Ask the Author: Maggie O'Farrell
Answered Questions (6)
Maggie O'Farrell
Ideas can come from anywhere, often when you are least expecting it. It can be something you’ve been told, something you overheard, something you dreamt, or something you’ve read about. I keep a particular notebook where I write down any ideas or scenarios that strike me as interesting: I flick through it when I’m feeling a dearth of inspiration.
Maggie O'Farrell
The best advice I was given was ‘keep going’. Even it it’s a bad day or week or month and putting words on a page feels like pulling teeth, keep going. You might end up throwing up two thousand words but there could be a sentence or a paragraph or even a metaphor in there that nails something further down the line. That said, it’s also a good idea to walk away from your desk for a while. Sometimes going for a walk solves everything.
Maggie O'Farrell
One of my children has dyslexia. It wasn’t something I had any experience of, although I wonder now about those kids in my 1970s primary school class who never progressed beyond the first-level reading books. As a mother, it completely floored me: I had no idea how to help someone who couldn’t differentiate between ‘a’ and ‘g’, ‘f’ and ’t’, or ’s’ and ‘5’. Luckily, these days, help is out there if you need it. I kept thinking, however, what it must have been like to grow up in a time when the diagnosis didn’t exist, when it wasn’t recognised, a time before all the books and research hadn’t been written. That’s where the character of Aoife came from.
Maggie O'Farrell
I have two - I’m the middle one of three sisters. I think relationships with siblings are always changing but there’s a fundamental bedrock that stays the same, no matter what happens in your life or theirs. My younger sister and I shared a room when we were growing up: we still find it very easy to share things, to be in each other’s company, perhaps doing different things. It’s an ease that has come from spending many, many hours together.
Maggie O'Farrell
I've visited all the places in the book: I would never be able to write about somewhere I hadn't been. It would feel very wrong to reconstruct a place from research or maps. I used to go on holiday to Donegal, where the novel starts, when I was a child. I went to the Bolivian salt desert, the Salar di Uyuni, in my late twenties: it was such an astonishing, unlikely place that I knew I would write about it at some point.
Maggie O'Farrell
You never know what's ahead of you. That's part of the joy of writing.
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