Louise Tucker talks to Rebecca Connell
If you haven’t read the book yet – please note, this interview contains spoilers.
There are three strong characters in the novel. Who interested you most and why?
I saw all three characters as quite distinct from each other and Nicholas was the character who came to me first. In general I tend to prefer writing men, rather than women; I find it easier. I wanted to get the sense that this was someone who was quite morally ambiguous, so that the reader’s response to him would shift back and forth. I thought of him as the most complex.
As far as Lydia was concerned, I wanted her to be quite an unlikeable character, someone who, on the surface, was everything that someone would want, without much underneath. I almost felt I didn’t know her. And similarly, in a way, I saw Louise as someone that the reader wouldn’t know that well, someone who had an air of mystery about her but who had a lot going on under the surface, so the opposite of her mother.
And where did the idea for the book come from?
The scene where Louise is following Nicholas on the street came to me first. At that point I didn’t know why the woman was following the man at all, I just liked the idea of a woman following a much older man, and leaving it quite ambiguous – was it, for example, a sexual thing or not? It evolved from there.
I played around with ideas of how the plot would develop for quite a while. Originally I thought Louise would die at the end so I was working towards that, but as I continued writing that felt too melodramatic, since the pivotal point had been Lydia’s death, so I had to shift my expectations. But there were certain characters, like Adam and Naomi, who I hadn’t banked on at all. I had seen Nicholas as an eternal bachelor, who hadn’t quite got over his affair with Lydia, but then I started feeling that it would be a lot richer and more complex if he did have a family, if he had slipped into a different role.
The theme of this novel is very dark and your website mentions that your next novel is even darker: what attracts you to such darkness?
You don’t necessarily have to experience darkness to understand it and I think there is darkness, or sadness, within most people, even if it hasn’t been tested to the limit. I haven’t experienced a lot of tragedy but I know that capacity is there, and for me the book was about pushing that into the open. Certainly as far as infidelity goes it’s a subject that I personally don’t feel very ambiguous about. I’m pretty anti it, as most people probably are, but I was interested in trying to create a situation in which someone’s infidelity was sympathised with to an extent. I think writing should be about pushing your own moral boundaries as well as those of your readers and characters.
Louise’s life seems to be haunted by the lives of her parents: do you think that is common?
I think we are all shaped by our parents to varying degrees, most people probably more so than they’d like to admit. My own family life is nothing like Louise’s but I have a father who’s a strong character and he himself saw some parallels between Nicholas’s personality and his own, even though that wasn’t explicitly intended on my part. Powerful people in your life can influence your writing whether you mean them to or not.
The incest is not commented on in the book, either by Louise or Nicholas. If anything, it’s skated over. Why is that?
Louise and Nicholas are both people who have grown used to repressing their feelings, and to pushing painful memories underground. I initially considered the possibility of them having an explicit conversation about Louise’s relationship with Adam and its implications, but it felt wrong. When push came to shove, I don’t think either of these characters would want to face up to the unpleasantness of the situation, at least not immediately, and I wanted to reflect that in how much – or rather, how little – the reader was told about how they were feeling about it. Ultimately, it’s just another secret that both of them will have to keep.
You went to Oxford University and set the book in the same town; what made you choose it as your location, apart from familiarity?
Familiarity was important and although I thought about setting the book in London, which I know better, it didn’t feel quite right. London is such a huge, sprawling place, and although Oxford is a busy city too, there’s a more enclosed and insular feel to it, an introspective feel. To me that was important because the characters are so bound up in their own worlds that they don’t really let the outside world intrude too much into them. I liked the idea of a setting that reflected that.
Why is it the ‘art’ of losing?
Ah yes, the title, it took me quite a long time to get to the title; I probably didn’t have one until I was about halfway through at least. Obviously loss is a big theme from both Louise and Nicholas’s perspective, but particularly for Louise: she doesn’t have any obvious talent, ambition or direction in her life and almost the only thing that she’s good at is tapping into the past, connecting with that sense of loss. So whilst it’s not exactly an art, it is something which she holds precious, in the same way that other people would hold a talent or an ambition precious.
It’s also a quotation from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. The poem itself is not particularly relevant, but that’s how I came across the phrase. I felt I wanted something to do with loss so I Googled for quotations and that’s what came up and it seemed to fit. In the past I’ve always had a title first so it was bit unsettling not to have one. Ideally I wanted to have something to do with identity because I feel that that is such an important theme in the book, but I couldn’t quite find the right phrase.
Why is identity so important a theme for you?
From a conceptual point of view I’ve always had an interest, but I also think that the idea of self, how we define ourselves, is central to life, as is the way that others define us. The synthesis between those two things, or the disjunction between them, is fascinating. I often feel that the perceptions we have of other people are wildly inaccurate or at least only reflect one aspect of a personality but it’s something that you never quite know unless you’re very close and even then it may not accurately reflect what’s going on inside. I tried to play with that theme, via Louise changing her name and almost to an extent becoming her mother. But since she doesn’t know Lydia she has to create a different self who is perhaps like Lydia but perhaps isn’t. I had the sense that she was trying to search for something deeper about her mother which didn’t even exist.
What was it like to cross the divide from unpublished, unagented writer to agented and sold writer?
It was something that I’d been anticipating for a long long time and although I’m mercifully young to have a first novel published I do feel quite old to be doing it. I’d built up in my head this mystique of what it would be like to have an agent and a publisher; I used to lie in bed thinking about it, so when it actually happened it felt quite natural: this is what I always thought I would do, so what took me so long?!
At the same time there was a lot of excitement, particularly in the agenting process, because once you have an agent you hand it over to them to find a publisher and sort out all the details, whereas finding an agent is something you do by yourself with no one to back you up. I found that part of the process, the submissions process, difficult because I wasn’t used to putting my work out there and part of me didn’t want to. But I got to the point where I thought it’s silly not to try.
Apart from doing an English degree, did you do any courses in creative writing or have you read lots of books on plot?
I’ve never done a course or anything like that because I feel that creative writing MAs have a limited use. I don’t think they can teach you to write, though they can be good for motivation, but that’s something in the past that I’ve never really needed. I also think that there is a certain house style and the work that comes out of them can feel a bit samey, so I consciously didn’t go in that direction.
As far as books go, I read Carole Blake’s From Pitch to Publication quite carefully but I didn’t do extensive studies. I think because I have been writing since I was about five I went for it in my own way, and hoped that that’s what the market wanted too.
Who are your influences as a writer?
My first major influence was Agatha Christie. When I was younger I was really into her. And although I’m not writing murder mysteries as such, I do think the elements of crime and mystery are always going to be part of my writing. As a teenager I was into a lot of writers who are traditionally seen as quite misogynist, like Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Julian Barnes and David Lodge, people who women aren’t supposed to like. But I never saw their writing like that; I thought their view of women was quite interesting, maybe not always accurate, but there were certainly some points of recognition. And I think that’s partly why I like writing about men. I feel that I’ve learned from writers who create powerful male characters and that comes quite naturally to me now.
In more recent years, Maggie O’Farrell’s After You’d Gone was a big inspiration for my own novel, because it plays around with tenses and first and third person. I knew I wanted to do that but I wasn’t sure it could work; having read her book, I thought, yes, it can and I’ll give it a go.
How do you think your writing will develop?
I think over time I will move slightly more in the direction of the crime genre. It’s something that has always interested me. It might sound morbid but a book without a death is not a book for me!
