I'm not a twin This is the thing I get asked most often by people who have read Beside Myself. I like to think it means that the twins in the book feel believable. But the truth is, although I have been friends with several sets of twins over my life, I made it all up.
Ann Morgan
I love reading international stories My first book was a non-fiction book called Reading the World, which came out of a project I did to read and blog about a book from every country in the world in a year at ayearofreadingtheworld.com. Since then, I've been a big fan of translated literature. It has revolutionised my writing.
I don't have a mental illness (at least not officially) This is the second most popular question from Beside Myself readers because so much of the book takes place in the mind of Smudge, who is told she has bipolar disorder. However, I think mental illness is more complicated than many people assume and probably most of us have had times in our lives when we might have been diagnosed with something if we'd gone to a doctor. Instead of a sharp divide between sanity and insanity, I see mental health as more of a sliding scale. I wanted to take readers inside the mind of someone at the extreme end of that scale to see what the world looked like through her eyes.
I'm a fan of hot chocolate If I ever come to speak at your book group or just pop round your house for any reason at all, pressing a cup of Green and Blacks (or similar) into my hands is a tried and tested way to make me happy.
For me, stories start with 'what if…?' What if I tried to read a book from every country in the world in a year? What if a pair of twins swapped identities and then one of them refused to swap back? I'm in the early stages of working on my next book and my head is full of what ifs right now.
I love singing When I first started trying to write, singing was one of the main ways I paid my rent (it wasn't a very sustainable business model). These days, it's more of a social thing for me and a great way to break up the solitude that writing requires.
I get annoyed by toilet cubicles that don't have hooks This is a pet peeve of mine, along with people who stop walking at the top of escalators. I can't explain it, but these things have a huge amount of power to make my day better or worse.
I have very poor visual sense This made writing a novel with an artist for a central character rather challenging. I spent a long time in galleries staring at pictures and trying to train myself to see as a painter might.
I have a weakness for documentaries and reality TV Fly-on-the-wall things fascinate me. I admire the way filmmakers shape narratives out of bringing strangers together in challenging situations. You really get to see how people work and to realise that human beings are infinitely interesting - all of us contain more stories than anyone could ever tell.
It took me eight years to get an agent So don't give up if you want to write too!
