Thursdays in the Park
What can you tell our readers about your new novel Thursdays in the Park?
Thursdays in the Park is about two grandparents falling in love over the swings in the park with their grandchildren. But one of them is married…
Apart from being a romance, it’s about what it’s like to be older in today’s world, the pitfalls that face the modern grandmother, the problems of a long marriage, falling in love in your sixties.
I am a baby-boomer, born in the years after the last war, and we are a stroppy lot, not going into old age willingly! I thought it would be interesting to look at a tale of romance in the older generation.
What inspired you to tell this tale?
I was in the park with my granddaughter. As she, aged less than two, fell into a trance on the swing, I looked about. Across the playground was an older man, perhaps a grandfather but not decrepit yet, quite attractive in fact, and I thought hmmm… this might be the beginning of a good tale.
My husband, when he read the first draft of the book, did give me some funny looks!
You trained as a nurse and a marraige guidance counsellor as well as being a heath journalist, so when did writing come into play?
I have been writing novels for over twenty years. I will only admit to finishing four before Thursdays! But they were all rejected out of hand. I cried a lot and fell into a depression each time I was rejected, then got back down to the next one. Because I love writing fiction. Getting my first novel published at the age of 62 was so completely staggering after so long. I still can’t believe it’s happened.
You have published six non ficton books, what made you decide to deviate and write fiction?
I always hoped that I would get a novel published, but as I say above, despite writing for twenty years, it took a horribly long time. So I did the non-fiction as the day job, then moonlighted with the fiction.
Like the character Jeanie, having your husband leave is the worst thing for any wife to have to go through or imagine, so how difficult was it to write about when you are married with three children?
In fact, George only stops having sex with Jeanie in the book, he doesn’t actually leave the marriage. Not a lot better, I imagine, and perhaps just as complicated as upfront infidelity. I have had a fairly up and down marriage, and I know what it is like to experience the intense pain of marital upset. We have been together for 40 years now, and we have sorted a lot of stuff out, but it’s probably the hardest thing to do, keep a marriage on track – and enjoy it - over a long period. And sometimes you just can’t.
Did your career as a marriage counsellor have an bearing on this novel as it centres around relationship dissolution?
Yes, very much so. I am totally fascinated by relationships, and the emotional dynamic between a couple. All my writing centres around the way people deal with all relationships – parents, children, spouses, friends, colleagues - and this interest I think prefigures the marriage guidance work. It’s just always been important to me.
How does working as a journalist differ from fiction writing?
Most of my non-fiction was around health issues, and it’s absolutely vital that the facts are right.
Writing fiction is bliss. You don’t have to get the facts right, you just make it up as you go along. It took me a while to get used to the difference.
You have another book out in September, called Tangled Lives, so what can you tell us about your second novel?
Tangles Lives is a story about a woman who gives her baby up for adoption in the 60s, aged 18. He comes back into her life – and her family’s – 35 years later. The book is about how they all cope with this unexpected turn of events, especially as the children she had later don’t know about their half brother.
Again, it’s about relationships, particularly mothering. I had a brilliant mother, but mothering is a fantastically hard thing to get right. How do you love a son you haven’t seen since he was ten days old? Do you love him as you love your other children, whom you’ve brought up, lived with day in day out? They are all just as much your children. And how do the other children feel about this man, turning up suddenly, claiming their mother as his own? It’s loosely based on the story of a friend of mine, which has moved me and troubled me since she told me, decades ago. It was different times back then, but no one should be pressurized into giving their baby away.
What is in store next for your fans after Tangled Lives?
I’m right in the middle of writing it now! It’s about a nurse whose long term boyfriend, a mountaineer, suddenly walked out on her after eight years together – no message, no phone call, nothing, just disappeared - sending her into a serious reactive depression. Then he comes back into her life three years later, claiming undying love. She is now forty-one, she still loves him, but can she trust him?
It’s about how love survives injury and hurt. Does the heroine still love the man, or the fantasy she’s held for so long? Can sexual fixation masquerade as real love? Once trust is broken, can you find a way back? Do we love people for who they are, or who we think – and indeed hope – they are? What does ‘forgiveness’ really mean?
Who do you most love to read?
Difficult to pin it down. I read all the time, I’m obsessed with it. I panic if I haven’t got a book on the go. That’s why I love my Kindle. I can download a ton of books and know they will all be lined up for me. I don’t even have to leave my flat. That’s not to say I don’t love reading a proper book, but I travel a lot, and taking a library in my handbag is very appealing.
I love writers who write about the psychological aspect of their characters, not just their actions. Sounds obvious, but to me the emotional narrative is as important as plot.
I spent my teenage years reading writers such as Daphne du Maurier, then when I was in my early twenties, I met a person who was reading The First Circle, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I thought it would be too highbrow for me, but I couldn’t put it down. Then I really began to read seriously, and went on to study English at university in my thirties. But I still love Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek! The ultimate in romantic fiction.
I read mostly fiction, but I do enjoy a good historical biography, such as Claire Tomalin’s book about Samuel Pepys. Or Mao: the unknown story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
I am fascinated by tales about human survival against the odds, such as Primo Levi’s books about his life in the concentration camp. And, on a lighter note, I love to read about people who survive in the wilderness, up a mountain in a blizzard, or in the woods, such as Ray Mears. (not that I would ever put myself up a mountain, in a wood, anywhere scary, with nothing to make a fire with but two sticks. But I’d sort of like to know how I might should the need arise!)
Otherwise, I love the usual suspects: George Eliot, Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Henry Fielding, Flaubert, Rousseau, Zola, all the Russian 19 century writers. More recently, Ford Maddox Ford, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Marilynne Robinson (genius!), Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Philip Roth… the list goes on.
Which authors have inspired your fictional flair?
I don’t write anything like any of my heroes or heroines of fiction, sadly. I would like to have written, for instance, Fortune’s Rocks, by Anita Shreve. I love her work. She writes with such honesty and passion. Or Ann Tyler. Her characters are both strange and very ordinary, yet so compelling.
Click here to buy Thursdays in the Park
Female First Lucy Walton