as a generation of writers revisit their own teenage years.
Your picture of it is very domestic and less extreme than other writers,
could you talk about the different ways that writers have approached this
period?
I was a teenager in the Seventies, which was a time of turbulence,
excitement, change. But, like a friend of mine who was in Paris for the
events of 1968 and yet had no idea at all what was going on until he came
back and read the newspaper headlines, I didn't properly realise or
experience that at the time. I only came to it later, when I left home and
went to university. When I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I didn't take a
huge amount of drugs and discover feminism and radical politics and have
lots of sex and quarrel definitively with my parents and go on marches and
hang out on the Kings Road in strange garments. I got on well with my
parents; I was reasonably obedient; I wanted to feel liberated and I wanted
to experiment and push against boundaries, but quite often I was also
scared. I think most of the time we don't live at the dramatic centre of history
but in its margins. In Things We Knew Were True, I very consciously left
out most of the things which have come to define the Seventies, in order to
write an account from those margins.
3.Siblings - As your own children grow older, do you see emerging
alliances forming between different siblings? And, how different is
sisterhood from your own memories of childhood to how you would observe it
now?
I'm one of four children and I've got four children myself (a son of 15, and
then three daughters aged 14, 12 and 9). Although the older two have a
different father, who left when my oldest daughter had just turned one,
they're a gang, very close and loyal to each other, which I love (I always
wanted us to be outnumbered by our children). Of course, there are tensions
and arguments - between them; between them and us.
I also grew up in a very close-knit family and of course there were
tensions there, as well. But the big difference was one of authority. My
parents, who were really quite liberal, never the less belonged to a
different culture to us. They were scared of all drugs, believed sex before
marriage was wrong, expected us to have the same job for our entire working
lives. They laid down laws of behaviour and morality and consequently we had
secrets from them and we rebelled against them. The world changed after the
Seventies and in our household, Sean and I listen to the same music, wear
the same kind of clothes, come from the same kind of culture and believe in
the same kinds of things as our children, and so are not at an authoritarian
distance from them. We're a kind of democracy - so what are they to rebel
against, which is part of growing up. Sometimes in the end you have to leave home
to be yourself (for example, my eldest sister, who was gentle and insecure, didn't just
leave home but the country and the continent - she lives in Angola now), One of the
subjects of Things We Knew Were True is how we need families and yet need
to break free of them; how we're both anchored and trapped by our parents
and siblings.
4.Did you keep a diary as a child, or are the sights and smells of
childhood and the excitement/agony of first love purely from memory?
I kept a diary on and off and when I re-read it years later was
excruciatingly embarrassed by myself: my earnest, intense, self-obsessed,
pompous, aggrieved tone. I threw it away, although now of course I wish that
I hadn't. The things I write about are from memory (and invention). I'm
sure that we all? vividly remember the intense experiences of our childhood
and teenage years, though we forget things that happen later. Our childhood
becomes almost like the mythology of our life, and the way we explain
oourselves.
5.The book is set in 2 parts - the first looks at when the sisters are all
teenagers, the second - when they return to their childhood home some 20
years later, some married and with children of their own. Why did you decide
to set it in this particular time frame?
I wanted to write about experiencing something and then looking back on it
and seeing it differently. And about homesickness for the irrecoverable
past. I closed the first section with a tragedy, so that that the door swung
shut on an era - Edie and her sisters were abruptly expelled from childhood
and only revisited it years later.
6. I'm sure readers will have strong views on Edie's behaviour at the end of
the book, could you explain the thinking behind it?
Edie has always behaved well. She's been a 'good girl' and she has been
haunted by guilt ever since Vic died. Here she does two things - she tries
to recover the past in order to somehow mend it (which of course she knows
is impossible and ridiculous) and she behaves badly. What's more, she
behaves like her mother once behaved, repeating a pattern. She lets go of
her control over life. One of her dominant emotions is pity - pity is a very
dangerous emotion for many women I think; as dangerous as desire. We're
drawn to people who are hurt and whom we feel we can redeem. Edie behaves
foolishly and wrongly, but she doesn't try to excuse herself. She's honest.
7. Which contemporary novelists do you enjoy reading?
Oh God, so many: Philip Roth, Sarah Walters, Anne Tyler, Ian McEwan,
Margaret Atwood, Helen Dunmore, Ruth Rendell, Pat Barker, Carol Shields,
Rose Tremaine, Henning Mankell, John Banville, Jim Crace, Hilary Mantel -
also, there are just particular novels that I've loved, like Barbara
Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Marguerite Youcenar's The Death of
Hadrian (OK, that was written ages ago and she's dead now, but I've only
just read and been bowled over by it), E Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.
8. Lastly, as you re-read childrens' books to your own children, does it
evoke memories of your own childhood?
There are some books I read as a child that meant so much to me that I've
almost been scared to re-read them with my children. The weird and mystical
Moomintroll books by Tove Jannsson both Sean and I knew when we were small
and then read out loud to our children - over and over again, in fact, so
that now all six of us know them practically by heart, and yet we still cry
hopelessly over the same passages. Or The Little White Horse by Elizabeth
Goudge which was one of my favourite books as a girl and which has now been
re-printed so I can read it with my daughters. Or The Lord of the Rings
which we've read (it takes ages even though we skip the long historical
explanations) three times to various children, and then listened to the
unabridged radio dramatisation about ten times on long car journeys, as well
as seeing the film of course. And I read poems to my children that I used to
have read to me by my mother: 'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes ('The wind
was a torrent of darkness,/Among the cloudy seas./The moon was a ghoslty
galleon/Tossed upon stormy sea...')
I love the way children read with total immersion. I can yell in their
ear and they don't hear me, or brush me away like an irritating fly buzzing
round them. I remember that vividly but hardly ever do it any longer -
spend entire days curled up in a chiar urgently reading a book, and the
whole world disappears. Wonderful.
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Author interviews
