Maggie O'Farrell is the author of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox and After You'd Gone. She talks to Good Reading about her writing style and the inspiration for her latest novel, The Hand that First Held Mine.

 

 

MO: I identify with all of them, I think, in different ways. You need to be able to empathise with your characters in order to write about them convincingly. 

 

 

MO: The idea came to me when I was at a gallery. A few years ago, I went to a John Deakin exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. His photographs showed people – actors, painters, writers – on the streets of Soho in the 1950s. There was a peculiar stillness to them; Deakin’s subjects stared into his lens as if mesmerised, leaning against walls or nightclub tables, cigarettes held between fingers. Behind them was a city that was recognisable yet indefinably strange.

It was a fascinating glimpse into the bohemian, artistic community that existed for a short time in post-War London. The more I looked at these images the more I wondered if it would be possible to write someone into them. You often hear about people being airbrushed out of photographs but I wanted to attempt this process in reverse: to make up a person and place them in this vanished world.

So I set out to write a book about two women, living apparently unconnected lives, fifty years apart, in the same city. The structure, therefore, was a clear from the start. I knew the two stories would collide in the second half of the book. But no matter how much you plan, there are always surprises along the way. The characters did things I wasn’t expecting. It’s these surprises that keep me interested in writing. I could never be one of those writers who plans everything out to the last detail and then begins to write: I like it when a novel mutates and develops as you write.

 

 

MO: I admire novels that have a careful shape, plots with a complex structure. I didn’t plan to write a ‘page-turner’ but I suppose I knew all along that there would be a dark moment at the centre of this book. I also knew it had to be carefully plotted, so that the link between the two stories is revealed very gradually and at the right time. I would write a draft, then put it away for a month or two before looking at it again – only that way could I see whether the trail of crumbs through the forest was obvious enough. Then I would go back and rework it. 

 

 

MO: James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, Michael Cunningham, Kate Grenville, William Boyd, Ian McEwan, Robert Drewe, Molly Keane, Anthony Burgess, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Philip Roth.

 

 

MO: When I gave up my job at the Independent on Sunday it was to be a freelance journalist. I don’t think I’ve ever written “full-time”, whatever that may mean. I taught creative writing for a while as well. And then when I had my children, I gave up the journalism and teaching to look after them; the writing bit, I kept. 

 

 

MO: I don’t think what Elina is feeling is ambivalence – only shock. Not only has she had a very difficult birth, but she has to recover from surgery while looking after a tiny baby. I wanted to write about very early motherhood because I haven’t encountered it much in fiction: the exhaustion and emotion and elation of those first few weeks. The shock is not only physical – the sleeplessness and the never-ending demands – but also emotional. A lot of this novel is concerned with people whose lives change in an instant: they meet someone, leave somewhere, lose someone and life is never the same again. I think motherhood is such a moment. As soon as your baby takes its first breath, life as you know it is gone and a whole new existence takes its place. It can take a while to adjust to that. 

 

 

MO: I think having children changes everything, without exception, so it’s inevitable that it changes the way you write. The most obvious way is that you have so much less time than before. Instead of a whole day, you have the hour or so while they nap and the evenings when they’re in bed. But I’ve found that this time pressure does have its advantages: it helps you to focus on the task. Before I might have fiddled about all day but now I sit down as soon as the baby goes into her cot and I write, without stopping, until she wakes up. Children are great editors as well, not in the sense that they go through your manuscripts, pen in hand. But being so busy means you have less time to follow every whim and every notion in your writing. Only what’s important makes it to the page – anything else is lost. I cut much less from my novels than I used to.