Readers Place

Susan Lewis interview/review

1. Conducted personally with the author Before becoming an author you worked in TV – what was it that made you leave your day job to become a full-time writer?

The reason I left The Bill to write full time, was because I lost an entire book on the computer (Stolen Beginnings – how’s that for an irony) and I had to rewrite it. So, there you have a computer disaster literally changing someone’s life, in this case, I’m glad to say, for the better – but believe me, it didn’t feel all that good at the time!

1. Just One More Day is a hugely personal book, and you don’t attempt to disguise this by changing names. Was it a difficult or painful book to write, or did you find it therapeutic?

It was after an interview with Libby Purves on Midweek that my email inbox started to fill up with emails from women all over the country who’d heard me mention that I’d had therapy to help overcome the profound and lasting effects of my mother’s death. Most were from women who’d lost their mothers too, or in some cases their fathers, almost all had experienced the loss whilst still children, but others were teenagers, or even into their twenties and thirties.

Like me, they felt different, set apart from the crowd, but though they guessed it had something to do with their loss, they couldn’t understand why, in many cases, they were attracted to addicts or bullies or people who were just out and out bad for them. At the suggestion of my therapist, I sat down to write about my mother, and the years preceding her death. I’m told by those who knew her that she sweeps through the pages with all the robustness and vivacity they remember, not to mention the trepidation and alarm.

As mawkish and New-Agish as this might sound, I don’t mind admitting that I felt her with me during each day that I wrote and I still feel her with me now. At last she has her rightful place in my life. She was always there; I just wouldn’t let her in, because I didn’t know how.

My emails tell me that an enormous number of us are still trying to overcome loss. Even as adults the death of a parent is never easily overcome, and it’s important to know that there’s nothing shameful about grief, or in taking a look at your mistakes in order to understand why they were made. There are also thousands of women out there now trying to deal with the nightmare of leaving their children behind. I guess this is mainly a book for them, to show how very, very important it is to talk to a child, no matter how hard it might seem, because if you don’t tell them the truth they will almost inevitably create their own reality, and only time will tell what kind of calamities that will trigger.