The Book of You
The Book of You is the story of Clarissa, a woman who is being stalked. She has good reasons for feeling that she needs strong evidence – and a great deal of it – before the police and legal system can help her. So as well as keeping all of the unwanted gifts this man is showering on her, she records each of her encounters with him in a notebook, addressing her comments to him. I think a lot of people will know what it’s like to be the object of unwelcome attention. Thankfully, it’s not usually as extreme as what Clarissa goes through. But what happens to her can happen to anyone.
This is your first novel, so was writing it anything like you imagined it to be?
Writing The Book of You was an intensely addictive experience. I’d start to make coffee and just sit down to type a few more sentences while the milk heated, but it would boil over almost every time because I’d be drawn into the story and forget about the saucepan. I hope readers will find it as compelling to read as I found it to write.
The book was the subject of a six way auction so can you tell us a bit about this?
My agent sent The Book of You to publishers on a Friday and rightly cautioned me that it could be several weeks before we heard anything. I took his advice and spent the weekend trying extremely hard not to think about the fact that editors might at last be reading it. I remember thinking, Please, just let one of them like it. But by Monday offers were flooding in from UK publishers and from abroad. I was thrilled but a little in shock – I kept waking in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. It was an extraordinary time, with everything happening so quickly and dramatically I could hardly take it in. After years of having novels rejected, I hadn’t anticipated being in that situation.
Please tell us about the character of Clarissa.
She’s 38 and works as a university administrator. She and her boyfriend have just split up after failed fertility treatment. She has become rather solitary. Her passions are sewing and reading. She’s very human, very fallible. She makes mistakes. But I think she’s incredibly brave and even with her flaws she’s entirely beautiful to me – in that fairy tale sense of true beauty being a deep thing that goes beyond physical appearance. She’s forced to be less nice and polite as the novel goes on. She’s forced to fight. And she refuses to be the only one under somebody’s eye – she turns the tables and investigates Rafe, to try to learn something that might help her. I’m enchanted by her and I hope that readers will be too.
With the rise of social networking, your book is very apt for its time- was that something that you wanted to highlight with the book?
Clarissa’s loss of privacy is very disturbing. It’s part of her character to be cautious about revealing much of herself in any public forum. She knows that however careful a person may be, it’s still so easy for information to be leaked in ways that are outside their control. Rafe himself is much more interested in Clarissa’s physical presence than any virtual one, but he is definitely shrewd enough to make sure that if there’s anything to learn about Clarissa by feeding her name through search engines, he will find it and exploit it. Clarissa comes to see that she can play that game too. Despite her fear of the possibility that her personal details could circulate around the world, she’s clever enough to use the Internet to defend herself.
What is the appeal of the psychological thriller genre for you?
I love its intensity, and the way it lets the reader get under the skin of somebody who is in a position of extremity. I tried to write The Book of You in a very immediate way, so that reader is almost in Clarissa’s position and feels her terror and frantic search for ways of defending herself. I wanted to accelerate the action and raise the stakes with every chapter – the psychological thriller really invites you to do that. And it’s a great genre for exploring things that matter, real problems that people are confronted with every day. But in the psychological thriller these things happen in their most full-blown form. Another thing that’s important to me as a novelist is the moral and emotional complexity that the psychological thriller lets you delve into. Readers may not agree with every action Clarissa takes – I hope they will want to ask themselves what they would do in her place.
What is next for you?
I’m excited that The Book of You is finally in the hands of readers here in the UK. It’s going to be appearing in other countries and languages over the next months. All of this seems wonderful to me. And I’m in the early stages of my next novel, which is a very special phase to be in but one in which I hold the secret of what I’m doing very close.