Susan Lewis
More festival fun
Wow! I’ve just attended my THIRD virtual book festival of lockdown! Feels like a real indulgence. This one was another trip to MyVLF, a free global virtual literary festival, connecting readers with authors.
This time the focus was on historical fiction and included a stellar cast of well known names – Kate Mosse, Victoria Hyslop, Alison Weir, Elizabeth Buchan, Bernard Cornwell. Of course, they were speaking from their own homes, and I was amused to see them in relaxed lockdown mode (without benefit of hairdressers, makeup artists, camera men) side by side on the same screen with their professional promotional photos. But grooming aside, they were every inch the polished, fluent and accomplished professionals in their performance: responding to interview questions, sharing their favourite time periods, their experiences researching their topics or drafting their stories. And a day of listening to them positively enthused me, the old brain whirring into writing mode again.
They also inspired me to dig out a hitherto unread historical novel from my shelves: Philippa Gregory‘s Three Sisters, Three Queens … another household name. Perhaps the craftsmanship behind it will be even more apparent to me now that I’ve just heard about the painstaking work that predates writing such a book, the importance of a firm scaffolding of facts through which characters can weave and wander. Certainly I shall appreciate all over again the way the author must immerse herself in the dates and customs and places and mores of the time, even though most of the research never gets into the book. That’s a lesson I learned early on in my own career as a novelist: the reader mustn’t be aware of the knowledge you the author have acquired, but of course, hearing these marvellous writers talk about their obsessions, what they’ve learned, how much they know, serves only to make admiration of the finished product the more sincere.
Three Sisters, Three Queens will make a change from being back in my own specialist field of medical ethics, too. Three years ago exactly I wrote a post on this blog which looked at the subject of children in trouble through the novels of Susan Lewis. By some weird coincidence this very week a neighbour left the sequel to Stolen, the third book I mentioned back then, on the shelves at the end of our drive. Well, I had to read it, didn’t I? At the end of Stolen, Charlotte Goodman had fled to New Zealand from the UK with a little girl she had stolen from abusive parents. You said Forever picks up the story five years later. By this time Charlotte and lawyer husband Anthony have two other children biologically their own. Chloe, now legally adopted by Charlotte but not Anthony, is causing mayhem both at home and at school. When she threatens the life of the younger children, Charlotte knows drastic action is needed. But what? How can she choose between her children, the little people she loves more than life? She promised Chloe a forever-home; but can she keep that promise?
Lockdown is certainly affording me plenty of new experiences. I’ve even cut my own hair – very very short, slicing into three fingers at the same time! And painted the outside of our windows and doors, and renovated and wallpapered a walk-in-larder. Much ladder-climbing involved. It might just be a relief to get back to sitting safely at my desk writing!
Behind Closed Doors
‘Behind closed doors’ … a familiar slogan, isn’t it? Instantly conjures up the horrors of domestic violence, abuse, and pathological relationships. And too often it’s women who are caught behind those doors, unable or unwilling to seek help, putting on a brave front for the outside world. So it seems like a fitting subject for a week that began with International Women’s Day on March 8th. The flags have already been raised: the Duchess of Cornwall calling for the topic of domestic violence and coercive control to be openly discussed, warning of the corrosive effect of silence; then the Duchess of Sussex using her last solo public platform before she retires from royal life to urge people to respect and value women. So let’s capitalise on that foundation.
Put the same term – ‘behind closed doors – into an Amazon book search, and instantly six titles of novels come up. Hmmm. Odd. My first check when I create a new title for my own books is to make sure it’s unique. But maybe ‘behind closed doors’ is irresistible. It’s so instantly evocative, speaking so powerfully, it can bear repetition without losing impact.
Hey ho. I’ve been sucked in, anyway. I already have two of those six ‘behind closed doors’ books on my shelves. The first one chosen because I’ve enjoyed Susan Lewis‘ writing before, and the second because I was – and still am – devouring anything claiming to be a psychological thriller.
Behind Closed Doors by Susan Lewis isn’t, I have to confess, as compelling as others she’s written. Fourteen-year-old Sophie Monroe has vanished along with her computer, mobile phone and a bag of clothes. The Detective Sergeant who’s investigating the disappearance is painfully reminded of a tragedy that tore her own family apart twenty years ago: her teenage sister vanished and has never been found. She struggles to separate the two stories and maintain perspective and judgement, as a tale of jealousy and fear and secrecy unravels. This one, to my mind, is overly generous with adjectives in places; all the characters seem to have secrets or tragedy in their past; and an improbable number of them have lost children or young parents. So I don’t plan to dwell on that one in this post.
Behind Closed Doors by B A Paris on the other hand, promised a lot. A debut novel billed as ‘makes your blood run cold … fast and frantic …heart-pounding … utterly compelling …’ it fits the basic requirements for a psychological thriller which I can analyse without previous baggage.
‘Grace Angel, wife of brilliant lawyer Jack Angel, is a perfect example of a woman who has it all – the perfect house, the perfect husband, the perfect life.’ So why are there steel shutters on their windows, high walls round their perfect garden, and one window barred? Yep, we’re wary already, aren’t we?
In his professional life, handsome, debonair Jack is the champion of battered wives. Grace has given up her career to be a stay-at-home wife so he doesn’t have to come home to an empty house or an exhausted partner. Losing is not a word in his vocabulary. And ‘everything he does and everything he says is calculated down to the last full stop. He prides himself on uttering only the truth … He is so clever, so very clever.’
Enter new neighbours, Esther and Rufus. Esther is a woman who’s suspicious of perfection. What is it with this completely joined-at-the-hip couple? Why doesn’t Grace have a mobile phone, or have her own email address, or go out to lunch without him, or honour arrangements …?
What really is going on does indeed make the blood run cold. Here is a dark mind, an amoral compass, depravity wrapped up in immaculate manners and a charming devotion. As the past and present inch closer together we are rivetted to the page, willing good to triumph over evil, dreading the psychopath out-manoeuvring the victim. The ending is very cleverly crafted and maintains the suspense to the very last page. Scary stuff but an excellent example of tense and fast-moving plotting.
But behind the fiction, lies the real-life problem. Let’s not forget hidden women everywhere for whom oppression or abuse or injustice in any form is their lived experience.
Nothing new under the sun
Big sigh!
Publishing anything – a letter/article in a newspaper, a research paper, a novel – is always subject to time. Will someone else pip me to the post? Will I appear to be a plagiarist rather than an original thinker? Two incidents have stirred that old anxiety for me recently.
It’s a while since I read a novel which explores an ethical issue in my own sphere of interest, so I was intrigued by Susan Lewis’ 2017 book, Hiding in Plain Sight, especially when I kept reading and found her story overlaps with no less than three of my own novels.
* One of her principal characters is Penny Lawrence who led a disturbed childhood before running away aged 14. In Over my Dead Body (2013), I tried to get inside the mind of a child who struggles to relate to her family, and a mother who agonises over her own response to her child.
* Penny Lawrence gets involved in the world of selling babies to infertile couples. I asked a lot of what-if questions about surrogate pregnancy in Double Trouble (2005).
* When Penny Lawrence meets up with her mother and sister almost thirty years later, all three are forced to face the fractures in their family lives foursquare. In my current novel, Killing me Gently, I’m delving into the effect parents’ and children’s behaviour and emotions can have on family cohesion and integrity.
And curiously one of the titles I considered for my book was Killing in Plain Sight.
But there the similarities end. Susan Lewis’ take on these issues, her writing style, her whole approach, are completely different from mine. Character and plot tend to be far darker, the psyche more tortured, the secret lives more sinister. She’s quick to reassure us that her books are not intended to leave us feeling frightened or miserable but they do dabble in disturbing and sensitive subjects – in this case family tragedy and mental illness. I too deal with sensitive and troubling issues, I have even been known to end on a sad note, but I do aim to have redeeming features in my characters, and to leave lots of breathing space for the reader to form his/her own opinion on the rights and wrongs of what happens.
There’s ample room for both of us to be writing on these issues, I think.
So hopefully this same maxim will apply in the case of the new Sunday evening drama, The Cry, which started this week on BBC1. I couldn’t believe my eyes when the trailers started just after I finished my latest edit of Killing me Gently. Difficult to predict the degree of overlap at the moment but there are uncanny similarities.
I’ve never seen so many flash-backs and flash-forwards before, but we know this is about a young mum (played by Jenna Coleman aka Queen Victoria!) struggling with a fractious baby who vanishes mysteriously, and now the mum’s on trial for something baby-related. The series will be finished before my book comes out, so if push comes to shove I can always tweak my own plot if necessary, but of course, I devoutly hope it won’t be. Months, if not years, of blood, sweat and tears have gone into creating and realising this psychological thriller, getting it balanced, making the point.
Children in trouble
Eh dear, why did I decide to write about pathological parenting? It’s causing me a fair few troubled nights, I can tell you. I’m currently trying to get inside the skin of children … parents … professionals … involved in these disturbing situations. And boy, is it harrowing!i There’s a heavy cloud hanging over me just reading about these traumatic experiences.
With all this in mind I was instantly drawn to three novels by Susan Lewis which I discovered in a charity shop quite by chance on my way to a hospital appointment. I zipped through the first two chapters while I waited to be called.
I’ve always marvelled at the ability of social workers to bear the burden of troubled families where parents may not be the best people to look after their offspring. Deciding when that line is crossed, taking them away … dealing with criticism whichever way they go, threats, physical harm … I’m not made of that kind of courage and stamina, that’s for sure. 
So it was profoundly disturbing to walk alongside overworked and under-appreciated Alex Lake as she lurches from problem family to problem family in No Child of Mine.
Alex is a social worker, passionate about protecting children from those who mean them harm. In No Child of Mine, there’s a veritable A-Z of toxic situations: abandonment, alcoholism, broken relationships, desertion, drug addiction, Fabricated or Induced Illness by Carers, mental illness, murder, paedophilia, physical abuse, sexual violation …! Yoiks! How do social workers ever manage to switch off? How do they preserve professional barriers? If they don’t care, are they in the right job? If they do care, what price do they pay for emotional connection? How do they cope with being principal scapegoats for the press and public? If, on top of that, they carry the additional burden of an horrific history of their own, as Alex does, what then?
Challenging tales to say the least. Taut, sinister, intense. I wanted to wrap Alex herself up in a comfort blanket and smuggle her away to a safe place, never mind the children! Small wonder that Susan Lewis found this one of the hardest stories to tell (… caution there for me!). And we’re left wondering if the fragile solution at the end can possibly hold. Which is why the author chose to continue the story in a sequel: Don’t Let Me Go. 
Since both books are a door-stopping 580+ pages long, I guess it’s lucky for us she split the story into two parts!
By now Alex has reinvented herself as Charlotte Nicholls and moved to the other side of the world. Life in New Zealand in a new family helps to heal deep wounds, but then suddenly, dramatically, her entire world is blown apart. Do pure motives ever excuse illegal actions? Should a vulnerable child become a victim all over again just to ensure the paperwork is all shipshape? What price is too high in the search for justice? I was on tenterhooks to find out the fate of a terrified and traumatised four-year-old. How would she react to being ripped from the heart of a family who loved her so deeply? And handed to a series of strangers, strangers who held none of the keys to the doors that protected her from her own private hell? And how would the law deal with a professional who had knowingly flouted its diktats? I’m relieved that we got to hear how the situation was resolved, although it’s sobering to realise that neither Chloe/Ottilie nor Charlotte/Alex can ever erase the traumas of their early lives.
I might well quibble about some dubious elements of this story – there are issues with time frames and professional boundaries – but such is the compelling nature of the storyline that I found myself well able to suspend disbelief in order to focus on the underlying messages. And as a result I have even more respect for the brave souls who spend their lives working for the good of these vulnerable children, too often unseen and unsung – like our emergency services dealing with this terrible spate of atrocities and tragedies. And for authors like Susan Lewis who help us to understand in our hearts as well as our brains.
NB. The third book, Stolen, didn’t resonate in the same way and I found the story line too far fetched to be plausible. But since the subject matter is less relevant to my own character development or research, nothing lost there.
Critical reading
A couple of months ago someone gave me a book with the comment: ‘I think this is your kind of thing.’
Well, I can see her point.
The said novel deals with or skirts around an impressive number of meaty issues: inherited diseases, fatal illness, teenage pregnancy, homosexuality, assisted death, parental loss and grief, infertility, infanticide, child abduction, cot death … My kind of subjects.
It has the strap line: It’s every mother’s worst nightmare … My kind of hook.
The blurb on the back cover lets me know that it’s about tragedy striking a young mother, it’s a tear-jerker, and involves secrets and betrayal … My kind of storyline. In fact it’s about a baby with a rare recessive gene disorder and all that that implies: an angle I even used in one of my own novels, Paternity, some ten years ago. So, yes indeed, it does sound like my kind of reading.
What then was this book? The Choice by Susan Lewis.
I’ve been pegging away fairly relentlessly at my own writing and marketing and publicity tasks (yawn yawn) so I decided to take a break and a little light relief on Monday and Tuesday this week. The Choice was top of my tbr pile.
It kept me turning the pages certainly, I wanted to know how things panned out for Nikki and Spence and their baby, what dark secret Nikki’s parents were harbouring. But I was itching to edit it! I guess, constantly revising my own writing has made me ultra-critical and nitpicky. Throughout to book, my own editor’s advice was ringing in my ears: lose another third; cut out all the bits you’re especially proud of; is that character fully earning her keep?; what’s that secondary story line contributing? make sure all your facts tally … Cut, cut, cut. Edit, edit, edit. She would have had me reduce that 532 pages to 252! But in truth Susan Lewis has published 30 books and established a resounding reputation, She needs no endorsement from me!
The book served my purpose, however. Thanks to a break away reading someone else’s work, I can return to my own writing with renewed enthusiasm.
Left Neglected
Isn’t it weird how things you read so often resonate with real life? They seem to jump off the pages. Some of it’s serendipity, some of it presumably just because we’re preoccupied at some level with a particular facet of life, making us super-sensitive to any mention of it anywhere it crops up.
That’s how it was with Lisa Genova‘s Left Neglected for me. (Clever title, by the way.) After a set back with my own ongoing health problems this past week, my upbeat facade slipped a bit; despondency crept round the edges of my guard. Sigh. Would I ever get back to full capacity and pick up the strands of my previous working life?
OK, distraction required urgently. Tidy desk … light a scented candle … reach for the next book on my tbr pile.
And there it was: Left Neglected.
The protagonist Sarah, a young mum of three, brain damaged in a car accident, is struggling with a crisis of confidence. Will she ever get back into her high powered, multi-tasking, crowded, demanding life again? And boy, this woman has far, far bigger mountains to climb than I; much, much further to fall. Already my own task assumes less daunting dimensions.
But so much of what Sarah experiences resonates with me. There’s …
‘the everyday, no-big-deal but assured voice’ she and I reserve for visitors …
the resentment we feel towards those who would protect us from work-related tasks lest they stress us out: ‘Focus on you, don’t worry about work’ …
awareness of our own powerlessness: ‘The therapy might work and it might not. I can work as hard as I’ve always worked at everything I’ve ever done, and it might not be any more effective that just lying here and praying’.
Then there’s the lurking sense of day-to-day failure: ‘This is not the confident image of health and competency I was hoping to project’ …
not to mention the unspoken dread for the future: ‘What if I don’t recover 100 percent?’ …
in spite of the oft-repeated rallying cry: ‘I’m a fighter, I can do this.’
Lisa Genova is a neuroscientist by background which probably accounts for her choice of topics and the authenticity and insightful awareness of her writing. I loved her first book about dementia, Still Alice (now a major film). This time she has totally captured the real feelings of someone facing the ongoing issues of serious debilitating illness. The bonus is that her writing is also a delight to my soul. Listen to the way she introduces Sarah’s little girl Lucy who’s 5:
‘Lucy comes out of her bedroom dressed like a lunatic.
“How do you like my fashion, Mom?”
She’s wearing a pink and white polka-dot vest layered over an orange long-sleeve shirt, velvet leopard print leggings under a sheer pink ballerina tutu, Ugg boots, and six clips secured randomly in her hair, all different colors.
“You look fabulous, honey.”‘
Or the baby, Linus’ habit of crying relentlessly till a parent goes to him:
‘Plan aborted. Baby wins. Score: Harvard MBA-trained parents, both highly skilled in negotiation and leadership: 0. Nine-month-old child with no formal education or experience on the planet: too many times for my weary brain to count.’
If you’d told me Genova would take over 75 pages to even get to the accident I’d have gulped. Will there be enough hooks to keep me engrossed? No danger. She builds up a powerful picture of a beleaguered super-mom in her thirties juggling many competing demands. A nagging list is playing in Sarah’s head as she drives:
‘You need to call Harvard before noon, you need to start year-end performance reviews, you need to finalize the B-school training program for science associates, you need to call the landscaper; you need to email the London office, you need to return the overdue library books, you need to return the pants that don’t fit Charlie to the Gap, you need to pick up formula for Linus, you need to pick up the dry cleaning, you need to pick up the dinner; you need to make a dentist appointment for Lucy about her tooth, you need to make a dermatological appointment for you about that mole, you need to go to the bank, you need to pay the bills, don’t forget to call Harvard before noon, email the London office …’
By the time we get to page 75 we’re not surprised that she’s searching for her phone while she drives from A to B and momentarily takes her eye off the road. We might even secretly sympathise. How else will she stay on top?
And after all that happens to her, perhaps we aren’t surprised either to find that incapacity, space and time give her a different sense of priorities:
‘For the first time in almost a decade, I stop barreling a thousand miles an hour down that road. Everything stopped. And although much of the stillness of the past four months has been a painful and terrifying experience, it has given me a chance to lift my head up and have a look around … Maybe success can be something else, and maybe there’s another way to get there. Maybe there’s a different road for me with a more reasonable speed limit.’
Ahhh. Speed limits. I too have been evaluating mine. Must I also accept that ‘life can be fully lived with less’?
In her acknowledgements Lisa Genova thanks all the people actually coping with Left Neglect who shared their experiences with her, giving her ‘the real and human insight into the condition that simply can’t be found in textbooks’. And this human warmth is what makes the novel so much more than the anatomy of an illness.
So I salute you, Lisa Genova. And I thank you for putting my own problems into a healthier perspective.
The next novel in my pile, Never Say Goodbye by Susan Lewis, takes me deep into the lives of women with incurable cancer … Ahhhhh. By now I’m deeply ashamed of ever having felt a twinge of self-pity.
I’ve since patrolled the Infirmary corridors in a torn and skimpy hospital gown (guaranteed to rob you of any sense of power or control you might be clinging to!) waiting for a medical verdict. My turn comes. I learn that a doctrine of doctors with yards of erudite letters after their names and aeons of experience with hearts of all descriptions, have put their mighty heads together to devise a plan to set me back on the road to recovery. It will take some months but I may not … may not … after all have to give up what I love doing. Thank you thank you thank you. The NHS at its amazing best. I may be dizzy and nauseated and fuzzy-headed and more tired than I’ve even been in my life, but I’m back on top of the world!