The Bay at Midnight

The Bay at Midnight

An author for over twenty years, Diane Chamberlain has become a major player in the US fiction scene.

Now, publisher Mira books have finally decided to bring her over the pond to the UK.

With her second UK published novel The Bay At Midnight out soon, Female First spoke to her about her life before and after she took up a life in prose.

So before you were an author you had a career in psychiatry, can you tell us a little bit about that?

I was a clinical social worker and a psychotherapist in a private practice. I worked in hospitals; I was a medical social worker in the emergency room and the maternity unit. Then I had a private practise as a psychotherapist working with mostly teenagers. And for a while I was doing both, I was writing and working as a kind of social worker at the same time.

What made you go back to writing after this?


Well, I always loved writing and I always loved reading. I had an idea in my mind for a story, probably from the time I was a teenager about a group of people living together in a big house on the shore.

One day I had a doctor’s appointment and he was keeping me waiting for hours, he was very late, and I had a pad and a pen with me and I just started writing down that story and I got hooked. First I thought of it as a hobby and then I really started aiming towards publication because I was so into it.

It took me about four years to write that book, just doing it during the evenings and on my breaks at work. Then it took me about a year to find and agent and another year to find a publisher but then I was well on my way.

Has this background helped you as an author?

I think it’s helped me tremendously because it’s given me insight into people and what makes them tick, as well as how they deal with adversity.

Especially working in an emergency room where I would see people become so strong in the face of trouble, that really influenced my writing because I like my characters to go through a lot, but them to ultimately triumph.

Was it hard trying to get published as a first time author?


You know, it seemed really hard at the time but I think it was easier then than it is to get published now. It seems that there are so many people writing right now and there are fewer publishers so I think just got tighter and more difficult now.

It’s been twenty years since I wrote my first novel and I think I came in at a good time. Although it took me a while to get published, in retrospect it seems like it was pretty easy compared with what writers go through today.

Do you have any tips for anyone trying to become an author?

My first tip is to make sure that you can write well. I see a lot of manuscripts from friends and acquaintances who will ask me to read what they’re written and a lot of the time the ideas are brilliant but the execution is so poor that I know that it’s never going to get published.

I think that if someone isn’t completely sure they’re writing very, very well that they need to take a few really basic writing courses and learn how to string words together in a really beautiful way.

When they feel really secure about their writing then they need to persevere because it is hard and a lot of people give up too soon I think.

A lot of people these days turn to self publishing and I think they do that too quickly because they’re impatient and it does take time to find an agent and it does take time to find the right publisher. So, hang in there is what I’d say.

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

An author for over twenty years, Diane Chamberlain has become a major player in the US fiction scene.

Now, publisher Mira books have finally decided to bring her over the pond to the UK.

With her second UK published novel The Bay At Midnight out soon, Female First spoke to her about her life before and after she took up a life in prose.

So before you were an author you had a career in psychiatry, can you tell us a little bit about that?

I was a clinical social worker and a psychotherapist in a private practice. I worked in hospitals; I was a medical social worker in the emergency room and the maternity unit. Then I had a private practise as a psychotherapist working with mostly teenagers. And for a while I was doing both, I was writing and working as a kind of social worker at the same time.

What made you go back to writing after this?

Well, I always loved writing and I always loved reading. I had an idea in my mind for a story, probably from the time I was a teenager about a group of people living together in a big house on the shore.

One day I had a doctor’s appointment and he was keeping me waiting for hours, he was very late, and I had a pad and a pen with me and I just started writing down that story and I got hooked. First I thought of it as a hobby and then I really started aiming towards publication because I was so into it.

It took me about four years to write that book, just doing it during the evenings and on my breaks at work. Then it took me about a year to find and agent and another year to find a publisher but then I was well on my way.

Has this background helped you as an author?

I think it’s helped me tremendously because it’s given me insight into people and what makes them tick, as well as how they deal with adversity.

Especially working in an emergency room where I would see people become so strong in the face of trouble, that really influenced my writing because I like my characters to go through a lot, but them to ultimately triumph.

Was it hard trying to get published as a first time author?

You know, it seemed really hard at the time but I think it was easier then than it is to get published now. It seems that there are so many people writing right now and there are fewer publishers so I think just got tighter and more difficult now.

It’s been twenty years since I wrote my first novel and I think I came in at a good time. Although it took me a while to get published, in retrospect it seems like it was pretty easy compared with what writers go through today.

Do you have any tips for anyone trying to become an author?

My first tip is to make sure that you can write well. I see a lot of manuscripts from friends and acquaintances who will ask me to read what they’re written and a lot of the time the ideas are brilliant but the execution is so poor that I know that it’s never going to get published.

I think that if someone isn’t completely sure they’re writing very, very well that they need to take a few really basic writing courses and learn how to string words together in a really beautiful way.

When they feel really secure about their writing then they need to persevere because it is hard and a lot of people give up too soon I think.

A lot of people these days turn to self publishing and I think they do that too quickly because they’re impatient and it does take time to find an agent and it does take time to find the right publisher. So, hang in there is what I’d say.