The Bad Mother
What can you tell us about your new book The Bad Mother?
In The Bad Mother I wanted to write about the threads that bind different generations together; how each, in seeking to avoid earlier mistakes, can over-compensate, creating new difficulties, compounding past damage and handing further trouble down to the next generation.
Tessa Parker, who runs a boutique B&B in a pretty sea-side town, believes she has life under control until her mother’s sister turns up unexpectedly from Australia and reveals a closely-guarded family secret. As Tessa’s familiar world begins to unravel, she turns for support to her estranged husband just as he announces that he’s in love with someone else and wants a divorce. Trying to balance her turmoil against the emotional needs of her teenage kids, Mitch and Lauren, Tessa seeks out her birth father, convinced that only he can provide the answers she needs.
Tessa and her children learn the hard way how loneliness and isolation can drive people further and further into dangerous and destructive situations.
You come from a family of doctors, so what made you want to break the mould and do something new?
I failed my 11-Plus and was hopeless at physics and chemistry at school, so was never going to be a scientist! And, although I often visited the hospital or clinics where my parents worked, I never found those environments exciting enough to aspire to join in. Later on, sharing a house with medical students put paid to any idea that doctors were glamorous! Besides, I always wanted to write, and was lucky that my parents encouraged me.
Your first novel Out of Sight was published last year, so what can you tell us about this for fans of The Bad Mother?
Out of Sight is about a loyal husband and father, Patrick, who, when disaster strikes, gets stuck and fails to change. I wanted to write about how we all sometimes go on repeating destructive behaviour that can only damage both others and ourselves. Yet, although the novel contains great sadness, it’s ultimately a love story. The other central character, Leonie, believes passionately in the redemptive power of love. Her belief may leave her blind-sided, but it’s the only force any of us possess powerful enough to overcome emotional damage. The book raises difficult questions: when does Patrick’s inability to recover tip over into cowardice and even cruelty? And at what point does Leonie’s naïve refusal to give up on him become foolish? How do we ever know when to give up on the people we love?
You began your career writing non-fiction, so when did you decide to branch out and write fiction?
I always dreamed of writing fiction, but, certainly as a student at Cambridge, considered my life too uneventful and privileged to give me anything worth saying. After Watergate, I thought it would be exciting to be a journalist – which is what I became, though never an investigative staff reporter like Woodward and Bernstein. When I first tried my hand at a novel, I didn’t enjoy it very much, mainly because I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing.
My first commission for television, from the BBC, was a drama series based around how my parents met as junior doctors in the East End in 1944, so, just as in my non-fiction, I was still drawing on research and interviews. Writing TV crime drama taught me not only how to structure a story and rely on my own imagination but also that my subject matter, my ‘little piece of ivory on which I work’, as Jane Austen phrased it, was the family. When I had stories to tell that weren’t immediately suited to television, I was finally able to return to fiction with a little more confidence.
You also write for television, including Midsomer Murders, so do you have a preference between the three?
I do love screenwriting because it’s so collaborative. It’s incredibly exciting to watch as my script mobilises a small army of specialists to go out on location and shoot my story, to see characters that were just voices in my head come to life on screen, and then have them watched by millions of people. What’s not to love? And I’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing actors, directors and production crews. As a journalist and non-fiction author, too, I got to interview some wonderful people I’d never otherwise have met, such as members of the Bloomsbury Group and writers and designers who hung out with Picasso and Gertrude Stein in Paris in the 1920s. Fiction is very isolating in comparison, though endlessly challenging and therefore rewarding. I’m greedy – I want to do it all!
You teach screenwriting at Drama Centre, Central St Martins, so how much does this aid your own work?
It’s been really helpful. We’re in the new University of the Arts building behind King’s Cross, and it’s fun for writers to be part of an art school in addition to collaborating closely with the student actors and directors on the course.
When I hear myself give some useful piece of advice to a student, I think: I just made the same mistake in my own writing! Why on earth don’t I take my own advice? It’s good to be reminded of what you know, of all the craft skills you acquire over twenty years in the business, and teaching has given me greater confidence in my ability to fix things in my own work.
It’s a one-year MA, and also I really love the moment when I get to see each student simultaneously relax and increase their focus because they’ve now found themselves as writers. It reminds me how lucky I am to do what I love.
What advice do you give to your students when they first start on your course?
Forget about plot! Plot comes last! Learn to explore what you want to write about, and why, and then work out the best way to dramatise it. And then (unless you’re writing an action-adventure movie) start small – simplicity of plot, complexity of character – then build up the story beat by beat. Jimmy McGovern says you can tell any story by asking ‘who makes the tea?’ and he’s quite right.
You were a volunteer for the New Bridge charity for many years, so what did this entail?
The New Bridge, among other things, is a wonderful befriending service for people in prison who maybe don’t have anyone else to talk to in the outside world. As a volunteer, I exchanged letters with and visited perhaps a dozen people over 10 years, and also served on the charity’s management committee. Prisons are necessary, but their bureaucracy can be secretive and defensive, and I think it’s important to understand the problems of those we lock up, and to see for ourselves what’s being done in our name, and why.
What is a normal day like in your world?
Pretty dull to anyone observing me! As my daughter once explained to her primary school teacher, I sit in front of a computer all day and write down what the people in my head say to one another. In the interests of sanity, I try to walk around Hampstead Heath several times a week and to hold conversations with ‘real’ people. My teaching day is very good for me!
What is next for you?
I’m happily writing my third novel for Quercus - a crime story this time, although it still involves an element of psychological suspense, called Good Girls Don’t Die. I’m also developing an original television drama with Hat Trick.
THE BAD MOTHER by Isabelle Grey is published on 23 May by Quercus, paperback £7.99