Author Q & A

1. Was your childhood ambition always to be a writer? If not, what inspired you to start writing?
   
   I always enjoyed writing at school and was good at it, but my real passion was history, and in my teens I got diverted by theatre. I started writing again when my children were small, just to see if I could write a novel, and though the first one wasn’t any good, I learnt so much I just had to go on and discover if I could do it better…
    
   
2. How long have you been writing?
   
   About fifteen years, in among the rest of life. It got really serious about seven years ago.
    
3. What do you enjoy most about writing?
   
   The total immersion when it’s going well: I don’t even notice that the music’s stopped or my  feet are freezing or the sun’s come out, or that I’m enjoying writing. And the way that almost anything I read or see – whatever is in my life at the moment – might turn out to be useful.
    
4. Which writers do you admire?
   
   Rose Tremain, William Golding, Jane Gardam, Angela Carter, Georgette Heyer, P G Wodehouse; of the classics, Jane Austen, E M Forster, Henry James, Shakespeare. I always write better when I’ve had a dose of Shakespeare: it’s as if I’ve had a skin stripped off me.
    
5. Which authors have influenced your writing the most and why?
   
   Peter Ackroyd for the intensity and fluidity of his historical vision, John Le Carré for combining compelling storytelling with really good writing and subtle psychology, Jeanette Winterson for her wonderfully baroque imagination, Helen Dunmore for her exquisite prose.
    
6. What was the last good book you read?
   
   Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
    
7. To what extent has your life experience influenced your writing?
   
   I don’t write at all autobiographically, but I’ve used settings from my own life – Suffolk, Northern Spain – and subjects, like photography, that I’m passionate about. And if you write about humans, you can’t help bringing in what you know of human life: love, birth, death.
    
8. Did you know how THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE would end before you started writing it?
   
   More or less. I knew the place where I wanted the characters to end emotionally, but not how I was going to get them there, or where they would end up in physical fact.
    
9. What inspired your new novel THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE?
   
   Originally, I had a vision in a writing class of a soldier in Wellington’s Spain, watching a girl bathing in a river and falling in love with her. And later I wanted to write a novel that used photography as I know it to be: layers of time and light, a kind of ghost. So given war and love and photography I had the core of what became The Mathematics of Love.
    
10. What kind of audience do you think THE MATHEMATICS OF LOVE is aimed at?
    
    I don’t think about this question when I’m writing: I write what wants to be written. But I know that people who really respond to The Mathematics of Love often also like books like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, A S Byatt’s Possession, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, Louis de Bernière’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. I’d also suggest that fans of Sarah Waters, Georgette Heyer, Rose Tremain, and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle would enjoy it.