In a lot of your books, characters have to often confront their pasts. Is this a deliberate theme?
I won’t say it’s deliberate, bit it does seem to happen a lot in my writing. What I’ve discovered is that I don’t set out with a theme in mind but themes start to emerge. I think I’ve been fascinated with how what we did in our past can come back to haunt us later and what we do about that. So it does seem to happen quite a bit in my books.
You’ve said in your blog that you sometimes take ideas from looking at books in the library, can you tell us a bit more about that?
I like to go the library and walk around the non-fiction section when I’m trying to come up with a book idea and I just look at the spines of whatever books are there and some just jump out at me.
For example, for my book Breaking The Silence, I was in the library and a book jumped out at me called Journey Into Madness by Gordon Thomas and it was about the CIA mind control experiments that the United States carried out in the 50’s on involuntary psychiatric patients and I was fascinated by this and it became a really major part of the book. So it’s that kind of thing.
I just like to walk in the library and see what jumps out at me because it never fails to trigger some ideas.
You were diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis over ten years ago. How much has affected your work?
It affected it a great deal in the beginning because they didn’t have very good drugs, or at least the drugs they did have didn’t work for me. So, I wasn’t able to type any longer and as you can imagine that was horrible. Just the emotional impact of having a very serious disease and one that was so very painful to me.
It took up a lot of my time just to cope and to alter my lifestyle; I couldn’t walk the way I used to. It was all very difficult and very challenging and what I ended up doing was getting voice recognition software so I that could actually continue to write and I wrote a couple of books just using the software.
If you’ve ever used it, it can be pretty challenging as it doesn’t quite work as well as you hope, but at the same time it allowed me to write two books.
Then the good medications, what they call biologic came on the market and they completely changed my life. They gave me my life back. Now I can type, pretty much all the time, I still have the software on my computer just in case I need it, but I haven’t used it in a long time. I can type for hours and hours.
I still have trouble walking; I have a lot of damage in my left ankle from before I got good treatments for the rheumatoid arthritis.
You know how people sometimes say that an illness is a blessing, and I think that in a lot ways it has been because it really has helped me understand adversity better and my characters better. In The Secret Life of Cee Cee Wilkes, I didn’t set out to get Cee Cee rheumatoid arthritis but one day I was picturing the scene that she was in and she was limping.
Sometimes that’s the way ideas for the books come to me, I sort of picture the scene in my subconscious, something will happen in that scene and I’ll realise that that’s part of the story. She was limping and I thought 'OK, she has rheumatoid arthritis.'
So that was the first time I’d written about it and it felt good to be actually able to write about it. It’ll probably be the last time I’ll write about it also, but that’s the reason I gave her rheumatoid arthritis.
Do you take life experiences like this and put them into your other books?
Not usually, but I have to say The Bay at Midnight is full of little anecdotes. I re-read it recently because I knew it was going to be published in the UK, and I realised how much of the little things that happen are things that I really did experience.
The setting in The Bay At Midnight was my childhood bungalow at the Jersey shore, so many of the things that happen actually did happen. So, for one scene where everybody gets in tubes and float down the canal to the bay and that’s something that my family actually did.
One where Julie, the 12 year old girl catches eels in the canal and that’s something that I used to do, I’d catch eels and other fish in the canal behind my house and my mother would cook them and my mother and grandmother would eat them and that’s what happens in the book. So there are small anecdotal things.
The big difference is that Julie, who’s really our central character is very gutsy, and I wasn’t at all, I was more fearful like her sister Lucy. So that’s the big difference. Also the big tragedy that happens to them, with her big sister Isabelle being murdered, of course nothing ever happened like that to my family, thank goodness.
So, what’s next for Diane Chamberlain?
I just finished my 19th novel, which is called The Lies We Told, and that book is set in North Carolina. It’s about two female doctors who work for a Doctors Without Borders organisation, and they’re working in a disaster area after a hurricane.
One of them goes in a helicopter with one of her patients, and the helicopter crashes and the one left behind thinks she’s dead but she’s actually trapped on an island with some intriguing people and lots of things happen…
The Bay At Midnight is out on the first of January.
Femalefirst Cameron Smith