The inspiration for Dreaming in French came from a walk I take near my home, down by the sea. There’s an old house I pass that has always fascinated me. It’s tucked away behind a high brick wall, decaying under a tangle of green. And just nearby someone has etched the word Felix into the concrete. That’s all I had. A crumbling old house and the name Felix, but I knew there was something there because of a certain quality to some ideas that just hold your attention for whatever reason. And it must hold your attention for the months, sometimes years, it takes for the story to unfold.
But when I tried to write this story set in Sydney in this house, with these two characters I had, Saskia and Felix, it just didn’t go anywhere. This was during the end of the pandemic, and I think I was feeling very stuck in my own life. And I wondered if I could transpose this old home to a tiny island off the south-west coast of France where I’d lived age 19 as an au pair. I had soaked up the essence of Île de Ré over months of living there, so I knew I could conjure a sense of place, which is a key starting point for all my books. I had also soaked in the language, and I wanted to explore the feeling of going to another country for the first time as a young person and having another place, people and language take hold of you. And let’s face it, I was really missing the feeling of travel at that point.
I make a scrapbook for each book I write and if I go back I can see how I was waiting for the character’s voices to come to me, trying to find the tone of the novel. The tone is atmospheric and a little haunting – I somehow kept the feeling of that old house on my walk. Saskia and Simone, my other key characters, came to me in the process of writing. Saskia is in a troubled marriage, and I wanted to explore that, and how and why it’s not always easy to escape relationships. Simone is a beautiful, wealthy French woman who has left half her villa to Felix and half to Saskia. We meet her in the past, when Saskia, Simone and Felix spent a summer together. Her voice just flew off the page at me. But I was nervous to inhabit a French woman given my French had lapsed.
I started French classes again and found the words coming back to me in real time as I wrote the book. That’s when I happened upon the title – Dreaming in French – being when you fully assimilate another language, and somehow that became a metaphor for assimilating your past self with your present, Saskia’s emotional journey.
Leave a Reply