Mandasue Heller
Respect is the story of a young girl who is desperate not to fall into the same trap as her mother: having babies to no-good men, living on benefits, and generally not giving a stuff about anything but herself, drugs and drink. Early on, she’s landed with the responsibility of looking after her younger brother, and her life is turned upside down as all her efforts have to go into keeping him out of trouble - and them both out of the clutches of Social Services.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO WRITE THE BOOK FROM A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD’S PERSPECTIVE?
It wasn’t a conscious decision – but, then, it never is when I start a book; I just create a scenario and go with it. This time, it just happened to be a fifteen year old at the centre.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT MANCHESTER THAT IS THE PERFECT SETTING FOR YOUR BOOKS?
The place has played such a massive part in my adult life, I feel as though it is embedded in my heart. And the voices of my characters are the same voices I hear all around me, so it’s natural to hear them in my head while I’m writing.
WHAT WERE YOUR THOUGHTS ON MANCHESTER WHEN YOU FIRST MOVED THERE?
I was horrified! My parents split when I was quite young, and my mum refused to claim benefits so we had a pretty rough time of it. But it was nothing compared to the deprivation I encountered in Manchester. I’d never even set foot in a block of flats before I moved there, so I was truly scared to find myself in the middle of what felt like a war-torn ghetto. But I quickly fell in love with the life-style. A friend recently described life in the Hulme Crescents as being like ‘Glastonbury all year round’, and that is such a perfect description. We were all squatting, and none of us had money, but there was a real sense of community that I’d never experienced before – or since. There were so many artistic people there, too, and summers were one big long festival: our kids playing in safety on the grass, while us musicians set up our equipment outside the pub in the centre of the estate and gigged from morning till night.
That was the up-side; the down-side was dark, dark times of drugs and crime. At one point, everyone I knew was hooked on Heroin, and random acts of violence were happening every day. I have always said they were the best and the very worst times of my life, but I would do it all again in a heartbeat.
HOW MUCH IS SONG-WRITING AND FICTION-WRITING INTERCHANGEABLE?
It’s a very different kind of writing. I used to spend hours writing angsty poems as a child, which I later turned into song-lyrics. It’s similar to fiction in that you’re telling a story with a start, middle, and end; but a song is delivered as a statement of emotion about a particular issue from one person’s point of view, whereas a book deals with the emotions, responses and actions of a multitude of characters.
CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR FIRST NOVEL, THE FRONT?
I call that one my ‘blokey one’, as its main characters are male. Set in the Crescents, it concerns a group of old school friends who are drawn back together years later by the lure of easy money. They are all in their 30’s, but while two of them have grown up, married and had children, the other two are a pair of idiots whose lives revolve around drugs and women. Things quickly go wrong, but they don’t realise who they are messing with - or how much trouble they’re in - until way too late. And then it’s not just them in danger, but also everyone they love.
AT WHAT POINT DID YOU REALISE THAT YOU WERE LIVING IN AN INSPIRATIONAL PLACE FOR WRITING?
The Crescents were the centre of my universe for the 10 years I spent there, and long after they were demolished I could still see them clearly in my minds-eye - I still can, some twenty-odd years later. Despite the bad times, I mourned the loss of my life there, but it never occurred to me to write about it until many years later. I was singing in a band when I fell ill and was forced to stop. Bedridden for several months, I got my hands on a word-processing typewriter and decided to write about an incident when I had been attacked in my flat, by a man who broke in and hit me over the head with a claw hammer. It was too personal to let anybody else read, but I was still itching to write about the Crescents and the wild and wonderful people I had met there. My first attempt was about a woman I’d known called Queenie, who was absolutely barking mad. Unfortunately, I had attempted to write it from her point of view, but I quickly realised that it’s hard to write from the perspective of a mad person if you’re not actually mad yourself. I also didn’t like writing in the first-person, as I found it too restrictive. So I started again, with a fictitious character instead of a real one, and took it from there.
WHAT IS NEXT FOR YOU?
I’m currently working on my 14th book, Talk To Me, which is due for release in Jan, 2015. Once that’s finished, I have my next album of songs waiting to be written and recorded; and I also have several other projects in the pipe-line, so it looks like I’ll be busy for some time to come!