Ten Things I Want My Readers To Know About Me By Sally Emerson

When I was staying in Buenos Aires sewage began to rise up in the apartment and as I tried to explain this, in bad Spanish, to a plumber I realised I was wildly happy. I love a good catastrophe.

I don’t really like being the centre of attention so novels are perfect because the heroine or anti-heroine hold the spotlight. I can be respectable, well, quite, while in my secret life a character like Tessa from Fire Child can seduce and destroy them with her eerie and comic detachment. Tessa and her male counterpart Martin, specialise in catastrophes. I feel like a mafia boss, sending these blazing characters out to do my bidding. I love it.

My six novels are all about love, but not love as most people think of it, are being reissued this year in a brilliant new series, Rediscovered Classics from Quartet. Fire Child is the lead title about a girl whose smile can make any man fall in love with her and re-reading it shocked me. In my head, I’d created a past that was reasonably tame - how then could I describe love like that? And the sex? Did I actually do all those things?

When I was just thirteen I won a competition for listing the qualities that make a ‘Sunsilk Supergirl’ and won £1000. I bought a typewriter and decided the money would help me become a writer. It did.

My favourite foods are oranges and soft boiled eggs, with toast. Perfect. Little beats the pleasure of pushing your fingers into the rind of an orange and stripping it off and finding those segments. Or cutting off the top of an egg and discovering the yellow sun inside.

I write at night and can’t write anything in the morning. I can’t see the point of mornings and never want to go to bed.

I think there are too few words for love. Everyone means something different by love and that’s why there’s mayhem in so many people’s romantic lives (and in my novels). Second Sight is about the limitations of adolescent, dreamy romantic love, Fire Child is about passion so intense it about time and death, good and evil, all at once. Heat explores destructive, consuming, possessive love. Separation is about the brutal power of the love of a mother for her child. As I love a catastrophe, there’s always a trap door waiting, and the characters fall headlong out of their secure existences. The novels have been filed under thrillers, even under horror in the case of Fire Child (my favourite novel), but what they are is love stories which have strayed into other territories, where the characters are strangers in their own worlds because of the strength of their new emotions.

From an early age, I have been unduly fascinated by property in all its forms. I realised I had to contain myself when I found myself following an auction online for the sale of a dilapidated, but beautiful house surrounded by factories, in Detroit. I knew all the room dimensions. This was madness. But the madness pays off sometimes. All my novels are inspired by houses, as if the characters are summoned up out of the houses. I like novels with houses at their centre, like The Great Gatsby.

I write on travel for The Sunday Times. I become a heroine then. I am told what to do by the travel editor just as I tell the characters in my novels what to do. Dutifully, I jump off a mountain paragliding, I endanger my life cycling round Vietnam (where road laws are minimal), I sleep in a hut full of bats or a jungle hut where cockroaches stalk the floor. The worst experience of all was with the bats in Guyana, South America. I put my head under the bedclothes and willed myself to sleep thinking, well they say there are no vampire bats but HOW CAN THEY BE SO SURE?’

I live in London, do Pilates once a week and am wildly happy most of the time. I get to revisit different stages of my life through my novels and I live it all again, except of course all those unsuitable sex scenes. Well, those too.