Maggie O'Farrell: I try not to be too precious about my writing, and I...

I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you 'Don't worry. This may be your life but you're not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you -- it's already organised.' It's all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.

Maggie O'Farrell

fate worry believe

Gretta sits herself down at the table. Robert has arranged everything she needs: a plate, a knife, a bowl with a spoon, a pat of butter, a jar of jam. It is in such small acts of kindness that people know they are loved.

Maggie O'Farrell

small-acts knives kindness

She wanted to say, no. She wanted to say, I have a son, there is a child, this cannot happen. Because you know that no one will ever love them like you do. You know that no one will look after them like you do. You know that it's an impossibility, it's unthinkable that you could be taken away, that you will have to leave them behind.

Maggie O'Farrell

taken children son

Always, at the end of every book, there are things you will be unsatisfied with, and still more things that later on you will realize were not right. But mistakes are part of what a book is. That itchy, dissatisfied feeling at the end of a novel is useful. It's what keeps you writing and gets you writing the next one. It's what keeps you learning.

Maggie O'Farrell

mistake writing book

Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.

Maggie O'Farrell

stories sea tree

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.

Maggie O'Farrell

reading feelings reality

What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?

Maggie O'Farrell

persons love-you giving

While I was writing the book, one of my children was diagnosed with dyslexia. Dyslexia is a very tiny word for a wide-ranging neurological condition that affects different people in different ways. But I was reading an awful lot about it, to try and find ways of helping my child. I think a lot of fiction comes from this desire to confront unanswerable questions, and it's heartbreaking to see your child, a bright child, struggling so much with something that others are finding so easy. It's such an assault to the child's self-esteem and, as a mother, it's hard to watch.

Maggie O'Farrell

struggle mother children

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

Maggie O'Farrell

two people years

Why isn't life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

Maggie O'Farrell

terrible-things terrible happens

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

Maggie O'Farrell

want-something terrible thinking

I was interested in the ripples of feminism passing through Britain and Ireland in the mid-Seventies - how the reverberations of the feminist political movement were being felt in suburban households. So many novels end with a marriage.

Maggie O'Farrell

feminism feminist political

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Maggie O'Farrell

identity hands world

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

Maggie O'Farrell

his-smile long way

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

Maggie O'Farrell

motherhood mother

I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the number of people who just walk out of their lives when the weather gets unbearable is astronomic. He said the police prepare themselves for it - for a huge rise in the instances of missing persons. People choose to disappear when it's hot. It was fascinating.

Maggie O'Farrell

perspective people interesting

People had tell me the most personal things. People I'd never met before would say thing like "Oh, that was the summer I had an affair with my neighbor." The 1976 heatwave occupies a peculiar place in people's psyches.

Maggie O'Farrell

psych summer people

As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

Maggie O'Farrell

personality secret brain

I think all families have these secrets, and it's sometimes the strangest things that bring them out. That was part of my interest in the heatwave, in heat as a catalyst for uncovering truths. I was reading Alice in Wonderland to one of my kids recently, and I remembered that it starts on a really hot day. Alice falls asleep because of the heat; the whole story is predicated on falling into a heat-fueled dream.

Maggie O'Farrell

reading dream fall

The role you've been ascribed in childhood can twist or break apart or seem outgrown, especially when you have your own family and begin to see your own childhood from a different angle. You remember. You reassess. I think that was the kernel of the novel for me. This idea that you change but that your family, the people you were born into, might find that change hard to accept. You no longer fit the mold you've always been ascribed. When the adult children in the book converge back on their small family home there's a sense that they don't fit there anymore.

Maggie O'Farrell

home book children

I try not to be too precious about my writing, and I try to be willing to walk away from it for a few hours when something's not working, to let things percolate a bit. I try not to hide myself away from life too much, because I think that's a risky thing for a writer to do.