Nicci & Sean on Secret Smile  |  On The Red Room  |  On writing together  |  Nicci on her writing, childhood and more

Just don't expect them to give the game away!

What gave you the idea for Secret Smile?
We like the idea of taking ordinary emotions that all of us have experienced, or at least can understand, and pushing it further and further until it becomes really sinister. Many people have experienced the embarrassment or irritation in meeting an old girlfriend or boyfriend who you never wanted to see again. But what if they weren't just tiresome? What if you couldn't shake them off whatever you did? What if they were out for revenge? We started from there.

Tell us about Brendan, the villain of the story
When you're in love with someone, you love everything about them, their gestures, the sound of their voice, their little habits. By contrast, we wanted to write a 'hate story'. Miranda, the narrator of the story, dislikes everything about Brendan, everything he says, everything he does. And Brendan lives up, or down, to her view of him by lacking any sense of appropriateness, of boundaries. He's a man who gets too close, who gets into everything, who says things he shouldn't. For Miranda he's like an infection she can't rid herself of. We wanted to make him a very domestic form of horror.

What about Miranda?
We like Miranda very much and we feel a bit guilty about putting her through the ordeal she has to undergo in Secret Smile. She is almost like the heroine of a farce. Unlike the beginning of our previous novel, Land of the Living, her plight at first seems almost trivial. But her problems deepen and deepen, and everything she tries only makes things worse. In the end, the only person who believes her is the reader.

At least you let her meet a nice man. But why couldn't he help her more?
It's funny how, when the leading character is a woman, and she gets into trouble, people want a strong man to come and rescue her. We don't believe in that. We hope that each Nicci French novel is different, but if there's a common theme to the books it's that you can't sit there looking cute, waiting for someone to come and save you. The morgues are full of people who are there because the cavalry didn't arrive in time. We feel that, in the end, if you're in trouble, you'd better rely on yourself. Anything else is a bonus.

I was alarmed by the ending
So were we, but we're not giving that away.

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Tell us about The Red Room
Nicci
The Red Room has as its narrator a young woman called Kit Quinn. She's someone who's drawn to danger, drawn to the things that she most fears. She deals with mentally disturbed people and is invited by the police to assess the case of a hopeless drifter who attacks her. Later on she's invited back by the police to corroborate their feeling that he's guilty of the murder of a young homeless woman who's found dead by a canal. She gets sucked into this world of people who are homeless, motherless, fatherless, in some way lost. She gradually discovers things about that world and its connections to the more apparently respectable world. She distances herself from her friend and from the police and from a sense of safety in order to try and find out who killed this young woman by the canal. In a way Kit's somebody who wants to see the things other people don't see, who loves the people that other people don't love, who looks at the people that most of us try not to look at.

Why did you choose to look at this world?
Nicci
One of the things we do when we're fishing for the next novel is talk about and explore subjects to see if they're fruitful. With The Red Room [we talked about] people who are lost in society and how, in order to feel comfortable with that, we choose not to look at it. We came back to that over and over again, in fact it grew through the novel when we were writing it. As a journalist it's something I've done work on myself and talked a lot about with Sean.

Are you frequently tempted to include issues which you feel strongly about in your books?
Sean
I hope all our books deal with serious issues, things that seem important to us, but one does have this ruthless, amoral commitment to the story. If something isn't working for the story then you have to stop and ask what it's doing there. There may be things you feel really passionately about - political things - and you may be able to work that into the fabric of the book, but if it's not worked into the fabric of the book then you have to re-think it.

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Why did you decide to start writing fiction together?
Sean
In the first years we were married, we talked about the idea. We knew that people could collaborate in different ways but we were interested in whether two people could write a novel that had one voice, where you were really creating a new person.

How do you manage co-authorship? Do you sit down and write together or do you take it in shifts?
Nicci
When we talk about how we write together we tend to make it sound much neater and better managed than it actually is, it's a rather chaotic and messy business. The one thing we never do is actually sit down and write together, and the thought of one of us dictating to the other is a kind of madness, it just wouldn't work. We spend a long time talking about the shape of the novel, the story, the way the plot goes, the development of the characters and above all the voice of the narrator into whom we both have to write, and once we're satisfied with that then we'll start to write. The writing will quite often take us away from the plan, but that's what we do. One of us will write, say, the first chapter and then hand it over to the other who is absolutely free to change it, edit it, erase it, add other words to it, and then they will write the next chapter and pass it back. It's a question of moving between the two of us. We never decide in advance who's going to write what chapter, there's no division.
Sean
We felt that in order for it to work we both have to be responsible for everything, whether we (individually) have written it or not. If there's any research that needs doing for a book then we both have to do it, we both have to have all of it in our heads.
Nicci
If Sean writes something and I change absolutely nothing about that whole section, but I read it and approve it, then it becomes mine as well. It becomes a kind of Nicci French thing so we both own each word of it.

Do you ever find yourself arguing when you're writing?
Sean
I think the real argument actually comes at the earlier stage when we're working out the story. We go through a long and painful process of finding something that we're both really passionate and committed to doing, because for a book you're going to be spending a year of your life on it, so you've got to trust each other that it's something we really can do.
Nicci
We don't argue so much about the fact that words have been changed as about who's going to make the next cup of tea and who's working harder, all the domestic squabbles that every couple goes through, but we're quite respectful of each other in the act of writing. Outside of the act of writing not so much!

Why did you choose to write crime novels?
Nicci
I'm interested in crime in the sense that I'm interested in the strange path that people's lives can go down. I'm not so much interested in the criminal, I'm much more interested in the victim, the effects of the crime and what lies beneath the settled surface. Most people, when you meet them, present themselves as ordered and controlled; they have a self-possessed image. Underneath that everybody is a welter of doubt, grief, loss, nostalgia, love and hate; that's what I'm interested in. The thrillers that we write are not about fiendishly clever serial killers outwitting the police, they're about ordinary people who have extraordinary things happening in the middle of their lives, and the way that they change and have to resolve things. I think that attracts us to the thriller genre.

You chose to use a female pseudonym, and almost all your novels so far have been written from a female viewpoint. Is there a reason for this?
Sean
The first idea we had was about recovered memory, and 99% of people recovering memory in therapy are women, so it obviously had to be a woman. Once it was a woman as the main character then it just seemed obvious that if we were going to choose a name, that it should be a female name. Women have achieved a kind of independence and equality, a nominal independence, and yet so many things haven't changed. There are so many kinds of unexpected pressures that have come along with that, and that seemed an interesting road to go down.
Nicci
It is that sense of there being a cross-current between what modern women are like now; assertive, independent, strong, ambitious, and yet still very physically vulnerable, but also vulnerable to all the things that attack us from the past, all the things we're conditioned to feel. There's a kind of emotional vulnerability and intelligence, a particular kind of female intelligence that seems to be a good way of looking at the world.

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We caught up with Nicci to find out how she enjoyed writing on her own for the first time with Things We Knew Were True; 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 17, and then three daughters aged 15, 13 and 11). 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.

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Nicci & Sean on Secret Smile  |  On The Red Room  |  On writing together  |  Nicci on her writing, childhood and more