Guest Author Post and Signed Copy giveaway- Peggy Riley – Amity & Sorrow

I’m delighted to welcome author Peggy Riley today who is on a whistlestop blog tour to mark the publication of her debut novel Amity & Sorrow, published this week in the US by Little Brown (and already out in the UK published by Tinder Press).

Amity and Sorrow tells the story of a mother, Amaranth, and her two daughters, who are fleeing for their lives during the chaos of a raging, apocalyptic fire at the fundamentalist, polygamous cult led by her husband. Amity and Sorrow, the daughters of the title, know nothing of the outside world. Amaranth is terrified her tyrannical husband is coming after them. Amity slowly blossoms and sees that there are other ways of living, but Sorrow will stop at nothing to get back to the only thing she knows as home. What happened to the other wives and children they left behind?

Peggy graciously answered some questions I put to her:

I read that you saw two unconnected photographs of a house on fire and two women in prairie dresses which acted as the trigger for the idea of the book. Did the characters emerge fully formed? How did it take shape from that initial idea?

 The two girls did emerge fully formed, yes, for which I am very grateful.  I had their voices quite quickly and I knew, from the first moment, that they would begin tied together.  I knew that their story would be about their push and pull, away and back towards one another.  The character of Amaranth took much longer to emerge as a whole person.  For a long time I could only see her filtered through her daughters’ perceptions and it was many drafts before I felt as secure with her as with Amity and Sorrow.  I had to do a lot of writing from her point of view to get under her skin, but I knew I needed her voice in the book.  It would be a very different story if we only saw things from Amity’s point of view.    

What really struck me was the sense of place – the novel is ripe with details of nature, the changing seasons, the plants and flowers particular to rural Oklahoma. How did you go about researching this?

I know absolutely nothing about farming, but I do love to read about it.  I love books that are yoked to the land.  ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is an exploration of Oklahoma, and I was familiar with the terrain of the southwest from my LA childhood and years spent in the desert.  But really, my education came from The Oklahoma Farm News Report, which blogs and tweets issues of interest to Oklahoma farmers.  I followed it for years until I finally began to feel a part of it, until their weather and drought and insurance worries felt familiar to me.  I would make a rotten farmer, but I’ll probably never forget when the winter wheat needs to be drilled.

I read on your blog that during your pre-sale book tour in the States, there was little love shown for the character of Sorrow, and yet I think she was perhaps the most damaged of all through no fault of her own. Widening out from Amity & Sorrow in particular, do you think a character has to be likeable for the reader to identify with them?

I don’t think a character has to be likeable, but I am surprised at how unlikeable Sorrow is perceived to be.  She has been terribly damaged, but she receives little sympathy, due to her lack of compassion or awareness for others.  I really like unpleasant characters, ones who are prickly and selfish and distracted.    Sorrow is vain and spoiled and stuck.  She has huge desire and a thirst for autonomy that women are not allowed in her faith.  I like her a lot, though her methods are ugly.  She has no self-control.  I don’t think anyone will especially identify with Sorrow, but I hope readers can come to understand her point of view, how her world has made her into who and what she is. 

You have a led a fascinating and varied life as a festival producer and a writer in residence at a young offender’s prison to name but two strands to your career. Did you always harbour a desire to write a novel? What made you decide to in the end?

I had no idea I would ever write a novel, though I have been a writer for as long as I can remember.  I did handwrite and staple little books together in kindergarten and can remember being reprimanded for what I had written.  I trained as a playwright and expected to go on writing plays, but when I moved from London to Kent, I found my writing changed.  My sense of self changed.  I had the story of Amity & Sorrow in my head and I couldn’t find a way to put it on stage, to set what I saw in my head.  So, the story made me change how I wrote, to tell it.  Stories are often much smarter than their writers! 

What did you find most challenging in making the departure from writing prose to fiction?

Two things.  First, the simple logistics.  How did you get a character in and out of a chapter?  Scenes in a play can be lightning fast – it’s lights up, begin speaking.  In fiction, readers only get confused.  My brilliant agent was instrumental in reminding me to “place things” before I began, to give readers time to get their bearings.  Maybe this is because we pick up and put down books, in a way that you don’t as an audience, captive in a theatre.  The second was an intense fear of wallpaper.  In plays, you describe as little as possible.  Scene directions are only cues to directors and clues for designers, but they are usually ignored.  In a play, you want to describe characters as little as possible, so that every actor can find herself there.  I vacillated between describing nothing and moving round each room in centimeters, looking at every speck and stain.  Ultimately, I had to find my own way in and out of chapters, as well as what to describe and how and when. 

What is the last book you read that you wish you’d written yourself?

Anything by Louise Erdrich.  Her writing is so rich and deft.  I admire how her books build on each other, drawing from and creating a history of generations of Ojibwe and German families, how their fates are intertwined, on and off the reservations of North Dakota, book after book.  Her language is lyrical – phrases can stop you dead in your tracks – but she also has a wicked sense of humour.  She can handle that balance of dark and light in a story and a character better than anyone.  I always find inspiration in her writing, but really, I’m just happy to read them.  I’m more than happy to let her keep writing them!       

If you would like to win a signed hardback copy of this wonderful book (and a god sex farming badge!) just leave a comment below. The draw is open to international readers.

Forwards and Backwards

I’ve been in a reflective mood this week.

Firstly, I watched the latest update over two consecutive nights of the series Child of Our Time which is a long term (20 years) BBC documentary following 25 or so children all born in the Millennium. I have a Millennium baby myself (and was asked to take part in the series but declined.)

Although I think the programme has lost its way a bit, in that there is little social commentary anymore, seeing how the parents have physically aged, one mother in turmoil over whether she did the right thing over being a stay at home mother and not following her career (we’ll never know, will we?” she said) seeing the  videoclips of the children being born, as toddlers, starting school – their lives on fast forward. How weird it must be to see your life compressed like that. It seemed to me that all the parents had split up (although it said only 50% had – reflecting the national average) but coupled with one of the mothers dying from cancer, the grief of stillbirth, prematurity, divorce, Parkinson’s, bullying, an Asperger’s diagnosis, I was a wreck by the end. To me, at least, they didn’t show any of the positives in parenting teenagers – it was, bar a few exceptions, doom and gloom. They all seemed to be saying ‘that’s it, you’ve done your best, now they’re going to be moving out, leaving home.’ My thirteen year old needs me for a little while yet I hope.

Then on Saturday night I went to see Sondheim’s musical Merrily We Roll Along at the Menier Chocolate Factory. The story is told in reverse order – so it starts in 1976 in the middle of a party for golden boy, man of the moment Franklin Shepherd, who seems to have it all, but you quickly realise it is a portrayal of disillusionment, friendships shattered, alcoholism, adultery, and then winds its way back to 1957 where it’s all wide eyed optimism and youthful idealism. It’s about three best friends – two men, Frank and Charlie, who are a composer and lyricist respectively and they gradually fall out and can no longer bear to work with one another. The third, Mary, is in (unrequited) love with Frank, going back years, and ends up an embittered alcoholic.It’s not nearly as grim as I’ve made it sound – in fact it was full of laughs and some great dance routines, but in Sondheim’s own inimitable way, it makes you think of your dreams and hopes and how you ended up where you are. The refrain kept coming:

Tend Your Dream

How Does it Happen

When does it disappear? Choices to make

Time goes by

How can you get so far off the track?

Why don’t you turn around and go back?

It brought up lots of emotions. Remembering one New Year’s Eve years ago where we all sat round and divulged our dreams of what we really wanted to do, how we saw our lives panning out. To where all those friends are now and what things they’ve been through, and what, to use a cliche, life has thrown at them.

Telling a story in reverse order is really hard to do I think – what does it add? Why do it this way and not the regular linear way? If you read the play/book forwards it should work too. Pinter’s Betrayal famously does this too – starts at the end and works its way to the beginning, and Sarah Waters’ novel The Night Watch, set in the Blitz, which I love.

It made me think of friends who fall out, and the reasons why. It made me think of the programme I watched not long ago about Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Gifford who made up the pop group Squeeze and how they fell out and didn’t really speak to each other for about seven years. Whoever it is, Joy Division, The Smiths, Fleetwood Mac – even Bucks Fizz - they all seem to fall out. As a child with ABBA posters plastered all over my wall, I was heartbroken when they split up. In these programmes, they always seems to have to film them separately, or  one of the key members is tellingly absent, or in a legal wrangle over who owns the band name or squabbles over royalties. I suppose spending that much time with the same people, the pressure of fame and travelling, creative differences, must get to them in the end. But I just want them to be friends for ever.

Nothing’s the way that it was

I want it the way that it was

Help me stop remembering then

Merrily We Roll Along – Like It Was

When do you show others your work?

Last night, I went to see the novelist Maggie O’Farrell in conversation at Waterstones Piccadilly in London. She was witty and fun, observant and gracious. I shall probably talk about things that arose from the conversation for a good few posts yet.

One of the things she said last night, and in this interview in The Observer, was how her husband, who is the novelist William Sutcliffe, is her first reader. She doesn’t tell him anything about what she’s working on and she has no idea what he is working away on either. But it reaches a point when they read each other’s work.

She keeps a plastercast of his teeth (!) on her shelf where she works and said that, looking at them reminds her to keep her more ‘flowery overblown tendencies’ at bay, just thinking of what he’ll say. She said he was ‘brutal’ and ‘mean’ but who wants someone who will just say, ‘that’s nice, dear.’ He tells her what’s working and what isn’t and she trusts his judgement implicitly. The novelist Esther Freud, who I saw speak last year, said something similar about showing her husband (the actor David Morrissey) her novel Lucky Break and he said she had been too hard on the acting profession and she had gone back and rewritten parts.

I am very secretive in the way I work and my husband has yet to read a single word of my novel The Make Up Girl. When I first started writing it, way back when, I kept asking him random things – what happens exactly when an airline loses your luggage, how much would a brand new, top of the range mountain bike cost, but after a while I gave up.

I’ve been thinking about why I don’t want him to. I think he wants to – at least he joked to a friend who asked if he’d read it that I hadn’t let him. We talk about most things but my interest in books and writing is one he doesn’t particularly share. It’s my thing, just as he has his. He did have a chance not long ago when I needed a copy and our printer wasn’t working (and still isn’t). He very neatly printed out the whole thing – 80,000 words – at work and brought it home in a transparent wallet, the chapters neatly pegged together with bulldog clips. But as far as I know, he didn’t read a word. It’s different from alpha and beta readers and critique groups somehow. Scarier in some ways. Frightened that he’ll think it’s shit and that all those hours I’ve spent on it have been wasted. Or that he just won’t get it. And yet by not letting him read it, I’m cutting him out from a major part of my life. I like this post by fellow writer Suzy Norman about the support she gets from her writer husband.

And now when I need another extract printed, or the odd three chapters, (I try not to to save paper but sometimes you just have to) I take it on a memory stick to my local printers. The guy knows me by now and gives me a wry smile.

This post by author Nathan Bransford has lots of interesting comments about at what point you let other people see your work – not necessarily writing but photography, music, and art etc. It can be confusing if you let other people have their say on it as you’re going along, like writing by committee, and yet we all need feedback otherwise you’re writing in a vacuum.

At what point do you let your husband/wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/partner/mother/father/friend read something you’ve written or created? If you keep a blog, do they read that?

Why I love Maggie O’Farrell

The first time someone in my ante-natal group, back in 2000, suggested to me I might like a book they’d just read, by an author called Maggie O’Farrell, I ignored it. I mean, not willingly, stubbornly ignored the advice but I just didn’t act on it. Sleep deprived with a new baby, the name soon slipped out of my consciousness. I could barely remember my own name some days.

And then, several years later, someone had left a book with a washed-out greeny-blue rather ethereal looking cover in the cottage where we were staying and I picked it up. There was that name again, half forgotten, like a whisper, a nudge of an elbow. I was gripped. The book was My Lover’s Lover, O’Farrell’s second novel. It tells the story of Lily, who moves into her new lover’s flat,  but becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to his previous girlfriend. I saw that she had written one before this one – After You’d Gone – and sought that out, realising that this must have been the one my friend had originally recommended, and kicking myself for not taking her advice.  I felt I was late to the party. But then there was nothing left of hers to read. And once more, I lost track of her.

And then, on my old blog, where I wrote about visiting a institution as a seven year old Brownie and a woman had mistaken me for her long lost daughter, someone commented, ‘this reminds me of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – have you read it?’ – and there was that name again. Like an old friend. Maggie O’Farrell.

I went straight out and bought it and whilst I was there, The Distance Between Us (my copy has irritatingly gone missing and I seem to have acquired two of My Lover’s Lover).  The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox bears all her hallmarks – elegant, poetic, pared down, intense prose with shifting narratives and timelines, but affected me far more deeply. Then there is that ending – I had to read it several times to see if what I was reading is what the author intended, and I think it was. I’m sure it was.

I read it again, and several more times, trying to pick it apart – how does she manage the shifting tenses, how does she integrate the flashbacks, how do the stories knit together. In this interview on her website, she talks of doing just this to Mrs Dalloway and how it is almost impossible to do because it is so brilliantly written.

And then there was quite a long wait for her next -The Hand That First Held Mine (which she explains here). I rushed out on publication day and bought it in hardback -something I rarely do – and now I was hanging on her every word. It is a beautiful, expertly crafted novel and deservedly won the Costa. I was engaged with both strands of the dual narrative, alternating chapters between journalist Lexie Sinclair in 1950s Soho and present day Elina, battling through the fug of new motherhood after a traumatic birth, coupled with her husband’s Ted confusion at the newly emerging memories of his childhood.

I like a lot of authors I would perhaps class with her – or I’m told  ’Readers Who Bought This, Also Bought…’ but for me, personally, she is the frontrunner, my favourite, the one I evangelise about to anyone who’ll listen. I think perhaps it is the themes that recur in her novels seem particularly pertinent to me and my own life and family history: the relationship between sisters, giving away babies, betrayal, loss, relatives turning out to be not quite who you thought they were, the long lasting repercussions of family secrets. I’m sure everyone sees their own story in her books somewhere and relates it to themselves and I’m not unique in that.

Towards the end of last year, little rumours began appearing that her new one would be out by Spring this year.  A glimpse of the cover tweeted by Tinder Press (@tinderpress). The news that it was set in 1976  in the famous UK heatwave, that it starts with a husband who goes out one day and doesn’t come back. Booking a ticket to go and see her in person next week in London at Waterstones Piccadilly. Little things building up.

Are you a Maggie O’Farrell fan? Which is your favourite book?

Instructions for a Heatwave is published on February 28th.

Remembering Sylvia Plath

Today, 11 February, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death. The papers are awash with tributes, reflections by writers from Lena Dunham to Jennifer Egan, the furore over the ‘chick-lit Faber cover rumbles on, and there is a slew of new books going over what they say is new ground, such as Mad Girl’s Love Song, another by Ted Hughes’ brother, released to coincide with the date.

There was a time when I would have gobbled a new book about her up. Maybe I was one of the peanut crunching crowd, that Hadley Freeman referred to. I don’t know.

I remember the first time I came across Plath. I was an intense sixth former, playing Joy Division and The The on a loop. My English teacher was a stickler for rote learning and tradition and we had ploughed through Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, Rudyard Kipling’s Kip, reading aloud in class with her taking all the best parts for herself. And then, in the sixth form, we had this new teacher, a Kate Bush lookalike, who dressed part Tenko, part Bloomsbury and we were all a little bit in love with, and she handed out copies of ‘You’re’ and ‘Daddy’ and The Bee Meeting’. She asked us how it made us feel. It was like nothing I had ever read before.  My copy from that time has frantic notes scribbled all over it, underlinings, asterisks, as if my thoughts are tumbling out. I read The Bell Jar and was floored by it.

For my eighteenth, newly arrived at university, my mother gave me a copy of Plath’s Letters Home and The Collected Poems writing an inscription in the front. I kept them by my bed and read them from cover to cover. When I saw Plath was on my degree syallabus, it felt great to be able to walk into Heffer’s and buy everything on the reading list. My affinity with her seemed strengthened by being in the same places where she had been, and I thought about her a lot as I rode my black bicycle with its wooden basket perched on the front, round The Backs, passing the same sights.

“…down Great St Mary’s Passage, lined with its parked bikes, wheels upon wheels. The stone facade of King’s and the pinnacles on the chapel stood elaborate, frosty, against a thin watercolour-blue sky.’

Stone Boy with Dolphin – Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

When it came to my first essay on Plath, I thought I could show off all my knowledge about her and out it all came. My tutor returned it, giving it a disappointingly low mark, with anything even remotely biographical scored out heavily in red with exclamation points in the margins.

My interest in Plath continued – when I stayed with my cousins in Hampstead, I left them at Camden Lock and made a little detour to Primrose Hill to her old house. I gazed up at the windows. I don’t know what I was expecting to see, and still feel vaguely ashamed that I did that. On my first trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, I traipsed all over the city looking for a tiny, out of the way venue where there was a one woman show on about her. The actress playing her wore a white bathing costume perched on a pile of builder’s sand. I read Emma Tennant’s book, Ted and Sylvia, I sat through the dreadful film Sylvia, where it seemed to reduce her to brittle neuroticism with none of the brilliance.

At some point, I can’t remember when, I put away my books about her. I lost the Letters Home, with my mother’s dedication, or lent them or gave them away. It seemed I had grown out of her. It seemed like it had been a phase. Although I bought Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters when it came out, I was never into the blaming, the taking sides, the settling of scores, the commenters who nitpick the minutaie – who seem to think they know more than the people who were actually there, involved, related.

I agree with Hadley Freeman that in the end, it is about the work she left behind. I won’t be buying any of the new books about her, trying to explain her. I’m going to re-read The Bell Jar instead.

Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love by Sarah Butler – Review

Ten Things I’ve Learnt about Love is a haunting, exquisitely written novel about love and loss, grief and guilt, home and belonging. It weaves two parallel, seemingly unconnected stories in alternating chapters. Gradually, the connections between the two are revealed.

The first thread is narrated by Alice, who has been called back to London from her travels in Mongolia because her father is dying from pancreatic cancer.

The second story belongs to Daniel, a homeless man nearing sixty, who spends his days wandering the streets of London, endlessly searching for the daughter he has never met. He collects little scraps of paper, string, foil and lost things like gloves and buttons, fashioning them into treasures, spelling out a secret code. He has a form of synesthesia - seeing letters as possessing a particular colour trait – but it is so subtly done and not spelt out as such. His words are like a refrain, a mantra:

Orange-red, dark purple, magnolia, green, charcoal grey, chestnut brown, Breathe. Gold, silver, lilac, charcoal grey.

The third character is the city of London itself. Much more than a mere backdrop or setting, it is a London that most of us don’t see, or would be there if only we looked. The book is, the author says in the acknowledgements, a love letter to London.

Each segment begins with a list of ten things such as, ‘Ten inappropriate thoughts during my father’s funeral’ or ‘Ten things I’d rather forget’ which are, by turns, funny and revelatory, but never mawkish. The whole book is shot through with humour.

For Alice, being back in the family home brings back memories of never fitting in, of not belonging, of the feeling that her father loved her two elder sisters, Cee and Tilly, more than her. Her mother died when she was four, killed in a car accident on her way to pick Alice up from ballet, but questions still hover over the circumstances – exactly where was her mother coming from?

What really stood out for me in this novel was the way in which Butler moves the story forwards, whilst simultaneously weaving in the backstory. It seems so effortless, gliding seamlessly from present to past, memories springing up as Alice clears out her father’s house ready to be sold, although listening to this Picador podcast, reveals just how hard Butler worked, to find their distinct voices, to differentiate between them. I love the fact she went on a writing workshop with Jackie Kay and Ali Smith -what a duo to be inspired by!

I had been wanting to read ‘Ten Things’ since reading a first person feature with the author in Red magazine and a sample on the Picador website or on Kindle, I forget which, drew me in further.  I have found myself thinking about it constantly since finishing it, greedily in a couple of sittings, and have started from the beginning again. A stunning debut.

New Year reading resolutions

For this New Year, I’m aiming to make more time for reading. Author David Nicholls’ article in the Daily Telegraph  struck a chord with me where he resolved to try and find just half an hour more in his day to read, a habit which he’d got out of.

Nicholls’ own time-sucks are pretty much the same as mine. I’m addicted to trawling news sites, I too have wasted hours following various Twitter feuds and online spats because there is always one going on somewhere, isn’t there?

Perhaps my own biggest time waster is reading the comments below the line on various news sites or blogs- you know the ones – that so enrage me I have to mainline Bach’s Rescue Remedy to regain any sort of composure. I’ve stopped checking Twitter on my phone the minute I wake up and last thing at night before I go to bed and instead have picked up a book. I’m not planning on going cold turkey or anything – but just that half an hour reading instead of being online – has clawed back some time.

Another resolution was to read more books I’ve already got on my shelves rather than buy more (although I’ve already failed on that one but they were bought with book tokens I got for Christmas so that doesn’t count).

So I’m two weeks into the New Year and I’ve read:

Me Before You - Jo Jo Moyes

I can’t think why I didn’t read this last year when everyone was talking about it. Although I pretty much knew what was going to happen, it was so engaging, I devoured it in a couple of sittings. I had seen so many people saying it completely did them in emotionally, I thought I’d be immune to it, being prepared in advance. But I sobbed and sobbed.

The Last Time I Saw You – Eleanor Moran

The Crooked Heart – Helen Dunmore

Dare Me – Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott is a stunning writer. I have a definite girl crush on her. She is brilliant at nailing those coming of age, intense female friendships. The End of Everything was one of my favourite books ever and she’s done it again.

The Other Hand – Chris Cleave

I’m not sure I would have chosen this had it not been chosen for my book group. I have a lot of issues with it and struggled to finish it.

Y – Marjorie Celona

I’ve just started this – it’s was announced at the beginning of the week as one of Waterstones Eleven. So far it’s gripping.

Did you make any reading resolutions this year? How are you doing?