Tag Archives: adoption

SISTER SCRIBES’ GUEST: ALISON LARKIN ON WHY SHE WRITES

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Welcome to Alison Larkin, bestselling author of The English American, award-winning Austen narrator and now the narrator of The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen and The Unexpected Past of Miss Jane Austen. 

I’m with Dorothy Parker who said “I hate writing. I love having written.”

I was born in Washington DC, adopted by English parents and raised in England and Africa and I’ve written for as long as I can remember – poems and plays mostly. But they were usually pretty surreal.

Then something happened that changed everything. Including the kind of writing I did.

It was the early 1990’s. I’d recently left drama school and was playing Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm in Newbury when the ‘phone rang back stage and I learned that the birth mother I knew nothing about and had been searching for was alive and well and keen for me to come and visit her at her home – in Bald Mountain, Tennessee.

So I went to Tennessee to meet her. Then I moved to New York and became a stand-up comic, because what else do you do?

Growing up, we didn’t talk about feelings in my family, which was helpful I think because the. absence of any other outlet meant I had to write, even though I hated it. I’m sure I never would have written the stand-up comedy act that led to the one woman show that led to my novel The English American if I hadn’t had to.

Photo credit Sabine von Falken

But I did have to. Why? Because people kept asking me what it was like meeting my ‘real’ mother and every time they used those words I felt as if I’d been punched in the heart. Because, to me, my ‘real’ mother was the mother who had raised me. And yet I had needed to find my birth mother and people didn’t ‘get’ why.

So I decided to combine stand-up comedy and theatre and show people through a one woman show in which I played myself, my English mother, and my American birth mother who were diametrical opposites in every way. The show was a hit and led to sitcom development deals in Hollywood and a run in LA and London. And then I had children and stopped performing comedy because I wanted to hang out with my kids while they still wanted to hang out with me.

But then I started to get really annoyed with the way adopted people were portrayed in books and on TV as eternally damaged victims at best, or serial killers. So I thought that maybe if I could put an authentic adopted heroine at the center of the kind of novel that I like to read  then maybe people on a beach or a plane would understand why someone from a very happy adoptive family would need to find the people she came from. And maybe, just maybe, instead of having to go through the whole thing every time someone said “What was finding your birth mother really like” I could say “It would take a book to explain. Oh! Wait! I’ve written one.”

After The English American came out I was rescued from writing by the audiobook industry who set me up with my own studio and hired me to narrate the first of over 200 audiobooks I’ve narrated to date. And I was so busy raising my children there was no time – or need – to do any writing.

My handsome, brilliant Indian fiancé, Bhima, loved my writing. “Why don’t you write more,” he pressed me four months ago. “Because I’m happy,” I said smiling again at the first man I ever dared to fully love. I’d spent a lifetime looking for him. And finally, in my 50’s, there he was.

Then he died. So maybe I will be writing again after all.

 

Between now and Christmas, for every audiobook downloaded directly via www.alisonlarkinpresents.com one will be donated to people in need.

 

 

 

BUSINESS OF BOOKS: FIRST, LAST, EVERYTHING – NOVELIST SANDRA DANBY

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What was the first writing advice you were ever given?

As a young English graduate longing to be a journalist, I chose a bad time to graduate. It was 1982 and publishers were closing their training schemes. Only two courses existed; one at the London College of Printing, the other at Cardiff Journalism School. Out of the blue I received a job offer on a new graduate trainee scheme run by business publisher Benn Publications. It was there in September 1982, sitting around the boardroom table in the impromptu Training Room, that I was given the piece of advice I still remember today and still use. Training editor Val Williams taught us Rudyard Kipling’s quote: “I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.” It has stood me in good stead whether writing a news story, a feature, a press release or a novel. And the journalist in Connectedness, Rose Haldane, uses it too when she gets stuck in her research.
What was the most recent writing advice you were given?

That’s easy, it is something that had never occurred to me before until my copy editor pointed it out to me during the editing of Connectedness. It applied to the name of a character, Maud Nettlebed. I realise now I chose Maud’s surname because of a liking for the word, Nettlebed, which goes back to my days as a reporter writing about a furniture company called Brights of Nettlebed. The name stuck. However Dea Parkin, my editor, said it was an unlikely surname that took her attention off the page every time she read it. And that, she said, is a cardinal sin. Avoid anything that distracts the reader from the page, which breaks their concentration, which returns them to the real world, which stops them turning the page and reading another chapter. I guess this is a subjective judgement, but it appeals to the journalist in me who dislikes embellishments and sub-clauses in long sentences. So, I changed Maud’s surname to Nettles.
What is the piece of advice you’d most like to pass on?

Listen to the advice you are given but do not blindly accept it or reject it without consideration. Evaluate it, then adopt or discard it. There is no ultimate template of how you should write, what you should write, the rules you should obey or break. But, and it is a big but, you must listen to the advice and consider it before rejecting it. You must know the rules, before breaking them. You will be a better writer for it. We are bombarded these days with writing advice, never have novelists been so vocal about how they write, when they write, at what time of day. There is no right way and wrong way; there is your way. Be true to yourself. Listen to feedback and suggestions, be polite, be prepared to offer positive feedback and suggestions in return, always give the person giving the advice the respect of considering it. I have participated in many writing classes – as student and teacher – and watched as some students, whose minds were closed to advice, simply did not hear suggestions that could help them. I’ve also watched other students writing copious notes about how their work should be changed and I worry they would subsequently make changes without analysing why. Knowing who you are as a writer, having confidence in what you write, is not easily earned. There is a truth in Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule.

 

Novelist Sandra Danby is a proud Yorkshire woman, tennis nut and tea drinker. She believes a walk on the beach will cure most ills. Unlike Rose Haldane, the identity detective in her two novels, Ignoring Gravity and Connectedness, Sandra is not adopted. Follow her on Twitter @SandraDanby

 

Amy Winehouse Was 'Physical Wreck' – Death Leaves A Trail Of Grief And Denials

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Amy Winehouse’s grieving mother has said that the singer was “a physical wreck” the day before she died and that her minders had to help her down the stairs. Janis, who suffers from MS, added that Amy was “completely out of it.”

The singer was apparently having weekly health check-ups and her doctor visited her 24 hours before her death but had ‘no concerns.” Her bodyguard, Andrew Morris, also checked on her in the morning, but when he returned in the afternoon, she had died.

After her funeral on Tuesday, Winehouse’s father gave fans her clothes, leaving one fan wearing a vest the singer owned. It also emerged that she was in the process of adopting a poor, 10-year-old, St Lucian girl.

Since the singer’s death, tributes have flooded in, and her family released a statement saying: “Our family has been left bereft by the loss of Amy, a wonderful daughter, sister, niece. She leaves a gaping hole in our lives. We are coming together to remember her and we would appreciate some privacy and space at this terrible time.”

Amy’s phone was apparently “routinely” hacked by members of the press, as were Winehouse’s parents, brother Alex and ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, according to investigative journalist Charles Lavery.

Talking about the troubled Londoner’s attendance at rehabilitation centres, a source told Lavery: “The press knew where she would be, who would be there, what time, at any given time.

“They were able to be there too, to befriend her and actively encourage her, as if they had arrived by chance. That made better copy and, more importantly, better photos for the snappers both inside and waiting outside.

Ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil said that losing Winehouse has left him “inconsolable”, while Fielder-Civil’s mother hit out at critics who said he was responsible for the singer’s untimely, saying he had nothing to do with it.

Amy joins the ’27 Club’ – a list of famous rock stars who died at the same age  – which also includes Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones.