Tanya van Hasselt
In All Desires Known Nell Garwood knows she is to blame when thirteen-year-old Rachel falls ill with depression. Isn't it always the mother's fault?
Three men in Nell's life think differently: Alastair, her charmingly indulgent husband; Martin, the public school chaplain whose faith is blighted by forbidden desires; and Lewis, the celebrated child psychiatrist with an unquiet conscience.
Then there is Juliet, Nell's best friend, who has always been on her side. Or has she?
As epiphany and tragedy collide one hot July night, Nell has to face the truth about the people she most trusted - and herself.
Tell us about the character of Nell Garwood.
Nell Garwood: 'ingenuous and fatally warm-hearted; a disastrous combination, Clement considered, and likely to land her - or worse still the school - in a whole load of trouble.' For once the nincompoop academic headmaster of Wharton public school has hit the nail on the head.
How much of your own personal experience has helped you to write this book?
I've so far been spared the scourge of mental illness but have witnessed among friends and family the appalling suffering and sometimes tragic repercussions - while being inspired by the courage and goodness of some of the doctors and the people they are caring for. Yet the inadequacy of mental health provision, especially for children and teenagers, is a national disgrace. We need to talk about it more...
How did your knowledge of public schools contribute towards the story?
Memories of the past come into the story, such as a thirteen-year-old boy's description of what went on in the dormitories... Of course public schools are quite different now. Human desires though remain unchanged...
This book is very topical at the moment – did you have this in mind when you wrote it?
This is a story that asks questions: about mental illness and suicide, about the success and failure of psychiatry, about being gay in the Church of England, about faithfulness in marriage, about why God apparently persists in hiding behind his Cloud of Unknowing. But just as 'finality always made Lewis uneasy' - the novel doesn't prescribe the answers. It's topical yes, but isn't designed to jump on some media bandwagon. Only to look at some of the things that bother the human mind, and when writing, I found myself remembering a remark of Alan Bennett's which went something like this, 'Doing the Right Thing may not always be the right thing to do'. A competition judge once compared my writing to Alan Bennett's; he's always been one of my heroes.
What do you prefer – writing a novel or writing a short story?
Writing a novel is much more satisfying to me - there's more scope for developing the idea of all the characters being unreliable narrators, so that the truth about people - or something approaching the truth because when was life ever tidy enough to be boxed up - is something that has to be worked out. This makes everything much more interesting. But both All Desires Known and my next novel Those Angel Faces Smile had their origins in short stories which won prizes so that was a good place to begin...
How did it feel to win the Barbara Pym centenary competition as Tanya Aydon?
It was just wonderful winning joint first prize in the Barbara Pym centenary competition - I always have a Barbara Pym novel among the pile on the bedside table! - and the best bit was meeting all the delightfully friendly and fun members of the Barbara Pym Society and my fellow writers. All six short-listed stories can be read on the Barbara Pym Society website.
What is next for you?
What's next? Those Angel Faces Smile, published later this year, picks up the story of the gay teenager in All Desires Known, but is primarily about the retribution that may come from hot-housing children and the inexorable destruction of a marriage following the death of a child. But as in All Desires Known there is comedy too, and a frumpy heroine who surprisingly wins through...