Dorothy Koomson's Blog, page 9

Total Fangirl

So, I went to the National Literacy Trust midsummer’s party last night. I am a huge supporter of their work and how they aim to help to lower and eventually eradicate the high levels of illiteracy in this country.

It’s only when you hear the patrons of the charity talk that you’re reminded how so many people don’t have access to books – especially with what has been happening to libraries in recent years. But you know my feelings on that.

 

At the event, held in London at the Hatchette building with amazing views of London, I had one of those moments. You know, one of those moments, when you look across the room and spot Malorie Blackman and your heart stops because you’re looking at one of your writing heros. And she’s talking to another author you admire – Chris Riddell – and you realise that this is one of those few moments when you can go and make a total show of yourself in front of them and NOT ACTUALLY CARE.

So that’s what I did. I told them I was in awe of them. And Malorie said she’d read my books (swoon) and Chris said we should meet for coffee because he lives in Brighton (swoon again) and I sort of do, too. And I wished that I wasn’t on a self-imposed social media break because I so wanted to tell the world. I settled for telling my husband who was more impressed than I was, if that was possible. (And didn’t even mind me waking him up to tell him about it.)

Do have a look at the work the National Literacy Trust do if you get the chance. They are doing some brilliant stuff and they could always use people to help out. For example, you could host a Tales and Teapots party to raise funds for the National Literacy Trust. Me, I’m so counting down the days until it’s acceptable to hit Mr Riddle up for that coffee by the sea…

My events

 

Keep checking back here for news of my new events. And don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter to be kept up to date on the new stuff I’m up to.

Lizzie Enfield

In her novel Living With It Lizzie Enfield tackles the subject of how the choices one person makes can drastically – and yet unintentionally – alter the lives of other people. She explains here how one of the photos she kept on her computer desktop (shown below) became a part of her writing the book.

Lizzie writes

This is a photo of Roald Dahl with his wife and three children. He’s standing next to his daughter, Olivia, to whom he dedicated two of his books, James and the Giant Peach and The BFG. Olivia died of measles, aged 7 in 1962, just two years after the picture was taken. This happy family was shattered by a childhood disease which is now entirely preventable.

It makes you think doesn’t it? It makes you wonder why so many people still choose not to have their children vaccinated, putting their own children – and other people’s – at risk.

Dahl wrote a heartbreaking essay about losing his daughter. “I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ I asked her. ‘I feel all sleepy,’ she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.” The author described it as “almost a crime to allow your child to go unimmunised”.

I agree. All children should be vaccinated, not least to protect those too young or too vulnerable to receive the vaccine. It’s easy to forget how dangerous childhood diseases, which had almost been eradicated due to a successful vaccine programme, were. This is the issue at the heart of my latest novel, Living With It. It’s about a group of old friends. One member of this group has never had her children vaccinated. Her teenage daughter catches measles while they are holiday with another couple who have a young baby. The baby catches the virus and is left profoundly deaf as a result.

This is not an implausible “what if” scenario. The legacy of the MMR scandal, which began in 1998 when Dr. Andrew Wakefield proposed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism is still leading to large numbers of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children. He has since been discredited and struck off but the fear his report generated prevailed, leaving a large number of children unprotected against a disease which is more infectious than smallpox and has serious side effects including, deafness, blindness and brain damage. One person died and many were injured after the UK outbreak in 2012. There will be more children and vulnerable people damaged in the current outbreak in the US.

In the immediate aftermath of the Wakefield report’s publication, my middle daughter was due to have her MMR jab. Naturally I was worried. Who wouldn’t have been? Autism was on the increase and measles was a distant memory. But I took the plunge, aware that measles had not been eradicated. But what if I’d been too scared to have my kids vaccinated and they’d caught measles when it re-emerged? What if they’d passed it on to the baby of a friend and their baby had been damaged or worse? Could I have lived with the consequences of a decision made years previously?

These are questions the central characters in the book have to face. It’s a novel, not a polemic. It is, I hope, a compelling story, told with humour, insight and sympathy for all the characters involved. But I also hope it will make people think, as the picture of the Dahl family picture made me think every time I looked at it on my computer desktop.

Seeing them all looking so happy, knowing that two years later, that happiness would be shattered, you can’t help but wonder why anyone would risk the health of their own children or put those of others at risk by not having them vaccinated. Look at them all.

Now imagine the space where Olivia stands is empty.

About Lizzie Enfield

Lizzie Enfield is a journalist and regular contributor to national newspapers and magazines, has written two novels – Uncoupled and Living With It – and had short stories broadcast on Radio Four and published in various magazines. She has taught for the Arvon Foundation, various universities, writes a monthly writing column for Writing Magazine. Lizzie also teaches creative writing at the Writers Room in Brighton with Araminta Hall.

You can buy Living With It by clicking here: Living With It

Find out more about Lizzie at www.lizzieenfield.com or www.writersroom.info or follow on Twitter @lizzieenfield @writersroombrig

The Two Ice Cream Girls

It’s a little-known fact that my readers often make me cry. They do so by telling me how my books have deeply moved them.

With The Ice Cream Girls, I have had numerous emails from people all over the world telling me how the book changed their lives or the life of someone they know. Such as the 60-year-old woman who said the book reflected her experiences in a way that she had never been able to share. Such as the domestic violence perpetrators outreach worker who said the novel had shown a man in her class that he was an abuser and that his wife had been right to leave him. Such as the woman who, after reading the story, finally plucked up the courage to see her relationship for what it was and to leave. Those are just three examples from all the powerful emails I’ve had.

When I write a book I feel an enormous sense of responsibility to tell accurately and sensitively the stories of the people I speak to, which is why those emails bring tears to my eyes: not only has something I have written touched someone, but I have managed to accurately portray the realities of people’s lives.

I have to admit, when I first started researching for The Ice Cream Girls I didn’t know or understand that all abusive relationships are rooted in emotional manipulation – I thought it was all about the physical violence. I found out that without the psychological control, the violence wouldn’t happen more than once. Having learnt this, I told the story of The Ice Cream Girls knowing that anyone, including ‘nice’, ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’ girls from two-parent families can and do find themselves manoeuvred into the situation that Poppy and Serena were in.

The TV drama that is based on my novel doesn’t seem to agree with what I learnt from my research and it seems to fall into the trap of regurgitating the stereotypes believed by those who have no experience or knowledge of domestic violence. While watching the drama I couldn’t help thinking that, while the people who made it had liked the basic idea of my book, they decided that abusive relationships and girls being groomed into sexual relationships by older men simply didn’t happen in the way I had written about them.

After the second time I outlined my concerns over the potentially damaging messages in the TV drama, the show’s executive producer admitted that their drama ‘tells a slightly different story with slightly different characters and different motivations’. Which is true, there are two versions of the story called The Ice Cream Girls: both have protagonists called Serena and Poppy, both have Poppy and Serena accused of killing an abusive man called Marcus.

The Serena I created was a shy, clever-but-naïve young girl manipulated into a relationship by her teacher who then went on to brutalise her; the Poppy I wrote about was a young girl, close to her father who thought the older man she was involved with loved her even when he abused her. My Ice Cream Girls were trapped in a nightmare situation not of their making and they couldn’t work out how to escape.

My Ice Cream Girls, as many people from all over the world have told me, were loveable, likeable and deeply sympathetic to the point where readers were torn about who they thought had murdered Marcus.

So, essentially, there are two versions of the story called The Ice Cream Girls – the research-based novel that I wrote and the TV version.

I’m sure a lot of people enjoyed the TV version – the actors did a great job with the material they were given. But I hope the viewers questioned whether those situations play out in real life as they did in the TV drama, and that they consider how very different my book, the original story, might be to that version.

A further difference between the two is that the TV version had a different ending and a different killer. For those asking: I didn’t have any say or input into any of the changes including the ending.

 

Welcome

I hope you enjoy yourself here and I look forward to hearing from you x

That Photo, That Book

In my book, That Girl From Nowhere, the main character, Smitty, spends a lot of time taking photos and displaying them on her wall. Authors often find photographs are helpful in sparking ideas, building character profiles, creating a sense of time and place. In this new series about writing, different authors will share which photos have helped with writing particular books. The first one is from Lizzie Enfield. You can read it here: Lizzie Enfield’s That Photo, That Book.

Hope you enjoy it – I’ve find it very interesting.

Dorothy x

When I Was Invisible

The blurb says . . .

‘Do you ever wonder if you’ve lived the life you were meant to?’ I ask her.

She sighs, and dips her head. ‘Even if I do, what difference will it make?’

In 1988, two eight-year-old girls with almost identical names and the same love of ballet meet for the first time. They seem destined to be best friends forever and to become professional dancers. Years later, however, they have both been dealt so many cruel blows that they walk away from each other into very different futures – one enters a convent, the other becomes a minor celebrity. Will these new, ‘invisible’ lives be the ones they were meant to live, or will they only find that kind of salvation when they are reunited twenty years later?

The blurb means . . .

This was a hard book to write. I know I say that after every book, but this was difficult for the themes and research I had to carry out. Speaking to the people who have lived through some of the issues in this book was emotional and heart-rending, but also uplifting and inspiring. I hope you enjoy reading the story of Nika and Roni as much as I loved writing it.

You can read an extract of When I Was Invisible here: Read an extract of When I Was Invisible by clicking here: WhenIWasInvisible-Extract

 

Music from the book

There’s a music and sound theme running through When I Was Invisible. Click here for some of the music mentioned in the book. When I Was Invisible by Dorothy Koomson (The Music)

You can buy When I Was Invisible here:

Amazon

From There To Here

To whet your appetitie for my tenth novel That Girl From Nowhere, I’ve penned this short prequel called From There To Here. It basically tells the story of what the main character Clemency ‘Smitty’ Smittson’s life was like there in Leeds and how she ends up here in Brighton, where most of the present-day story is set.

I really hope you enjoy the short story and that it inspires you to buy the book to read Clemency’s whole story. Let me know what you think of the story on email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

You can read the short story by clicking here: From Here To There and you can buy That Girl From Nowhere from all good bookshops and online at these various places.

That Girl From Nowhere

My tenth novel is called That Girl From Nowhere. Find out more about it here . . .
The blurb says . . .

‘Where are you coming from with that accent of yours?’ he asks. ‘Nowhere,’ I reply. ‘I’m from nowhere.’ ‘Everyone’s from somewhere,’ he says. ‘Not me,’ I reply silently. Clemency Smittson was adopted as a baby and the only connection she has to her birth mother is a cardboard box hand-decorated with butterflies. Now an adult, Clem decides to make a drastic life change and move to Brighton, where she was born. Clem has no idea that while there she’ll meet someone who knows all about her butterfly box and what happened to her birth parents. As the tangled truths about her adoption and childhood start to unravel, a series of shocking events cause Clem to reassess whether the price of having contact with her birth family could be too high to pay…

The blurb means . . .

About five years ago, when I had finished The Woman He Loved Before (published 2011, finished 2010) I began writing a book called Where I Left You, which became Where I Found You. I was researching the story on a woman who was adopted and how she becomes involved with someone’s wish to end their life. The more I fleshed out the story and characters in my head, the less I felt the need to tell the story. It was almost as if the longer I spent time with the characters, the less interested I was in them. This is ALWAYS a sign that I’m not ready to write that story and, hard as it was, I decided to put the story to one side and go back to another idea that I’d had years before. This story eventually became The Rose Petal Beach. (That’d also been an idea that wasn’t ready to be told when I had it.) Things worked out well in that I left my publisher at the time and it seemed a natural break to start afresh and put the idea for Where I Found You to one side until it was ready to come to life.

Two books later, in That Girl From Nowhere, it has come to life. This time around, researching the story was a true joy, finding out about the subjects and themes involved in the book fascinated and challenged me in equal measures. They were not easy to write about, all the characters are different from when I had the original idea and I feel truly honoured to have spent time with them (if that doesn’t sound too odd). That Girl From Nowhere is my tenth book to be published and that’s as it should be. I’m really glad I listened to my instincts all those years ago, it saved me a lot of time and heartache because I didn’t create characters I didn’t 100 per cent believe in and it meant that this story was told at the time it needed to be told.

Hope you enjoy it.

You can read an exclusive short prequel to the book, by clicking here: FromHereToThere

You can read an extract of That Girl From Nowhere here: ThatGirlFromNowhere-extract

You can watch the trailer for That Girl From Nowhere here

What Is A Literacy Hero

Atthe end of 2013, to celebrate 20 years of working to improve literacy skills, The National Literacy Trust launched a national  search for Literacy Heroes – people who have overcome problems with reading and writing, or helped inspire other people to improve their literacy skills.

I’m a supporter of the National Literacy Trust and their aim to encourage and inspire people, especially children, to read, so I was really excited to be selected as one of the judges of the campaign.

As the National Literacy Trust says: ‘Anyone can be a Hero. A young person or adult who’s overcome challenges; an author who’s inspired people to read; a teacher or librarian; a volunteer in your local community; or even a celebrity.’ The group of celebrity judges included Cressida Cowell, the author of the bestselling How to Train Your Dragon series, columnist and author Lucy Mangan, and business entrepreneur Levi Roots. We were asked, in our choices, to consider:

1. The impact and contribution a nominated Literacy Hero has made to the literacy or reading lives of others and/or themselves. 2. How a Literacy Hero’s contribution reflects the overall aims of the National Literacy Trust in promoting literacy and reading to as many people as possible and in supporting literacy as an essential tool for life. 3. The creativity and resourcefulness of the nominee, and personal challenges that they may have had to overcome.

Click here to find out who the literacy heroes in the picture above are and why they won.

Photo credit: National Literacy Trust website

My literacy hero

I have several people I could nominate as my literacy hero, but the one I’m going to choose for now is Oprah Winfrey. I’ve long admired her for the way she has brought several important issues to the forefront of people’s consciousness, but it was what she did globally for reading that has established her as one of my enduring literacy heroes. When she began her television book club in 1996, selecting a book to read every month with her viewers and then discussing it on the show, she helped to transform reading across the world. Many people in lots of different countries were inspired to start their own public and personal book clubs realising that all they needed to do so was a good book and people to talk about it with. Reading is one of the best things to do and anyone who makes it accessible, desirable and most importantly, possible for other people, is a hero to me.