Claire Seeber Talks About Never Tell

28 April 2010

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Claire Seeber has been an actress, TV director, documentary maker and journalist, finding success in them all, and has now turned her hand to writing.

With two books under her belt already I caught up with her to talk about the new book Never Tell, juggling her career with motherhood and what lies ahead.

- Never Tell is the latest book so can you tell me a little bit about it?

Never Tell is a story of a mother and journalist called Rose Miller who has given up her career for the sake of her young family; she has had a very adrenaline fuelled career as an investigative journalist.

But she also has this dark past where she belonged to a rather debauched secret society at Oxford University, where she met her husband James.

So there are secrets in her past and they are coming back to haunt her now.

- And where did the inspiration for the central character of Rose come from and how do we see her develop throughout the book?

Rose is not me (laughs) but there is an element, I had a high flying TV career before I had my kids; so I was really interested in the idea of giving up your career for your children but really missing it.

But Rose has had a dangerous career and I was really interested in that because I had read various books about war reporters who are addicted to the buzz, which Rose is; she was also addicted to this naughty society that she belonged to. So she is really a bit of an adrenaline junky and I was interested in how you marry that with having a young family and trying to settle down.

I hope that she’s fully fleshed out as a woman who is struggling and is torn between the two; her family and her career.  In the book she goes back to investigate something for a newspaper but she is really torn between whether she should be doing that.

So that’s the way that she develops because you see her struggle with that. I was also interested in having a dark past, having done something that you are not proud of and whether you can redeem yourself in the future.

Her career is about bringing people the truth and that’s partly to do with the fact that she feels she has got to make up for being bad when she was younger, although she wasn’t particularly bad there were other much worse characters in the society, but she did go off the rails a bit.

- You have mentioned that Never tell is about secret societies so what was it that interested you about that?

I think with secret societies what makes them fascinating is they are secret and we don’t know very much about them and we wonder about them. Is it because anything that we are not immediately invited into becomes more exciting, a bit like not being allowed in to the latest club in town?

And with the secret society I was interested in the character that starts it, Dalziel, this aristocrat who is a bit dangerous because he feels like he has got nothing to lose. I was interested in why someone would feel like they had nothing to lose and how they would try and break convention, which is what he’s trying to do; he’s trying to lead these kids into breaking society’s rules and it’s about power.

Rose thinks that she is a member of the elite and she realises that they are all outsiders and that is why he is interested in them because they have got flaws which have made it possible for him to draw them in.

- So what sort of research did you do into these societies for the book? And what did you discover?

Well Oxford University, which the book is set in, has got some quite famous secret societies, some are more secret than others, there are a couple that seem to be quite secret and it really was quite difficult to find out anything about them.

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