Where Love Lies
I've been describing Where Love Lies as a sort of twisted love story. It's about Felicity, who believes she's happily married to Quinn, until out of the blue one day she starts getting memories of her first love, Ewan, a man she knew ten years ago. The memories are always accompanied by the scent of frangipani, and they're so overwhelming that she feels that she has to leave her husband and find Ewan again.
Please tell us about the character of Felicity.
She's an artist, and a children's book author; she writes and draws a series of books about Igor the Owl, the only hang-gliding owl in children's literature. She's creative and flighty and doubts herself every step of the way. Her husband Quinn loves her entirely and without reservation. She's mourning her mother, who has always been the most important person in her world, and she is really not sure what love is.
You have been praised for your character jumping right off the page- so how do you make your characters so vivid?
I fall in love with my characters I think—even the ones who are not always very nice people, and the ones who make mistakes. At the best of times, they seem alive to me and they dictate their stories to me through my fingers. I do a lot of work before writing, to understand my characters, but when they take over their own stories, it's something like magic.
Why did you want to avoid the heroes and villains route, but simply writing about the complexities of people?
I'm interested in real people, and I don't think that real people are all good or all bad. We all have flaws, and it's how we deal with those flaws that makes us heroic, or villainish, or most likely somewhere in between. In Where Love Lies and in my previous book, Dear Thing, too, I really wanted to play with perspective and get the reader to understand the point of view of my characters, even though they might disagree with each other or see things differently. I want the reader to sympathise with them, even when they are making mistakes.
Why is it important that fiction makes you think about it between reads?
Well, some fiction you just read for pure fun and pleasure, and you might not think about it afterwards, and I think that is absolutely great. I do hope that readers think about my novels after they've finished them, to try to figure out how they worked, maybe, or maybe just because the characters seemed real to them for a space of time, or maybe because the things the characters go through are similar to something they've experienced themselves. I have books that I've carried around in my head for years; I find something new in them every time I read them. It would be a huge compliment if someone felt the same way about one of my books. I think that's one of my ambitions.
How did something as simple as a scent evolve into a story and why are smells so important for our memories?
I think we've all experienced the moment when you unexpectedly smell something, a perfume or an aftershave maybe, or a certain kind of detergent, or flower, or food, and we've been catapulted back to a time in our lives when we smelled that scent before. The part of our brains that perceive and identify scent is very close to the part that accesses memories. I think that most people can, if they try, close their eyes and conjure up the scent of a person who has been important to them. I was walking down the street one day a couple of years ago and I smelled the boy I went to the prom with in the eighties—except, of course, he wasn't there; it was someone else wearing the same after shave. That really basic and quite profound link between scent and memory is one of the things that prompted Where Love Lies.
What is your writing process?
I spend about six months faffing around and playing on Twitter and writing when I can't possibly avoid it, and by the end of that I usually have a really messy first draft, which I can begin to fix. Every now and then, I stop and make an elaborate plan using Post-Its and then I often completely forget about it and keep on writing something else. The process for Where Love Lies though, was quite different than my usual novels, because I contracted pneumonia in the middle of it. And so although I kept writing, what I wrote when I was ill was really quite bad (though I didn't realise it at the time; I was too ill) and I had to do a lot of revising and layering in and making sense afterwards.
What is next for you?
I'm working on my next novel. I'm at the stage where I've fallen in love with my characters and want to spend every waking hour with them. In between Twitter, of course.