Briefly tell us about your book
Faithless is essentially about a love affair between a writer and an older, married man. It’s about the extraordinary vector that consuming love can be in our lives, and that it can be a force of great joy, and also great devastation. It is the story of Cressida and Max and the unfolding of their relationship, but it’s also an exploration of the power of desire in our lives; that way that it can often be a mirror that tells us about ourselves.
How does it feel to hold your book in your hands?
It’s always a somewhat surreal, though enormously exciting moment to see the swirl of ideas that has been occupying your head for so long suddenly made incarnate; an object that so definitively exists and is about to begin its own journey out into the world. With Faithless, it was even more surreal and exciting, because I have that beautiful cover endorsement from Michael Cunningham, and the thrill of seeing the name of one of my enduring literary icons on the cover of my own book will definitely not wear off.
What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
The thing I found the most challenging was the fact that I was trying to describe love and desire; two of the most powerful forces in our lives, but also two of the most complex and difficult to express in words. I’ve always been fascinated by the ways in which we translate the untranslatable into language, and writing this book pushed me to expand my expressive repertoire. Of course writing the sex scenes was also very challenging (mostly because I was petrified that they would sound cliched or corny) but overwhelming physical attraction, and the way that it can bring us to our knees, was so much part of this novel, that I knew I had to become equal to the task.
How did you think of the title of the book?
I’m very interested in the notion of faith, not so much in a religious sense, but in terms of what it means to keep faith with oneself and with others, and how this is often far more complex than we think. I’m also deeply interested in the converse notions of faithlessness and deception; the betrayals and transgressions that so many of us make, and how we justify and defend them. Any life contains some necessary secrets and compromises, large or small, and the way that we integrate those into our psyches is deeply interesting to me.
Do you write about people you know? Or yourself?
Oh yes, I plunder from my own life enormously. Sometimes the veneer of fiction is very thin indeed and sometimes I can succumb to the thrill of pure invention. That’s one of the delights of writing novels; you are free of many of the constraints of truth or accuracy that a non-fiction writer may be subject to, and yet you can weave truth and ‘real’ life into your work as you please. And sometimes you need to use fiction to convey a great truth than you can in non-fiction.
What’s some great advice you’ve received that has helped you as a writer?
There’s a wonderful E.L Doctorow quote a friend once shared with me that I often come back to: ‘Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ It’s a sentiment that I found enormously encouraging and reassuring as I write in a very organic way in that I never entirely know how a book is going to unfold. For me it’s a wonderful way to write; to discover what the novel will become as you are writing it. But it can be quite overwhelming sometimes when you feel that you can’t really see where you are going and whether you will be able to execute it on the page successfully. It helps to remind myself that you just need to focus on the small stretch ahead of you, and that you will slowly make your way safely through.
What’s your daily writing routine like and what are you working on at the moment?
I live in the Luberon mountains in the south of France and I go walking in the countryside early every morning. As I wend my way home through the cherry orchards I find myself turning thoughts over in my mind and dreaming up sentences for whatever it is I’m working on, and hurry back to my desk. I write on through the morning, and generally stop around lunchtime (lunch and la sieste are taken very seriously here in France) and then in the afternoons I edit and revise, or read. I try very hard, though it’s not always possible, to write every day. Someone once told me that the process of writing a novel can be like leaving footprints in quicksand: they disappear very quickly if you don’t walk that way again very soon, and you can lose where you are. The work hardens a little if you stay away from it for too long, and it can be difficult to find your way back into it. I’m at that thrilling (and somewhat terrifying) stage of just beginning a new novel. It’s wonderful because everything feels possible, but also daunting because it feels like I’m at the very beginning of what I know will be something of a marathon.
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