When I first watched the film Slumdog Millionaire, I related very strongly to Dev Patel’s character, Jamal, who’s able to answer all the questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? because of the wealth of random facts he has accumulated in his life. Over the years, I too seem to have accumulated vast resources of useless knowledge, which have been extremely useful for answering the questions on Pointless, but weren’t quite so helpful when it came to forging a career for myself. In fact, you could say that my career path was more of a series of meandering zig-zags than the clearly signposted superhighways that most other people seemed to me to be on… Until, that is, I found the perfect outlet for all that seemingly useless knowledge: I became a writer.
The Dressmaker's Gift
My CV begins with a degree in Geography and segues, not entirely unreasonably, into becoming an IT systems engineer. It then mentions a sideways step into public relations and marketing. Next comes another zig (or, perhaps, zag) into the wine industry in France, working as a négociant selling wine to English suppliers. I’ve also, at various points in my life, worked as a caterer, (cook, waitress, bottle-washer), a yoga teacher and a matron in a boarding school. So when one of my sons once asked me what my degree in Geography had prepared me for, I was able to give him a very full reply. Random doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But then, when I began to write, suddenly it all made sense.
In my novels, I have written about wine-making (drawing from the hours spent educating myself about wine when I worked a harvest in a French chateau, doing everything from hand-harvesting grapes to shovelling out vats of skins once the wine had fermented); I‘ve taken inspiration from my experiences of bee-keeping and gardening; I‘ve woven in some of the technicalities of building projects and stonemasonry, based on the years spent renovating a rambling farmhouse. Yoga gets a mention, as does the hospitality industry and cooking. And my experience of being a mother to my two sons, as well as a surrogate mother to 30 children in a boarding house, has been a useful touchstone when writing younger characters into my novels.
Of course, there are many aspects of my books that have needed more in-depth research: art, sailing, the Second World War and the couture industry in Paris to name but a few. And these have inspired me to visit new places and to try out new experiences so that I can attempt to depict them accurately. I recently found myself on a boat in the middle of a remote Scottish sea loch watching naval ships on military manoeuvres. The skipper of the boat apologised for the appalling weather as I attempted to make notes in my increasingly soggy notebook in the pouring rain on the pitching deck. It was a brilliant day!
By way of contrast, last year I spent time in Paris while I was researching The Dressmaker’s Gift, staying in a garret room just off the Boulevard Saint Germain. While the other tourists were snapping pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysees, I was pottering happily on the quayside along the Seine, photographing cobblestones and a willow tree.
Because, as a writer, it’s those little details that are important, collected along the way on the seemingly random zig-zags that make up life’s path. And, just like Jamal, the randomness only makes sense when we finally get around to telling our stories.
The Dressmaker’s Gift by Fiona Valpy is published on 1st October by Lake Union (£8.99 paperback original)