Nothing About Writing is Easy: Q&A With Gretel Killeen, Author of My Daughter’s Wedding

1. Briefly tell us about your book

My Daughter’s Wedding is a comedy about the hilarious complexities of mother- daughter love. Based on an estranged daughter who rings out of the blue to announce she’s getting married in three weeks and demands her mother organise the wedding, it’s the story of that mother’s desperate attempts to fulfil this task in order to regain her daughter’s love – assisted by her own increasingly demantia’d mother and her two best friends; Soula (an amateur bikini- line waxer) and Thilma (who they found in a cab in the 1980’s).

2. What are you hoping the reader will take away from this book?

I want the reader to take joy and comfort from this book- to forgive their mums and their daughters as a result of it, to forgive themselves, let down some walls, laugh and laugh… and gain an insight into the universal agonies and ecstasies of mother-daughter relationships that we have all at one time experienced, been witness to, or have threatening on our horizon.

3. What are the easiest and most difficult parts of your job as a writer.

To be honest nothing about actually writing is easy. The most enjoyable part for me is not the writing at all- it’s the creation of the plotline and characters and floating with the muses as language and circumstance magically unfold in my head. But the actual process of writing…well there is nothing easy about that. I’m a bad typist, I hate sitting still, I love company and I love talking!  So I find the physical process of actual writing completely unnatural…but a necessary means to an end.

4. What’s some great advice you’ve received that has helped you as a writer.

The best advice I’ve received as a writer is to always make your reader feel that you’re in control of the story, that you know where you’re going, even if they don’t.

5. What’s your daily routine like and what are you working on at the moment.

I have very little routine in my life.  I work in a number of different areas of performing, writing, painting and media all at once and this requires that I constantly shuffle the deckchairs. But…when I’m writing a novel, discipline is required, so I make sure that I start writing as soon as I wake up each day, before I do anything else, because ‘two hours of writing before 9am is equal to eight hours of writing after 9am.’ At the moment I’m between novels so I’m completing painting commissions- painting is a fabulously free contrast to writing.