I write contemporary fiction and I live in South Manchester with my husband and two children.
My short stories have been longlisted and shortlisted in a number of competitions including the Fish Short Story Prize, the Telegraph Short Story Club and Books Ireland Magazine.
My first novel, The Relative Harmony of Julie O’Hagan, was awarded a publishing contract by Rethink Press as part of their New Novels Competition 2014.
I am a member of Manchester Irish writers
Delighted to have my short story The History Man shortlisted and published in this edition of Books Ireland Magazine. Click here to read. http://www.booksirelandmagazine.com/history-man-annette-sills/
Some photos of our performance of The Risen Word at The Irish World Heritage Centre on Thursday 10th March. Many thanks to all who came and made up the full house and to the other Manchester Irish Writers for their help and support. I loved being part of such a fascinating and involving project. Louise Twomey played the part of Kathleen in my piece, with great humour and gusto and unbelievably there was a woman in the audience who knew Kathleen Talty when she was an old lady in County Clare!
We are chuffed that ‘Dev and Miss Talty’ has been invited over to Liverpool Irish Centre on April 26th for their evening of events commemorating Easter 1916.
My lovely writing group, Manchester Irish Writers, have been scribbling away for the last few months on pieces for an event to commemorate the centenary of The Easter Rising as part of Manchester Irish Festival. We’ve written a variety of pieces which cover different aspects of the period. There’s live drama as well as poetry that reminisces and stories about the women who played their part and the children that got caught up in one of Ireland’s most important historical events. There are also true stories about some of the writers’ friends and relatives who had links with people who were there at the time. We’d love you to come along.
My own piece, Dev and Miss Talty, takes the form a monologue set in Manchester in 1919 and it’s going to be performed on the night. I thoroughly enjoyed writing and researching it. It’s connected to the story of Eamonn De Valera, one of the leaders of The Rising and later President of Ireland, who spent a week hiding in the city after escaping from Lincoln jail with the help of Michael Collins and others. The monologue is told from the point of view of Kathleen Talty, a courageous County Clare woman and member of Cumann na mBan who lived in Fallowfield at the time and who helped in the escape.
It is my first attempt at historical fiction and I have to say it was hard work but I loved it. My findings took me to County Clare and back and I had lots of help with my research from some great people over there. It’s going to to post up a recording of the story here at some point.
I’ve been asked my writer friend Laura Wilkinson to join My Lovely Blog Hop. Here are some thoughts on early memories, writing, and why Enid Blyton let me down.
My earliest memory.
I was about three of four, on holiday in the Irish village near Connemara where my mother was raised. I was in a shop standing next to my grandma. She was a very tall woman and I remember suddenly looking up at her, startled, as she started speaking Gaelic to someone. It was the first time I had heard another language, unless you count Wiganese, the vernacular of my hometown. I remember feeling afraid and alienated but fascinated by the babble of unfamiliar sounds. She later taught me to count and say a few greetings in Gaelic, words I recall almost fifty years on.
I developed an interest in foreign languages at school and went on to study five though I can by no means speak them all. I also became an English Language Teacher and studied linguistics as part of my teaching M.A.
Libraries.
Visits to my local library as a child are also some of my early memories. Ours was in Pemberton, a surburb of Wigan. It was a beautiful building on an ugly main road and a short walk from our house. We were allowed to go there alone from an early age and my friend Liz lived directly opposite. She had rabbits and I used to hang over her garden wall on the way home from my weekly visit and check on the bunnies. There were two shelves by the door in the library in the children’s section that I visited again and again. Famous Five, Secret Seven, Mallory Towers, St Clares – I can’t remember reading anything else except Enid Blyton for years on end. I was devastated a few year ago when I saw her played by Helena Bonham Carter in the film Enid. I had no idea what a dreadful old cow she was and how horribly she treated her own children.
I wrote my novel, The Relative Harmony of Julie O Hagan in my lovely local library in Manchester. Local libraries are very different these days. They are community and drop- in centres as well as being a hub for readers. You find a lot of society’s most vulnerable and damaged people there. My short story, Terry Taliban is set in my local library. It centres around a disturbed individual I used to observe when I was writing my novel in there.
Books and writing
My books fill the walls of two rooms in my house and I have a special shelf for signed copies that I’m very proud of. I still buy books but when I published my own novel I bought a Kindle and now I read mainly on that.
One of my few regrets in life is that I started to write fiction in my forties and not my twenties. I try to write most days and I’m steadily getting through my second novel.
My Passion
My lifelong passion has been reading and now writing but I also have a bit of a thing for northern soul music. I grew up in Wigan, home of the Casino and northern soul was everywhere when I was in my early teens. My friend taught me a few dance moves in her bedroom but the Casino burned down before I ever got the chance to go. I only really got into the music again recently and I can be found dancing around my kitchen with my ten year old daughter or at soul nights in ex working men’s clubs with other oldies. The story of northern soul is a fascinating one and it remains for me one of the few genuine underground music scenes. I find it hard to keep my feet still when I hear it. The tunes lift and transport me like no other music ever has.
I’d now like to tag Alrene Hughes and Carol Mckee Jones to be the next victims of My Lovely Blog Hop.
Yipee! The Relative Harmony of Julie O’Hagan is now available on Kindle on Amazon with paperback to follow in two weeks. You can also buy it in Chorlton Bookshop, other selected Manchester stores and at my launch, below.
The journey to publish my novel has been eventful to say the least. After a rejection filled December and January last year I was ecstatic to receive an offer from a publisher. A week later my novel I was shortlisted down to the last five in Rethink Press New Novels Competition 2014. The prize was a publishing deal but I had to bow out as I had already signed up with my publisher. The Relative Harmony of Julie O’Hagan was published on Kindle for one month in September and I was delighted with the reviews. I was less happy with my publisher and we parted company in October. Then Rethink Press came to my rescue and my novel is due to be published by them in January. It’s all been a very steep learning curve and I’ve found out a lot about the publishing industry. But that’s for another blog. Putting your novel in the hands of others is like sending your child to nursery for the first time and I’m very relieved that my baby is finally in professional and caring hands.
While all this has been going on I’ve been trying to get crack on with my second book. I naively thought that if I’d written one, the next would leap from my head onto the screen with ease. Not so. There are definitely techniques and tricks I’ve learned while writing book one but I’m discovering there’s a whole set of new challenges when it comes to writing book two.
You have less time. Any self published or traditionally published author spends a chunk of their allocated writing time promoting their work on social media. There’s also a search for reviewers, communicating with other writers on forums, a blog to write, reading events and a book launch to organise and all of this distracts from the real goal of writing. It’s like having a newborn and a toddler. You feel guilty that you’re not nurturing the little one because the toddler is demanding all your attention. My own kids were born fourteen months apart so I’m speaking from experience.
Then there’s the quality of the writing. I cringe when I think how I foisted the first badly written drafts of book one on my long suffering husband and friends. I’m not saying my writing is wonderful now by any means but my standards are higher so I find myself working harder to get the words right the first time.
Initially I thought I’d try something different with novel number two. I was going for something dark with a rip roaring plot that had twists and turns at every corner. A Mancunian Gone Girl. There was going to be hoodies, Bez type characters and violent scenes set in the underground car park of the Arndale.
I ditched it after ten thousand words. The voice didn’t ring true and the lack of laughs made me miserable. It felt strained, like I was writing it in a straight jacket. So I started again, wearing my own clothes this time.
Then other doubts crept in. What if it’s too similar to Relative Harmony? My main character is a sassy female who is having a mid life crisis. Is she the same as Julie O’Hagan but with night sweats? Should I have set it in Chorlton again? I’ve already taken a swipe at the hummus eating classes. Can I take another and get away with it? I just had to block out all of these thoughts and get on with the act of writing.
Some writers wrote wonderful first novels but didn’t bother with a second. After Catcher in the Rye was published J.D Salenger went on to write a novella Franny and Zoe and some short stories but nothing else. He became a recluse instead.
Margaret Mitchell of Gone with the Wind fame hated the limelight too and Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird found it hard to cope. Shortly after becoming an overnight celebrity she said this to a friend,
“I’ve found I can’t write… I have about 300 personal friends who keep dropping in for a cup of coffee. I’ve tried getting up at six, but then all the six o’clock risers congregate.”
Others writers died before they had their second chance. Sylvia Plath committed suicide only a month after The Bell Jar was published and Emily Bronte contracted tuberculosis a year after Wuthering Heights was released.
Their success was phenomenal. I’ll be lucky if my novel sells a few hundred copies but I’m determined to write another simply because I can’t imagine not doing. It is getting easier though, I know where my story is going even though it’ll probably take me a couple of years to get there. And if I do get too constipated for words along the way there’s always Write or Die by Dr Wicked. Write or Die is a lovely piece of software aimed at writers who are blocked. You put in a time and word limit and start writing but if you stop at any point everything you’ve written is deleted. That’ll teach me.
A few weeks ago was Banned Books week in the U.S., an annual campaign that celebrates the freedom to write.
Book are rarely banned by governments in the UK these days compared with the past. We’re pretty liberal about sex and swearing in the printed word though it’s more complex when it comes to religion and politics.
I wonder what exactly a writer would have to do to be censored? Create a sympathetic paedophile character who wears shell suits and presents a children’s TV shows? Or write a moving love story between an elderly member of U.K.I.P. and the female editor of a best selling tabloid?
Fifty years ago my own novel might have faced the axe. There are sex scenes, a large dollop of swearing and a couple of reviews have called it “gritty” and ‘dark.’ If a review described it as
‘A shocking piece of filth”
or wrote on Amazon
“I thought I’d seen it all in Fifty Shades but this really takes it to another level.”
there’d probably be a sharp rise in sales rather than a rush to get it banned.
But there are courageous writers who have written stories they probably knew would get them into trouble and others that may have doubted they’d ever see their work in print. Yet they went ahead and wrote them because they had the strength of their convictions. Here are a few of my favourites:
D H Lawrence – Lady Chatterley’s lover.
As an English undergraduate at Goldmiths, London University, I was taught by the academic Richard Hoggart. Hoggart was an expert witness defending Lawrence’s novel at the famous obscenity trial in 1960. In one of our classes he talked about his involvement in the trial and I read and loved the book immediately. For me Lawrence has always been the bravest of writers. He actually wrote Lady Chatterley in 1930, it was privately published in Italy and the unexpurgated version was only printed in the UK thirty years later. Its explicit sex scenes contained number of cunts and fucks which was outrageous for the time really. But his use of language wasn’t really what riled the establishment in 1960. As Hoggart explained to us students back then, it was an issue of class. Lawrence had produced a book about a member of the aristocracy shagging her gardener and loving it. One of the most memorable lines during the trial was when the prosecuting lawyer in his opening statement, turned to the jury in his opening statement and asked if Lady Chatterley was a book,
“you would even wish your wife or servants to read”
The book’s acquittal became a landmark in terms of censorship. Without it I am sure many other worthy but slightly risqué novels would never have reached our bookshelves. So thanks for that Dirty Herbert, as he was once affectionately known.
George Orwell – Animal Farm
Orwell wrote his novella Animal Farm in 1943 but couldn’t find a publisher in the UK until 1945 as the USSR was an ally of Britain in the war and, a satire on communism, the novella was seen as a political hot potato. When it was published it was immediately banned in the USSR and other communist countries. In 2002 it was also banned in schools the United Arab Emirates for content that was anti Islamic. In particular the authorities objected to the inclusion of a talking pig.
Animal Farm is still banned in North Korea and Cuba.
Lewis Caroll – Alice in Wonderland
Yes, really. It was once banned in a Chinese Province in 1931 because the characters took on human qualities and the governor at the time thought that children would start to perceive humans and animals on a similar level which he thought might end in disaster. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty suffered a similar fate. Although it sold over 50 million copies, it was banned by the South African Government during apartheid because it had the word ‘Black’ in the title.
Dav Pilkey – Captain Underpants
Apparently Captain Underpants is the book most people want banned in the U.S. Yes. Captain Underpants. That immoral tale of a superhero and two young boys that we love so much in our house got the number one spot in 2012 and 2013 in the American Library Association’s Top Ten Most Frequently Challenged Books List. (Naughty books that have received lots of complaints). It actually beat Fifty Shades of Grey. I’ve read them both and if you ask me Captain Underpants is by far the better book. Click here to see author Dav Pilkey talking about it.
It’s been an exciting few weeks. The Kindle version of my novel has been released on Amazon and I’ve been getting reviews. After years spent writing in isolation, getting feedback, good or bad, is a wonderful thing. I can’t tell you how heart warming it is to hear someone talking about characters that have only ever lived in a room in my head.
A few of the reviews have talked about my depiction of Chorlton, the south Manchester suburb where most of the novel is set and where I live. A review in the Manchester Evening News even had the title Annette’s sideways view of Chorlton. Anyway this got me thinking about the role that Chorlton plays in the story and a sense of place in novels in general.
The Relative Harmony of Julie O Hagan is set in Chorlton between 2007 and 2008. Moneyed bohemian types have moved in and gentrified the once ordinary suburb. They wear Birkenstocks, eat hummus and shop locally for eco friendly cleaning products. This contrasts with the world of the main characters, Julie and Billy, a working class couple. He is an Irish immigrant, she was brought up on the local estate and they bought their terraced house before the house prices rocketed. She wears pink velour track suits, they let their kids eat Haribos, they drink boxes of Blossom Hill wine, and nether possesses a bike. Julie and Billy observe the changes around them with scepticism, fascination and envy. The contrast of the two worlds makes for moments of humour but also conflict. This conflict leads them to act and do things they might not have done had they lived elsewhere. In this way the setting has a direct influence on their motivation and narrative.
Some places I have visited in fiction have stayed with me more than others. One is the fictional town of Maycomb in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Set in the years of the Great Depression, the town’s oppressive poverty, insularity and racially segregated community is wonderfully drawn. When Tom Robinson goes on trial in the courthouse it seems there could never be any verdict other than guilty in such a setting.
Another is the post- apocalyptic world of Cormac MaCarthy’s The Road. Everything is abandoned and covered in grey ash and colour only appears when the boy and his father have flashbacks of their former life.
“Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”
McCarthy’s setting is often seen as as a commentary on a post 9/11 world where mass terrorism, genocide and weapons of mass destruction are real possibilities.
Some might say that without setting there is no story. Samuel Beckett would disagree. I remember spending hours as a student struggling through a couple of his novels that have no setting, fictional or real. Molloy, for example, is made up entirely of the two interior monologues of two characters set in an indeterminate place.
One of the Amazon reviews of my book said, “A knowledge of Manchester is not needed to enjoy the book and relate to the characters as there is a Chorlton in all parts of the country.” I was delighted with this. It suggests that the reader sees Julie and Billy’s predicament is a general one, that there are people all over the country being pushed out of or struggling to live in neighbourhoods where they were brought up because of house prices. And this is something I wanted to get across in the story.
My second novel is also based in Chorlton. I sometimes wonder if I’ve just been lazy and I should have packed up and moved on somewhere else. I admit to taking a swipe at the place but it’s an affectionate swipe. I love Chorlton and I wouldn’t live anywhere else. Besides, it has endless scope for satire. I just hope I don’t end up having to wear a blonde wig and large sunglasses whenever I go out.
I’m delighted to have Anneliese Mackintosh as a guest on my blog this week. Her book Any Other Mouth was my favourite read of recent months. It deals with pretty brutal stuff, addiction, mental health and sexuality but it is also extremely funny and tender. It was in the Readers’ Ten Best Books of the Year so far in the Guardian and Anneliese has also been longlisted for the prestigious Frank O’Connor Short Story Award.
She is appearing at the Manchester Literary Festival with David Gaffney and Socrates Adams on 9th October at the launch of Alison Erika Forde’s exhibition at John Rylands Library and then at Canongate Lates on 10th October.
Hi Anneliese. Thanks for joining me.
What is the first thing you ever wrote?
I’ve written fiction for as long as I can remember. Creative writing was always my favourite subject at school. I remember writing a poem about ‘waking up on the ceiling’ when I was about five. I think that was inspired by The Twits by Roald Dahl. I loved the idea of the monkeys sticking furniture to Mr. and Mrs. Twits’ ceiling.
The first proper short story I remember writing was when I was about seven. It was about a gang of garden gnomes trying to escape from a factory, possibly inspired by Terry Pratchett’s Truckers, which my dad lent me around that time.
I started my first novel then too. It was about a girl who gets into a lift at the supermarket, and when she gets out, she’s in the Jurassic Period. I’m not sure what inspired that. A psychic pre-empting of Jurassic Park?
How and when do you write, in short bursts or regular chunks of time?
Short bursts.
I’ve spent periods of my life writing in regular chunks – getting up at a certain time, writing for x number of hours, taking a break, writing again, etc. And while it’s a great method for producing a vast quantity of writing, I’ve never been that happy with anything I’ve come up with using that method.
The pieces of writing I’m proudest of are the ones that have crept up on me, that I’ve been forced to get out of my system when I’ve been least expecting it. They’ve often been propelled by anger, or pain, or another extreme emotion, and they’ve been the most meaningful to me.
I think a mixture of both methods is most helpful though. I try to write something at least every couple of weeks, so I don’t get out of the habit. But I’ll only get really stuck into something once the right emotions take hold of me. At those times, I’ll binge-write, at the expense of just about everything else. Of course, it doesn’t matter how quick the initial burst of creativity is, though. I’ll still edit, edit, edit, for hours, weeks and months on end.
Your book has had great reviews so far. How do you react to bad reviews?
I’ve been absolutely delighted with the reviews Any Other Mouth has received so far. I honestly didn’t know what to expect from reviewers, given that the work is so intimate, and the format is quite experimental.
I’ve had bad reactions to plenty of things I’ve written, though. I wrote and directed a play that people walked out of; the novel I wrote for my PhD was described by my examiner as ‘not as clever as the author likes to think it is’ (yikes); I had a couple of stories I put up online, just for fun, given one-star reviews. One of the reviews was labelled ‘simply awful’.
I guess I obsess about bad reviews for about an hour after reading them, learning every word in them off by heart, announcing to myself and to anyone who’s unfortunate enough to be listening that I’m going to quit writing forever. And then shortly afterwards I forget all about it and carry on just as before.
Sometimes a bad reaction to my work can even spur me on to write something new. That’s what happened with my PhD. I ended up writing a story, which ended up in Any Other Mouth, based on my experience. It involves someone doing a PhD who is trying so hard to be clever that she fails. It was therapy, I suppose.
As horrible as bad reviews are, though, it’s important to get reviews. Much better to be provoking some sort of reaction than no reaction at all. I think I deal with reviews a lot better than I used to, as well. Before my book came out, I looked online at my favourite books, and how they’ve been reviewed. Some of their reviews are scathing! And it’s okay. Everyone has different opinions. Thank goodness we’re not all the same.
The stories in your book are separate yet interconnected, not quite short story collection, not quite novel. Have you ever written any novels or do you plan to do so?
To be honest, I view my book as both a novel and a short story collection. I think it could be seen as either. I had a long chat with my publisher about it, and we decided to call it a short story collection [that felt like a novel], which we decided sounded better than a novel [that felt like a short story collection]. It also allows me to put out a debut novel next, which is nice!
I am writing something at the moment that I view more as a novel than a short story collection. I have written other novels in the past. I wrote one about a girl who has a heart transplant, another about a guy who hates wearing glasses. I’ve written a lot of novellas too. But I’ve always loved short stories the most. I find they speak to me more than any other form. I view my life as a string of short stories, rather than a novel with a clear narrative arc. I think that’s why I found it easiest to write about my own life in Any Other Mouth in that format.
Your writing style and subject matter comes across as very personal. How have your nearest and dearest reacted since publication?
I spoke to my mum and sister about the book before it came out. They gave me their blessing to get it published, but both of them have said they will probably never read it. I started the book just after my dad died, so obviously I couldn’t discuss it with him.
My boyfriend is pleased for me and happy about the book. He doesn’t have a problem with the content, or with knowing so many intimate details that may or may not have happened in my past. He’s been really supportive, and helped me through it all.
There are other family members who are not so happy about the book. I think they’d been waiting to read one of my books in print for years, and my style has changed a lot since the stories of mine that they used to read. I guess they’re disappointed that the book is not to their taste, and that it’s so personal. I know that a few of them have read it, but none of them have spoken to me about it. I have just heard this second-hand. I think some of them are upset that I had such a happy childhood, and yet now I’ve written something that they view as disparaging towards my upbringing and even my family. It’s a shame they view it that way. The book was written from a place of love. I love my family to bits and don’t blame any of them for anything they’ve done. But I had to write the book – it helped me keep going when nothing else could. And getting it out there, getting it published, was an important step in admitting to myself that I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve done, or that’s happened to me. In fact, I’m really proud of myself. I’ve never liked keeping secrets, and this book contains everything that was inside me, out in the open. I needed to do it.
It’s important to state, though, that the book is a work of fiction – not everything in it is true, by any stretch. I feel like the whole thing is emotionally true, but I’ve changed some of the facts, either to protect people or to make the story run smoother, or to make it more interesting. The book is about a character called Gretchen. It is not an autobiography, but rather an interpretation of my own memories, played out in the life of a character that is not me. Gretchen’s mum is not my mum. Her dad is not my dad.
Do you enjoy publicising your work?
No! I find it awkward, draining and difficult. I feel like it’s got harder as I get older too. I’ve become very private since I quit drinking. I don’t enjoy going out to the pub, and I find reading onstage – in a room full of people drinking alcohol – very emotionally demanding. I get more nervous now that there’s more at stake too – now that I have a book that I’m trying to sell.
I find asking people to vote for me for various online competitions really awkward. I don’t like having to ask people over and over again for their support. But if you don’t do it you don’t stand much of a chance, and it can help your career so much if you do win. The Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award (https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/first-book-award/vote?book=4655) is currently open for votes – if anyone out there enjoyed my book enough to vote for me, I’d be really grateful!
Oops, okay, I just did some publicity in the middle of telling you how much I hate doing it. In all honesty, I do find it tough. I don’t know that people realise how hard I find it, given that I appear quite confident in my videos and onstage. I get really shaky, can’t eat, and can barely talk in the hours leading up to a performance. I put a lot of energy into it. It takes me ages to relax again afterwards.
The odd Tweet and website update are the most manageable methods of publicity for me. The most introverted forms of publicity are the best!
But I do recognise that without publicising my work, without telling people about what I’m doing, nobody would find out about it. The times when the publicity has worked – when someone has come across my stuff and really connected with it – that’s when it all feels like it’s been worth it. I don’t want to try and convince anyone to buy my work who doesn’t want it. But being able to find the people that want to read it, and who really get something from it, is important to me. I’ve had some amazing emails from people over the years. I have had people share some really personal things about themselves with me too – I think because they appreciate how open I am in my writing. That means a lot. There are good people out there. Hello and love to you all.
Many thanks and good luck with the book.
I have just spent the last weekend with my wonderful extended Irish family at a reunion. We get together every five years in various parts of the world. Stories, love, conflict and colourful characters abound at our gatherings. It’s a writer’s paradise and as my friends often remind me, I really have no need write fiction with all this material at my fingertips.
I was asked a few times about my novel and the inevitable question ensued.
“Are we in your book?” .
I suppose the most truthful answer is yes and no. Most writers of fiction don’t base their characters entirely on family and friends but like magpies, they are attracted to the shiny stuff, the interesting bits of different people, physical traits, aspects of personality, ways of speaking and gestures They steal these characteristics and make fictional composites, characters with their own identity, an identity that is intrinsic to the story being told.
And yet, writers only have their own worlds and experiences to steal from so it’s inevitable that friends and family who read their work will think they see people they know. It’s a bit like being on the dodgems. People are close and you can’t always avoid them.
However there are a number of good reasons not to base characters in fiction entirely on real people.
Who wants to hurt people’s feelings? If a character is drawn well they will have flaws and no one wants to see their bad points in print.
Writers would rather not be sued. They make hardly any money as it is and a defamation law suit would bankrupt most. It does seem that lawsuits against writers of fiction are relatively rare (sighs with relief) as it is hard to prove whether a fictional character is based on a real character or not.
It happens more with public figures. Take the recent example involving Scarlett Johansson who won a defamation case against the French novelist Gregoire Delacourt for creating a fictional character that is her double. Her character represented an ideal of modern beauty in his story, but she put it about a bit, something Scarlett said damaged her own reputation and so she sued.
Delacourt was incredulous at her reaction, saying he thought the lovely Scarlett might have invited him for a coffee or sent him flowers for putting her in his work and he insisted,
“I wrote a work of fiction. My character was not Scarlet Johannson.”
Tony Blair wasn’t happy about his own appearance in fiction either. In his novel The Ghost, Robert Harris portrayed him as a superficial former P.M. who couldn’t even write his own memoirs and Blair called his old friend “a cheeky fuck.” Blair then went on to prove Harris wrong when he wrote his bestseller, Tony Blair, A Journey, all by himself.
There are some great books out there that have fictionalised real people. My favourites are Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, which chronicles the internal life of Marlyn Monroe, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and which looks at Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power and Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn a wonderful story of Irish emigration which is based on a true story he heard as a child.
Sebastain Faulks’ A week in December is another. When it first came out, rumours abounded that the character of the embittered literary critic R Tranter was based on the Private Eye literary journalist DJ Taylor. Faulks denied it profusely saying,
“I can’t describe the measure of desperation with which this question fills me. This is the complete opposite of what I’m trying to do: create a freestanding, fictional world, true to itself and umbilically connected to the real world.”
Taylor did not react but a creepy detective did turn up in one of his own novels later with the name Faulks, so it looks like they both might have been having a bit of a laugh.
In his novel The Godfather Mario Puzo based his crooner character Johnny Fontane on Frank Sinatra who was always rumoured to have connections with the Mafia. According to Puzo, Sinatra was incensed and when they met in a restaurant Sinatra went for him, yelling at him and calling him a pimp.
At least he didn’t end up with a horse’s head in his bed. When my book comes out in September I hope I don’t either.
Annette Sills 