Author and editor in conversation


David Fickling talks to Jenny Downham about her new novel Unbecoming, which he edited.


It has been four years


since your last novel, You Against Me, was published, and eight years since your debut novel Before


I


Die. Can you describe the creative process you use to plan your writing?


I know very little when I start writing a book. I have a few ideas, but they are often abstract, as if I know the tone of the piece but nothing more. I use free writing techniques. is a bit like


This improvising


in theatre – throwing words down and not planning anything in advance. I write every day, treating it like a 9-5 job. I have to be really disciplined because there’s no one telling me to do it. I start with themes or relationships, sometimes a voice or a triggering event. I write thousands of words, approaching the work from many angles. Most of it goes in the bin, but I find I return again and again to the things that preoccupy me and eventually I begin to see what the book might be about. It’s a slow process.


Tell us about your new novel, Unbecoming.


Katie is seventeen and in love with someone whose identity she can’t reveal. Her mother Caroline, is uptight, worn out and about to find her past catching up with her. Katie’s grandmother, Mary, is back with the family after years of mysterious absence and ‘capable of anything,’ despite suffering from Alzheimer’s. Every morning Mary runs away. She’s desperate to find something,


says it’s imperative, but when questioned, can’t be more specific. Katie wants to know what Mary’s looking for. She also wants to know why her mother seems to detest Mary. What was the nature of their original estrangement? It makes Katie question everything she thought was true about her family. So – three women at different stages of life bound together by a


web of lies that only the youngest can untangle. Oh, and it’s a love story too ...


Which character did you find easiest to write/relate to the most?


Mary. This is odd, because I have never been an eighty-year-old woman with memory loss. But I loved writing her. She made me laugh and I never knew what she was going to do next.


As both a mother and a daughter yourself, how much did you draw on real-life experience to write Unbecoming?


This is undoubtedly the most personal of my books. I have been a teenager and a mother and some of my own experiences are in there. But perhaps most importantly, my own mother had Alzheimer’s and became very unwell and died while I was writing Unbecoming. I hope I was a better carer and daughter as a result of writing this book. Certainly, I found it very cathartic to try and imagine how my mother might have been feeling as she faced the erosion of her memories. There’s a lot of my mum in Mary.


18 Books for Keeps No.214 September 2015


Katie, Caroline and Mary all grapple with mistakes they have made – do you believe in making mistakes?


Of course. How do we learn a thing if we don’t make mistakes? The most interesting days are full of them and the most fascinating people have made hundreds of them …


Misremembered memories and the stories that we tell ourselves form a vital narrative thread in Unbecoming. Was this a conscious theme?


I don’t really think in terms of themes or topics when I begin a project, I’m more interested in characters and the stories they have to tell. I start with them and see where they lead me. Having said this, I also need to make sense of what I write, to see if anything coherent is emerging. There’s a writing exercise that suggests authors try summing up the


novel they’re currently working on in a sentence. It’s supposed to help them understand the heart of their story and of course, it’s a useful thing to have under your belt should anyone ask (as people so often do), ‘So, what’s the new book about?’ Here are some of my attempts when I was in the middle of writing Unbecoming: It’s a book about family secrets/It’s an exploration of identity/It’s a story of oppression – how we oppress one another and ourselves/It’s a study of memory/It’s a book about sacrifice, about giving up all that matters to you/It’s a love story ... As you can see, there were a lot of threads! The story spans sixty


years and is told in two voices and there’s a mystery at its heart and several secrets to be unveiled en-route, so it was often a complex juggling act to keep everything moving forwards. About six months before I finished writing, I realised that one of the major threads


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