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Nicci Gerrard |
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Nicci Gerrard (with Sean French) is one half of the bestselling husband/wife thriller writing team that is Nicci French. Nicci Gerrard has also written four novels under her own name - Solace, Things We Knew Were True, The Moment You Were Gone and The Winter House.
Nicci Gerrard, along with her husband Sean French, is already a bestselling crime novelist. Under the name of Nicci French they have co-written The Memory Game, The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room, Land of the Living and Secret Smile. Here Nicci talks about Things We Knew Were True.
Here we catch up with Nicci and find out how she enjoyed writing on her own for the first time; we find out about her childhood memories; who are her favourite contemporary novelists and more.
This is your first novel written on your own, but you've written a number of bestselling thrillers with your husband Sean French. Was it difficult changing genres and writing a novel about family life, rather than a thriller, and on your own?
Writing is almost always hard, and it requires a strange mixture of being full of doubt and yet having faith in oneself. Whenever I - or we, when Sean and I are writing together - finish a book I have a moment of sheer panic when I wonder if I'll ever write anything again. But one of the things about writing in collaboration with Sean has been that we can encourage each other to believe in ourselves and protect each other against anxiety and gloom. The hardest part of writing on my own was believing that I could do it. It took a long time, years actually, to start on the story that I'd had in my head. Once started, it wasn't so difficult to continue - in fact, I felt an urgency and a compulsion about it. The writing took me over, which is one of the best feelings in the world.
Anyway, I couldn't have written a thriller on my own. Nicci French writes thrillers. I wanted to produce something entirely different in my own personal voice.
The 70s has been a frequent subject for fiction e.g. The Ice Storm, The Rotters Club, as a generation of writers revisit their own teenage years. Your picture of it is very domestic and less extreme than other writers, could you talk about the different ways that writers have approached this period?
I was a teenager in the Seventies, which was a time of turbulence, excitement, and change. But, like a friend of mine who was in Paris for the events of 1968 and yet had no idea at all what was going on until he came back and read the newspaper headlines, I didn't properly realise or experience that at the time. I only came to it later, when I left home and went to university. When I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I didn't take a huge amount of drugs and discover feminism and radical politics and have lots of sex and quarrel definitively with my parents and go on marches and hang out on the Kings Road in strange garments. I got on well with my parents; I was reasonably obedient; I wanted to feel liberated and I wanted to experiment and push against boundaries, but quite often I was also scared.
I think most of the time we don't live at the dramatic centre of history but in its margins. In Things We Knew Were True, I very consciously left out most of the things which have come to define the Seventies, in order to write an account from those margins.
Siblings - As your own children grow older, do you see emerging alliances forming between different siblings? And, how different is sisterhood from your own memories of childhood to how you would observe it now?
I'm one of four children and I've got four children myself (a son of 15, and then three daughters aged 14, 12 and 9). Although the older two have a different father, who left when my oldest daughter had just turned one, they're a gang, very close and loyal to each other, which I love (I always wanted us to be outnumbered by our children). Of course, there are tensions and arguments - between them; between them and us.
I also grew up in a very close-knit family and of course there were tensions there, as well. But the big difference was one of authority. My parents, who were really quite liberal, never the less belonged to a different culture to us. They were scared of all drugs, believed sex before marriage was wrong, expected us to have the same job for our entire working lives. They laid down laws of behaviour and morality and consequently we had secrets from them and we rebelled against them. The world changed after the Seventies and in our household, Sean and I listen to the same music, wear the same kind of clothes, come from the same kind of culture and believe in the same kinds of things as our children, and so are not at an authoritarian distance from them. We're a kind of democracy - so what are they to rebel against, which is part of growing up?
Sometimes in the end you have to leave home to be yourself (for example, my eldest sister, who was gentle and insecure, didn't just leave home but the country and the continent - she lives in Angola now), One of the subjects of Things We Knew Were True is how we need families and yet need to break free of them; how we're both anchored and trapped by our parents and siblings.
Did you keep a diary as a child, or are the sights and smells of childhood and the excitement/agony of first love purely from memory?
I kept a diary on and off and when I re-read it years later was I excruciatingly embarrassed by myself: my earnest, intense, self-obsessed, pompous, aggrieved tone. I threw it away, although now of course I wish that I hadn't. The things I write about are from memory (and invention). I'm sure that we all vividly remember the intense experiences of our childhood and teenage years, though we forget things that happen later. Our childhood becomes almost like the mythology of our life, and the way we explain ourselves.
The book is set in 2 parts - the first looks at when the sisters are all teenagers, the second - when they return to their childhood home some 20 years later, some married and with children of their own. Why did you decide to set it in this particular time frame?
I wanted to write about experiencing something and then looking back on it and seeing it differently. And about homesickness for the irrecoverable past. I closed the first section with a tragedy, so that that the door swung shut on an era - Edie and her sisters were abruptly expelled from childhood and only revisited it years later.
I'm sure readers will have strong views on Edie's behaviour at the end of the book, could you explain the thinking behind it?
Edie has always behaved well. She's been a 'good girl' and she has been haunted by guilt ever since Vic died. Here she does two things - she tries to recover the past in order to somehow mend it (which of course she knows is impossible and ridiculous) and she behaves badly. What's more, she behaves like her mother once behaved, repeating a pattern. She lets go of her control over life. One of her dominant emotions is pity - pity is a very dangerous emotion for many women I think, as dangerous as desire. We're drawn to people who are hurt and whom we feel we can redeem. Edie behaves foolishly and wrongly, but she doesn't try to excuse herself. She's honest.
Which contemporary novelists do you enjoy reading?
Oh God, so many: Philip Roth, Sarah Waters, Anne Tyler, Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Helen Dunmore, Ruth Rendell, Pat Barker, Carol Shields, Rose Tremain, Henning Mankell, John Banville, Jim Crace, Hilary Mantel - also, there are just particular novels that I've loved, like Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Marguerite Youcenar's The Death of Hadrian (OK, that was written ages ago and she's dead now, but I've only just read and been bowled over by it), E Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.
Lastly, as you re-read children’s' books to your own children, does it evoke memories of your own childhood?
There are some books I read as a child that meant so much to me that I've almost been scared to re-read them with my children. The weird and mystical Moomintroll books by Tove Jansson both Sean and I knew when we were small and then read out loud to our children - over and over again, in fact, so that now all six of us know them practically by heart, and yet we still cry hopelessly over the same passages. Or The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge which was one of my favourite books as a girl and which has now been re-printed so I can read it with my daughters. Or The Lord of the Rings which we've read (it takes ages even though we skip the long historical explanations) three times to various children, and then listened to the unabridged radio dramatisation about ten times on long car journeys, as well as seeing the film of course. And I read poems to my children that I used to have read to me by my mother: 'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes ('The wind was a torrent of darkness,/Among the cloudy seas./The moon was a ghostly galleon/Tossed upon stormy sea...'
I love the way children read with total immersion. I can yell in their ear and they don't hear me, or brush me away like an irritating fly buzzing round them. I remember that vividly but hardly ever do it any longer - spend entire days curled up in a chair urgently reading a book, and the whole world disappears. Wonderful.
