WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE Q& A

What’s the book about?

In a nutshell, it’s about two very different sisters, polar opposites, who clash in every conceivable (and I use this word advisedly!) way. Grace is the ‘golden girl’ who seems to have everything: a happy marriage to a nice guy, plenty of money, and a great job. Susannah, on the other hand, is ‘the pretty one’ who’s totally screwed up her life, divorcing three husbands and dumping her kids in care before decamping to America. Without giving too much of the plot away, Fate brings her back home to Grace, where she offers to do her sister a massive favour – and then changes her mind, with potentially lethal consequences.

Are Grace and Susannah based on you and your sister?

To some extent, yes. Much of their relationship was inspired by me and my sister, not because we hate each other (far from it!) but because, like all sisters, we were friends and rivals growing up, and I could see the seeds of a far darker story there if things had turned out differently for us. I know so many sisters who love and envy each other in equal measure as the see-saw of power switches between them. It’s such a competitive, complex relationship. And I couldn’t help thinking how narrow is the line between ‘normal’ sibling rivalry and extreme behaviour – and what might happen if you crossed it. That was my starting point, and from there, the other elements in the book, such as surrogacy, evolved.

Where do your plot ideas come from?

In terms of the dramatics – like child-snatching in my last book, The Cradle Snatcher, or the organ donation issue in this one – I draw my ideas from the headlines. My background is as a news journalist for ITN and CNN, and I’ve been to many of the world’s troubled hotspots over the years. There are some stories and images that linger in my mind nearly twenty years later, and provide fertile ground for my fiction. But what really intrigues me are the relationships between people, and how we can be both cruel and compassionate to those we love. Life is like one huge soap opera: I never tire of watching – and writing about – it. As one of my friends once pointed out to me, I shamelessly plagiarize my life – but trust me, if you had a family as kooky as mine, you would too.

Your last four books have been written in the first person from the viewpoints of multiple characters. Why did you decide to do that?

I love getting inside my characters’ heads, and one of the best ways to do this is writing in the first person. You have to fully realize a character to be able to do this: to know them inside and out. If I can’t hear their voice – the kind of words they’d use, the pattern of their speech – I know I haven’t got them right yet. My husband says he can always tell which chapter I’ve written when I come out of my study, just from the way I behave – especially when I was writing The Adultery Club, which pitched a sweet, slightly dippy wife against a naughty-but-nice mistress! (Sorry, maybe that’s TMI…) I also like that I can play with the reader’s expectations: we trust our narrator, even when her or she is patently biased, and I like reversing the reader’s assumptions when in the next chapter they see something through another character’s eyes.

What genre do you read yourself? Who are some of your favourite authors?

I write the kind of books I like to read, so many of my favourite authors are in the same genre as me: Jodi Picoult, Penny Vincenzi, Joanna Trollope, Jane Green. I also adore Jilly Cooper, who is the first and the best of them all. It’s all branded chick-lit now, which has become a pejorative term – no-one calls writers of male fiction like Mickey Spillane dick-lit – but sticks and stones…. As long as people love what I write and keep buying it, who cares what they call it. I also re-read the classics all the time, to remind me how it should be done, and I love historical biography and (good) historical fiction, like Sharon Penman and Barbara Erskine. My first book was actually an ‘autobiography’ of Anne Boleyn – I wrote it when I was 18, long before HBO produced The Tudors (or as I like to think of it, Henry VIII: 90210) and made history hot again!

You’ve written a couple of non-fiction books, including Beat the Bitch!: How to Stop the Other Woman Stealing Your Man. Is this something you want to do more of?

Beat the Bitch! was such fun to write! I’m very much of the ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ persuasion, so turning a screwed-up marriage into a best-selling book was sweet. But fiction is my first love, and I’m currently writing my eighth novel, ‘The Wife Who Ran Away’, which will be published by Macmillan next Spring. It does exactly what it says on the tin: it’s about a wife who walks out on her husband, her children, her friends, her job and her family. I love my life, but there are moments where I want to run away from it all, and the best thing about being a writer is that I get to experience all those alternate realities vicariously. So that’s the book I’m doing now – although I have been asked to write a book about how to get the man you love to marry you, which I’m planning to do soon….