Hi everyone!
This week’s #SJsTwitterBookClub featured author and screenwriter Patrick Gale (@PNovelistGale) chatting about his brilliant book Notes From An Exhibition.
Patrick explained why he’d chosen this particular book from his extensive, and wonderful, back catalogue. “It's the one that changed my career. Rough Music was my first novel to be sold in Sainsbury's, which was a sort of benchmark, but Notes was picked up by Richard and Judy when they were still on telly. It brought me over 100,000 new readers." I then asked him if he’d summarise the book for us.
Basically it's a novel about motherhood and creativity
“Of course. I set out to write the most difficult mother yet. Rachel is a painter of genius and profoundly bipolar. There's a suspicion that her children only exist because pregnancy gave her the perfect excuse to come off her meds and do great work. The novel is a complex double helix in structure, with one strand going backwards in time to tell us how the hell Rachel came to be the woman she became and a second strand going forward showing how her children and husband withstand and survive her. Or, in one terrible case, fail to. So basically it's a novel about motherhood and creativity. I later wrote a sort of echo chamber novel, also set in West Penwith, about fatherhood and faith, which is A Perfectly Good Man. They share a few characters but can be read in any order.”
Patrick was also generous enough to tell us how he goes about working on his novels.
“Characters always come first. Often there's no plot for ages (or at all!) just notes for characters. I sort of drill backwards into their childhoods and almost play therapist to them until I feel there's enough substance there. The best plots seems to emerge simply from that...”
Rachel is actually an amalgam of all sorts of "difficult" creative women
And we also talked about the appearance of real-life artist Barbara Hepworth (AKA “GHB”) in Notes From An Exhibition. “In some ways she HAD to be in the novel so as to make it clear that Rachel wasn't her. Rachel is actually an amalgam of all sorts of "difficult" creative women , not least the amazing poet Anne Sexton.”
And during a conversation about the book’s various jacket designs over the years it emerged that one of the covers features a hand-model, who had also been the hands of Nanette Newman in the famous Fairy Liquid ads years ago.
It was a far-ranging and fascinating discussion about a really wonderful book. If you haven’t read it, it’s highly recommended!
Next week, #SJsTwitterBookClub welcomes author Julia Crouch, who’ll tell us all about her debut, Cuckoo.
Happy reading!