Walk into any room full of people and there will be a thousand secrets. They are invisible, perhaps never to be known, guessed at or disclosed. We long for intimacy, and yet we are all aware of how much is hidden. Our emotional lives are characterised by the desire to find someone whom we can fully know and by whom we can be fully known and accepted. But secrets will always remain, between the closest couples, between parent and child, between best friends. We remain mysterious to one another, and sometimes, it has to be said, we are actively deceiving one another.
Helen Dunmore
One remark that intrigues me is 'I can read her/him like a book'. It seems a desperate boast, for who can truly claim to have uncovered all the secrets, both great and small, which make up a life? The only thing which can be read like a book is a book itself. This, I believe, is why we find fiction so fascinating, and turn to it in order to understand ourselves and others.
Characters in a novel open themselves to the reader in a way which no living human being would dare to do. The reader knows what they are like when they are alone, unwatched, with no defences or pretences. At the start of my novel Exposure, each of the three main characters has a brief scene in which they are quite alone. Lily Callington is digging her vegetable bed at the bottom of her city garden. Nothing could seem more normal and secure, but when she hears a train whistle, Lily's nerves crisp. Instantly, and with terror, her thoughts fly to her children. Something deep in her past, kept hidden, is exposed for a second. Lily, like all the other characters, is not quite what she appears to be. When I was writing Exposure I was deep in a maze of secrets. Some characters keep them; others betray them. Sometimes an entire life is based on a lie. I chose the title Exposure because it has several meanings, and all of them are relevant to the novel. The exposure of a photograph; the exposure of a scandal; the exposure of long-concealed personal secrets, and finally, the exposure which a human being suffers when out in the cold and unprotected.
But exposure can also be a healing force. What is kept hidden for too long can poison relationships from within. I wanted to write about the destructive power of secrets, building up beneath the surface and ready to detonate.
Fiction is about the drama of revelation. By the end of the novel there is no secret which the reader does not know. What has been long concealed is brought into the light. One of the characters in Exposure says: 'It isn't what you know or don't know: it's what you allow yourself to know.' Perhaps the most dangerous secrets of all are those we keep from ourselves.
Credit: Exposure by Helen Dunmore is published on 28 January 2016 by Hutchinson in Hardback and Ebook (£16.99)