Readers Place

Susy McPhee answers questions about her book Husband and Lies:

What was the inspiration for Husband and Lies?

My friend Roz was on a dating site, showing me the photograph of someone who’d invited her on a date. We started window-shopping, giving the ads marks out of ten for presentation, wit, etc. and I said to her, ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if you saw someone you knew here? Your boss, say, or your husband, ha ha. After that the idea just wouldn’t go away.

As a writer one of your great talents is being able to seamlessly blend humour and pathos, but who makes you laugh? And cry?

My dog Mishka makes me laugh. She’s such a clown; she keeps me sane. There’s a dog in my next book inspired by Mishka. If we’re talking about people who make me laugh, it would be my kids – especially my youngest daughter Lauren. She doesn’t take life – or herself – too seriously, and can usually raise a smile from me even when I’m in a real strop. (She’s often responsible for the strop, too, so the ability to make me laugh has probably saved her from all manner of dire consequences.) I don’t often cry these days. I was a right cry-baby when I was growing up. There were four of us kids: my twin sisters, then me, then my brother Simon, all vying for our mum’s
attention. The twins were cute and always being photographed, and Simon was the youngest and a boy to boot, so I was lacking in novelty features. I got it into my head that if I snivelled enough, Mum would like me best. She didn’t.

Have you ever been on a dating website?

Apart from that time with Roz, only when I was researching for Husbands and Lies. I’ve never gone on one looking for dates. I met my husband about a hundred years ago at university when he was studying Maths and Computing and I was trying to break into the world of espionage, and we married straight after graduating. I would use a site, though, if I were single and wanted to meet someone special. I think they’re a great way for people to get together.

Which book are you reading at the moment?

I suppose I should say something intellectual so that I sound really intelligent and educated. Truth to tell, I am between books, having just finished a rather boring one – I won’t tell you the title, because it wouldn’t be fair on the poor person who spent all those hours writing it.

Who are your favourite authors?

I really like Marc Levy’s work. He’s hard to categorise, and I like that. Some of his books are quite off-the-wall – he wrote one story about a girl whose ‘ghost’ goes back to haunt the apartment she lived in before a car accident put her in a coma, and then last year he brought out Les enfants de la liberté, which was a pretty grim account of a group of young resistance fighters in France during the German occupation. Amélie Nothomb is brilliant as well – Sulphuric Acid is spine-chillingly good. And I recently read The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, by Maggie O’Farrell, which was terrific.

Which classic have you always meant to read and never got round to it?

Silas Marner. I know the story upside-down and back-tofront, but I’ve never read the book.

What are your top five books of all time?

I can’t limit this to five! So I’m not even going to mention To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies, Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, Animal Farm, or anything by Shakespeare or John Irving (especially A Prayer for Owen Meaney) as they’re all too obvious (well, maybe not the Irving, but Owen Meaney made me laugh out loud). I love Anne of Green Gables. My friend Mandy and I used to act the book out on the school bus. We took it in turns to be Anne and Diana, and our friend Carol was coerced into being a reluctant Marilla. We used to drive her nuts. Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey is another favourite: full of twists and turns and unexpected alliances. Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives – horrible! A nugget of a read, much darker than the film versions would have us believe. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – so, so sad. Jon McGregor’s if nobody speaks of remarkable things, though I found the structure hard to handle and the lack of capital letters in the title put my teeth on edge. Paolo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die. I know that’s six already, but can I have one more? Frankenstein.

Do you have a favourite time of day to write? A favourite place? What’s your writing process: are you a planner?

I like to get started as soon as I can prise my eyes open in the mornings, and will often sit in bed for an hour with my laptop and a cup of tea. The minute I come downstairs there’s usually a whole heap of chores waiting for me, so if I’ve already done some writing I feel more in control. Once I’ve run round after my messy family, cursing them roundly and vowing to make them do more to help around the house, I make some coffee and Mishka and I get stuck in for a good few hours, either in the study where it’s warm or in front of the fire in the living-room. When she thinks I’m in danger of atrophying she drags me out for a walk up the hill behind the house, which is a great opportunity for working on the plot of whatever I’m writing. I think I probably talk to myself during these walks – I get some funny looks from other walkers sometimes – so having Mishka with me is a great cover. As for my writing process – I start with a really broad idea and live with it for a few weeks. I like to let a character brew for a bit before putting anything more than a few notes in writing. It’s a little like having a house guest around the place. Then I jot down some ideas for the plot, although these are a moveable feast and tend to change and evolve as the characters and storyline develop. And then one day I just think, right, time to get going, and I sit down and write the opening line. I love opening lines: all that potential in a sentence or two. After that I’m fairly disciplined: I have a target word count I have to hit each week, otherwise I feel guilty. I never get writer’s block. I get writer’s laziness sometimes, or writer’s too-much-washing-and-ironing-to- do, or writer’s it’s-a-sunny-day-I’ll-do-the-garden-for-anhour- or-so, but not writer’s block. I think you have to write through any block, on those grunged-up days when you don’t feel you’ve got anything to say. Just sit down and write – anything. Even if you think it’s a pile of mince. You can always go back and revise it later, and nine times out of ten you discover that it isn’t mince at all, or at least not all of it – it was just your mood that particular day that made you think it was.

Which fictional character would you most like to have met?

Depends on my mood. Ma Larkin from The Darling Buds of May, on those days when I feel like a sympathetic ear, though my sisters are pretty good listeners. Boo Radley – I’d love to know what he got up to all day in that house. Ophelia – poor girl. We could have had a G&T together instead of her going off and drowning herself like that.

Who, in your opinion, is the greatest writer of all time?

I used to think Enid Blyton couldn’t be beaten. When my sister Dale sat the Eleven-Plus, one of the questions was, ‘What is the most famous book in the world?’ And she answered, ‘Enid Blyton’s.’ I think she was probably right – she passed the exam, anyway. The Famous Five! Brilliant. Every book was exactly the same, and I couldn’t get enough of them. These days – I hate to be predictable! – I would have to pick the bard.

Other than writing, what other jobs have you undertaken or considered?

When I was growing up, I wanted to join a circus. I still have a story somewhere that I wrote when I was six, illustrated with a picture of me underneath a circus horse in a tutu, clinging on to its belly. In my head it was much more glamorous than the picture. Then I wanted to be Samantha, the woman off Bewitched who could wiggle her nose and do magic. When I hit my teens I dreamed of becoming a vet. A stint with the RSPCA after my ‘O’ levels killed off that ambition – anyone who’s been as close to a cat’s blocked anal glands as I have will confirm it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I worked in Liverpool University Science Library for a year before I went to uni myself, and then after graduating and not getting taken on by any of the big spy houses, I got sucked into I.T. Don’t ask me how: I didn’t even know how to turn on a computer in those days. Scattered in between all of this I’ve worked for a butcher (great for titbits for the dog, though my sister Kerry once cooked them up for dinner by mistake), a grocer, and a tobacconist. I’ve also been, amongst other things, a barmaid, a lecturer, a supermarket assistant, a tiler, a wine merchant, and a karate instructor. I can milk a goat, though I never seriously considered this as a career option. I’ve trained rocket scientists in the former Soviet Union. And I once found myself advising the Deputy Prime Minister of Israel on how to improve standards in the construction industry. In Russian. Eat your heart out, MI5.

What are you working on at the moment?

My next book – The Runaway Wife. It’s about a woman – Marion Bishop – who is mugged on the the night she goes out to buy paracetamol to kill herself. So a nice cheery subject.

Read an extract of Husband and Wifes here