Novel Kicks Chats To… Nicci Gerrard

Published October 24, 2014 | By Laura

Nicci Gerrard is one half of the writing duo, Nicci French. She is also the author of The Winter House, Missing Persons and The Moment You Were Gone. Her latest novel, The Twilight Hour was released by Penguin on 23rd October. We chat with Nicci about her writing, her new novel and her favourite word.

Hello Nicci. Thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us about your novel, The Twilight Hour and how the idea originated?

Thanks so much for having me! And for asking me these questions.

The Twilight Hour is really about the past and present life of Eleanor Lee. Now in her nineties and blind, she needs to tidy away her life before her family discovers secrets that she has kept hidden for seven decades. She is about to be moved from her old house by the sea to a home and she employs a lost young man called Peter Mistley to go through all her papers and photos. Gradually he – and the reader – are drawn back into Eleanor’s turbulent history, her love and her guilt. I wanted the novel to shift between two times and to unwind a story that still has power over the present. I also wanted to show how the old – who are often invisible to us – contain all the selves they have ever been. Eleanor might be in her mid-nineties and close to her death, but she is also youthful, caustic, purposeful, passionate and complicated. She still has hopes and desires. She is brimful of memories.

I first thought of writing The Twilight Hour when I and my siblings were moving my very old and extremely frail parents out of the family home. It was very poignant, gathering together a life and packing it away, deciding what to keep and what to discard We came across a film of their wedding day, and that ghostly sense of their young and radiant selves was powerfully moving.

Do you plan much before a novel and do you edit as you go?

I do plan – or at least, I have to have a sense of the journey the novel will make and I have to know why I’m writing it, what is its beating heart, if that makes sense. But then, my plan always goes awry, because of course a novel isn’t like a machine. It won’t obey you. Characters don’t want to do what you thought they should. They go their own way – and that’s good, it’s when the novel is working and taking on life.

I edit as I go – which often means throwing things away and starting again. And then when I’ve finished. And then after my agent has read it. And then after the publisher has read it….But often I think that I know from the start if something is working or not, and if it isn’t all the editing in the world can’t save it.

Do you have any writing rituals?

I have favourite avoidance rituals. I have to either run or swim before I begin. And then I have to have at least two mugs of black coffee. And then I have to stand at the fridge and stare at its contents. And then tidy the desk a bit. And then have some more coffee…. But I don’t really have anything superstitious – in fact, my real wish is that I can write anywhere, in any condition. I have friends who need to sit at their desk, in their room, silence around them, but it scares me to think that you need to have particular conditions in order to write. Most of my writing life has been conducted in the midst of chaos and noise – with young children galloping around and shutting their fingers in doors. Not for me a writer’s retreat.

What’s your favourite word and why?

It changes all the time. At the moment it’s desolate because somehow the word sounds what it means, and is empty and sad. And I love the word buoyant because that’s what we have to be, keeping afloat no matter how choppy the waters. And giggle.

If you could travel back to any point in history, where would you go and why?

Because I am currently immersed in Virginia Woolf’s wonderful Diaries, I think I would go back to March 28, 1941, and I would be standing by the River Ouse near her Sussex home so that I could prevent her from drowning herself. I believe she could have become happy again, after she had passed through her last terrible depression, and she would have written more great and illuminating novels. (And then of course I could travel forward again and read them in the present, with footnotes.)

Is there a fictional character you’d like to meet?

Susan from C S Lewis’s Narnia books. I’ve always been outraged that she wasn’t allowed into heaven at the end because of her liking for invitations and lipstick. I want to tell her that invitations and lipstick are just fine.

Out of all the books you’ve read, which three have made the most impact on you?

Oh dear. I think I have to chose the children’s story by the great Tove Jansson; the odd, mysterious, fabulous Moominland in Midwinter, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which I must have read at least a dozen times now for its romance and its strangeness; and Virginia Woolf’s elegiac To the Lighthouse.

Who would you invite to a fantasy dinner party?

John Keats, Dr Johnson, the Wife of Bath, Elizabeth Bennet and Gandalf. That might be an odd kind of dinner party though.

Five tips for new writers?

Read a lot

Start now (there’s never going to be a right time)

Find your own voice

Don’t be daunted by humiliation and failure – much of writing is about failing to write, throwing away words, sentences, chapters, whole books

Only do it because you have to (writing isn’t a career or a profession, it’s a compulsion)

The Twilight Hour (Penguin, 23rd October 2014,) is available to buy from all major bookshops. Alternatively, click here to buy from Amazon.

Follow Nicci French on Twitter by clicking here.