"Where are you in the story?"

A personal story from the writing of Before I Go to Sleep

Today, I thought I’d tell you a story of the writing of Before I Go to Sleep…

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“This book is not about me…”

I wrote most of the first draft of my debut, Before I Go to Sleep, in 2009, while attending a course at the Faber Academy. That course ended in the July, and there was a little party to celebrate, during which I met super-agent Clare Conville who told me she liked the sound of the book I was working on and would love to read it when it was done. Now, as I’m sure you can imagine, nothing spurs on a hungry debut novelist more than a top literary agent telling them she’s interested in their work, and I put my foot down on the accelerator and finished the book a month later.

This was the first draft, however (which I now call ‘Draft zero’, to remind myself it’s just the raw material and not intended for anyone’s eyes but my own) and so I put the book away for a few weeks and picked it up again in October/November. A rewrite later, and just after Christmas, I messaged Clare to tell her it was done and she invited me to her office to deliver the manuscript. As I handed it over she asked me a question which has stayed with me ever since. ‘Where are you in this book?‘

At the time it was an easy question to answer. I’d seen several aspiring novelists write thinly-veiled autobiography — and I’d even done it myself in one of my abandoned bottom-drawer novels that will never see the light of day — and realised that while tempting, it’s rarely a good idea. Everyone thinks their own story is fascinating, everyone is the hero of their own life. But often our lives do not translate well to fiction, and furthermore it can be harder to see where the problems lie in the work we’re doing if it’s a version of our own tale that we’re telling. And so, quite deliberately, I’d written a book about someone with whom I had nothing in common. She was a woman, for a start, and older than I was at the time, and in a very specific situation (living with catastrophic amnesia) which I was not.

And so, when Clare asked the question I replied confidently:

‘I’m not in this book at all,’ I said. I told her it was a work of pure fiction, nothing to do with me whatsoever.

‘Right,’ she said, knowingly. ‘Shall we go for cake?’

Fast forward to a few years later…