1.Your latest book Little Friends is due for release next month (February 2020). Tell me a little about it and how it came to be.
Little Friends is a story about friendship and its risks; three very different families come together as the mother of one offers dyslexia teaching for children like hers with this problem. The children make friends and the adults do too; over the course of a long hot summer they share barbecues and dinner parties, a holiday in Greece. An affair starts, resentments smoulder but the three woman become close. They watch each other but forget to watch their kids who begin to play dangerous little games. Without realising it, the adults have let evil creep into their safe little world which begins to turn upside down.
How did it come to be?
It was a response to John Updike the American novelist whose book Couples intrigues me as a teenager; adulterous couples in a small American town got together using their children as an excuse; the reader quickly lost sight of those children who were banished to the further reaches of the garden while the adults played their games. We never found out what those children got up to or even their names, but I felt in my bones they were up to no good as unsupervised children so often are. Another noval William Goldings Lord of the Flies influenced me, it seemed to me to be a honest portrayal of childhood for the dangerous jungle it often is, where survival of the fittest determines who will win.
2. How do you go about developing the settings for “little friends”
We bought up three of our children in West Dulwich, a long time ago now. It was near the pretty and privileged little village of Dulwich but like so many areas of London, it you turn a corner you can find yourself somewhere completely different; tremendous wealth can co-exist with its opposite. In a place where different groups live close by, the potential for ne friendships as well as conflict can arise
I travelled to the Mani in Greece to research another story; the Mani in southern Peloponnese is an unspoilt area of rugged beauty; we stayed in an old tower house which was surrounded by olive trees and I realised this would provide another place to take my characters and see how they behaved. I also think it’s refreshing for the reader to be taken somewhere else different from the default setting – a bit like going on holiday. It is also true that beautiful places as settings for terrible things can work well.
3. In little Friends who are the main characters and what makes them tick?
The three couples and the six children they have between them
Eve is a woman born to wealth, an earth mother in an enormous house, careless and generous by nature. she studies how to teach children with dyslexia in order to help her own daughter, and advertises for pupils on Facebook. Her husband is Eric who was her father gardener. Melissa a workaholic interior designer is married to Paul; an architect they have a dyslexic daughter; this little family is highly complex. Finally Grace, a Zimbabwean immigrant and her husband Martin, a once famous writer, have two children between them, they struggle with poverty and live in a high rise flat in the outskirts of the village.
4.Out of all your books, which character was the most difficult to create and why?
The heroine of my third novel How Far We Fall, she is called Beth. The novel was a modern Macbeth tale, built around the lives of competitive neurosurgeons, at the cutting edge of their craft. Beth is the lady Macbeth character; in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is driven by ambition for her husband to encourage him to commit murder; I felt a modern woman would be compelled by her own agenda. Crafting a believable modern story as well as a complex character with whom the reader could identify was challenging but also rewarding
5 Who are your favourite authors to read
So many,here are a few in no particular order;
Ann Patchett.
Annie Tyler
Colm Toibin
Hilary Mantel
Marianne Robinson.
Elisabeth Strout.
Andrew Miler
Margaret Atwood.
Jane Smiley
Coetzee.
Deborah Levy
Sally Rooney
Tessa Hadley
7.What is your writing process like?
I write from home which is peaceful now the children have left; a first draft takes six months at least, working anything from 4 to 6 hours a day; once edits come back and deadlines are set’ then I can be working from 12 to 18 hours a day, re -writing and editing.
I work on a large table using my laptop though the first stages when I’m trying out ideas and possible story threads I tend to use pen and paper and often make diagrams and graphs until I have the shape of my story.
8. You have five children; how do you balance your family life with your writing?
My children are grown up now and have all left home. Having said that if they come home or discussions are needed then they always come first. I don’t think I could have written when they were little; I was working as a GP then and when I came home I left that identity and any problems behind. It’s not so easy to do when you are writing, the story stays in your head all the time; I also need stretches of unbroken time as the story takes its final shape.
9. What is the worst writing advice anyone has ever given you?
No one has given bad advice; you take what you need; advice that isn’t for me may be right for another writer but I’m glad no one told me the truth, quite what hard work it is and how much resilience you need!
10.What your writing kryptonite?
If you mean what makes the writing work well, it’s positive feedback. In this industry you get a lot of edits, many of them about things that need to be changed which of course is essential; what really powers you on though is knowing what you have done right, something is working well. When readers get back to me with their thoughts it’s like gold dust. Sometimes my words have made a difference to their lives and there is nothing better than that.
11.If you could tell your younger self anything what would it be?
You have made the right decision, train as a doctor if you want to, you’ll come back to you first love in the end.
12. What would you choose as your spirit animal
An elephant: I love the sense of the matriarch at the head of the tribe; wisdom and patience and strength are good watchwords for a writer.
13. If you could invite anyone living or dead to a dinner party who would you invite and why
Shakespeare: ask him how he did it.
Freya Stark the explorer- where did her courage and determination come from? What things did she learn?
My mother who died a while ago now, so much to tell her, so much to ask.
Available from Amazon.co.uk
Jane Shemilt Little Friends
