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About Me

  1. The picture on my home page was taken around the time I got pregnant with my first child, at 38. Trust me, I don’t look anything like so good 5 years and two children later.
  2. I am an Essex girl from an East End family, who went as a mature student to Cambridge and then taught there for years. So I sound posh to my family, common to my students and mongrel to everyone else.
  3. Being working class, and moving in your late twenties into an exclusively middle-class environment, means that you become neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring. I’m 44 now, and no closer to fitting in anywhere. For a writer, having access to a variety of worlds and voices is a huge privilege.
  4. Cambridge during term time is full of the young, beautiful, idealistic – which forces most of us who teach to face that we are none of those things.
  5. Teaching Creative Writing, as I do for the Open University, is a strange experience. At its best, it is wonderful: a working-with, a switching-on, absorbing and stimulating, especially if students come without wanting to ‘be’ a writer (whatever that means). Yet I fear that in some institutions, CW is in danger of eating itself, producing teachers of writing rather than writers who might perhaps teach.
  6. My original Cambridge base is Lucy Cavendish College, unique in Europe for taking only female students over 21. I was an undergraduate and postgraduate there and am now a Senior Member. My new home as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow is Anglia Ruskin University. The photo there is also proof of number 1 on this list.
  7. One firm belief I hold: after a certain age, you can still risk a tee-shirt in the sales for a couple of quid, but must never have cutprice hair unless your kids are starving.
  8. My teeth are crap, especially since children. Dentistry is ridiculously expensive, and while we see many of the young and almost all entertainers with insanely white and perfect teeth, we also see people like me with jobs, families, general respectability, visibly and sometimes painfully needing work done, and not being able to afford it. This is a humiliating state.
  9. The job of a novelist is to tell the truth as you see it. I thought I'd never write autobiography, and found it difficult to understand fiction writers who did. Any life has so much material to be plundered, obliquely, tangentially, that it seems a dreadful waste to use it up straight and in one hit. Yet I'm writing now about our experience as a family dealing with autism, and realize finally that 'all history must be emplotted in some way' (Hayden White), and that directed memoir is no different from fiction.
  10. When my dad died, my position in the world altered irrevocably.
  11. I don't understand those who claim to have no regrets: have they, then, never made terrible choices, hurt anyone, done a mean or a spiteful or a stupid thing? Never behaved for the briefest pause in ways reprehensible, craven, feeble, embarrassing. Never got it wrong. Those are probably the same people who say that everything happens for a reason. My regrets are too many to mention.
  12. I wish I’d had children when I was younger – as well as, not instead of, now. Two pairs with a long gap in between would have been lovely. Yet it wouldn't have been the right thing to do, and therefore the wish is one that would involve me having been a whole different person, perhaps one who wouldn’t have had that thought.
  13. My family doesn’t read my stuff. But one of my dad’s mates read my first novel and said that although he hadn’t touched a book since Wind in the Willows, he didn’t mind admitting mine had made him cry. I’m proud of that, yet I recognize that my audience largely will have a different background from my own.
  14. Unrelieved misery seldom makes money. Between Three Blind Mice and Prohibitions, I wrote a manuscript that was rejected by my publishers for being too bleak. My then-agent claimed that writers are often darker than other people and to explore that was self-indulgent. Now, I have come to believe that there is a market for the dark side, if only the sales and marketing people would realize it.
  15. Having had a mental illness makes me part of a club with an Us and Them outlook. There is so much prejudice around mental health issues that if we didn’t find something positive in having had problems, we’d go mad.
  16. When I meet someone new, I tend to dislike them, in case they get in first by disliking me. I’m not much of a one for trusting people. So when I make a friend, she or he matters.
  17. My great friend is the poet and non-fiction writer Elizabeth Speller; if we didn’t have each other to offload the boredoms, failures and fears of our writing lives, we’d quickly and deservedly lose the rest of our intimates.
  18. Few people will ever be as good as their heroes. Mine is Raymond Carver, and I know I could never be fit to hold his pens.
  19. One fairly recent belief: it is not natural or often desirable to live far from your family. Unless the dysfunction is intolerable, the extended family unit and the wider community are far more important than living a solitary life. We need to learn to give and to take help in fully integrated ways, or I don’t know what will become of us as a society.
  20. Having children of course radically changed my perspective and my interior being forever. That one of my children has Autism Spectrum Disorder has shifted this even further. How we cope with this as a family is now the most important thing in my life: how as parents we accommodate the needs of both children in relation to this condition, how we let them know each of them is loved and important, how we help them to love each other; nothing matters more except perhaps for changing the world.