The Cornish House
What can our readers expect from your new novel The Cornish House? An evocative ancient house with a glimpse of two broken women at very different stages of their lives trying to move forward from their loss. Before either of them can do this, they have to deal with issues of their pasts and form a new relationship with each other as well as adapting to their new environment in Cornwall. It is a novel of loss and misguided decisions but ultimately hope and love.
Why did you want to write about your home town? The Lizard Peninsular in Cornwall is one of the most beautiful and magical places I have ever been. From my first visit in June of 1989, I have been under a spell. I love the landscape and the people. It seemed natural to write about the area.
You discovered at an early age that your best friends could be books, who were your earliest influences? I loved EB White’s Stuart Little and Trumpet of the Swan, which a teacher read to us at the end of every day in primary school. From there I moved on to Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. In my teenage years I discovered Georgette Heyer and countless other historical romance writers. Living in the worlds they created helped me through those painful years.
How did moving from Boston to London affect your writing? In one way it didn’t because I wasn’t writing at that point in my life. I was working in insurance and enjoying living in a foreign city for the first time. However the experiences of being an outsider are very valuable to a writer. As a new comer you have no preconceived notions and you watch to see how things work. So in some ways it was a research period.
Was Maddie's fresh start in Cornwall in the story a reflection of your own change in moving to the UK? Yes, in a way it was. No one in the UK knew who I was. There is a tremendous freedom in that. Your past doesn’t come with you unless you want it to. Maddie certainly doesn’t want her past to come with her whereas I wasn’t worried about that so much. But I did want a new life defined by me and not who others thought I was.
Where did the inspiration come from for the novel? The Cornish House was the third complete novel I’d written. In the book before there was a dishy man, Mark, who was a secondary character, a love interest and he kept pestering me to tell his story.
Then one day when they were resurfacing roads we were detoured down a remote lane and I saw the Cornish house. This house had captured my imagination from the first time I had seen it years before. I wondered about the people who had lived there in the past and could their lives impact on those living there now.
The final piece of the puzzle was a visiting teenager going through the wonderfully awful phase when the blinkers are on. They can only see their point of view.
I knew then that I wanted the house to be important in teaching the teenager about life and other people. I wanted it to teach her to see beyond her own pain….
What plans do the future hold for your writing? I’m currently working on my second book for Orion, which was the one that I wrote before The Cornish House where Mark is a love interest. It too is set in Cornwall and in the Helford area. It’s about Jude who suddenly wakes up to the fact that she is following life by other people’s design and not her own. The book follows her journey of self-discovery as she moves to Cornwall and falls in love for the first time- not with a person but a place….
It has been suggested that it’s a perfect summer read, why do you feel this is? I don’t know about you but I love being swept away into another world. The Cornish House explores the dream of being given an ancient house filled with secrets. We’ve all looked in the estate agents windows on holiday and wondered…what if?
What is your background in writing? I lived for stories all my life. When the outside world bored me and as an only child this happened frequently I would create worlds in my head. Eventually I began to put these stories onto paper. When I was in high school a wonderful English teacher Miss Walsh encouraged my creative writing as did my parents. So I chose to study English Literature at university with a concentration in creative writing and medieval studies. For my senior thesis I wrote three quarters of a novel and my professor encouraged me to send it to her agent. I didn’t and I never finished that novel.
This had always bothered me but I now realize that my skin at 22 was too thin to take the criticism that comes with putting your creative work out in the world. And looking back I think I needed life experience to tell the stories I wanted to tell. At 22 the world was black and white with no shades of grey. Now I know that the grey is the really interesting bit.
Interview by Lucy Walton