At A Time Like This

The theme of friendship is one to which I keep returning in my fiction. It is something that has sustained me throughout my own life – and I don’t think we can overestimate its importance.

I’m also fascinated by the ‘public’ versus the ‘private’ face of each individual. It seemed to me that the complex personalities of four different women, with their secrets and their prejudices, their loves and their fears, would be rich pickings for any writer of fiction: and so it proved.

Of course, the Georgie and the Claire, the Maggie and the Nora I started out with had flexed their muscles long before I had committed their stories to paper.

I struggled with their claims to be different from what I had intended – each character had her own story to tell and each made sure I listened and recorded her experiences sympathetically.