The Two of Us: My Life with John Thaw,  Sheila Hancock’s superb “double memoir” of her life with the late actor.

 

Considerably.  There is not an author alive to whom this does not apply. We try to believe otherwise – and imagination does play the dominant role – but what we have seen, heard and suffered within our own lives is certainly part of our characters’ psyches.

 

Never. I start my books with a single image or phrase that has entered my brain and seized hold of it. Sometimes this image or phrase seems totally irrelevant until I sit down and discover what it is about. And sometimes the beginning ends up at the end. For me (excuse the cliché), writing fiction is a process of continual discovery.

 

Again it was an image. Somewhere in the distant past, someone had told me a true story about a young girl imprisoned by her family. I have long ago forgotten who told me – and even the details of what happened to the girl. But that central image, of the imprisonment, stuck with me and wouldn’t let go of its grasp on my brain until I sat down to examine it.

 

It is actually linked to the previous one, Children of Eve, but because the characters and locations are absolutely different, the novel is different too; the voices of the characters are their own; and I hope (again) that I am continuing to develop as a novelist.

 

I wish I knew!  I don’t aim at any particular audience other than readers who like to become engrossed in a good story and to keep them reading in order to find out what happens next.  I know that in a market flooded with fiction, publishers, reviewers and booksellers have to pigeonhole novels in ‘genres’ in order to give guidance and keep order, but every time I am asked to describe my own niche, I am genuinely stuck for an answer.  I would like Tell Me Your Secret to be regarded as a big, old-fashioned, engrossing story, told well. I would love a reader to feel satisfied having finished it, but also to murmur on closing its covers: ‘Damn! I wish that wasn’t the end.’