HELEN CROSS

Helen Cross was born in 1967 and brought up in East Yorkshire. Her first novel, My Summer of Love, was published in 2001 and won a Betty Trask Award. The book was made into a film directed by Pawel Pawelikowski. Helen's new novel, The Secrets She Keeps, was published in March 2005. She lives in Birmingham.

This interview took place at the beginning of October 2006, with questions from the British Council readers group in Singapore, who had recently read My Summer of Love.

 Photo: Roderick Field

1. How did you start off as a writer? Have you had any training?

HC: I had always wanted to be a writer and in my early twenties I decided to spend a year writing a novel. It took me four years and in the end I realised it was rubbish. I needed to actually learn the craft of writing. No one would think of just picking up the violin and playing a symphony, or  strapping on some ballet shoes and bursting into Swan Lake. So I wrote some short stories and then applied to do the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. There I won a rather prestigious scholarship for a story I had written, wrote a few more stories, and began writing My Summer of Love. By then I knew something about structure and voice.

2. How much of your own background do you draw upon in My Summer of Love?

HC: Lots. The town I call Whitehorse in the novel is Beverley in East Yorkshire where I was born and brought up. We lived in a declining industrial area on the side of a canal, and I spent a lot of time in pubs.  The Fakenham family are based on a posh, but rather strange, family I knew then. They thought I was too rough for their beautiful children, but to their irritation I weedled my way into some super parties and had lots of fun, including falling in love with one of their kids. Also when I was fifteen a child's body was discovered in the seedy dark canal that ran along the front of my house. I think that shocking experience informed the troubling sense of death and foreboding in the novel, and had a big impact on my teenage consciousness.

3. Were you as terrible as Mona and Tamsin?

HC: I was more loved  than those two, and had less personal trouble to deal with. But I was just rebellious and political and ill-informed and aching
for experience. I was just as willing to throw everything away for passion and adventure - as all young people are. That's what makes teenagers so
wonderful and so dangerous.

4. Why did you choose the Miners' Strike as the background for the novel?

HC: The 1984 Miners' strike was a groundbreaking event that created a major schism in Britain. In 1984 you were either for the miners, and the old working class, or against the miners and for the new aspirational Thatcherism. This seemed a good backdrop to a story that is all about a new kind of Thatcher feminism. Mona and Tamsin fall in love in a country that is violently overthrowing old male modes of power and authority and edging towards a more feminised, more malleable, media-based society. My two girls want to cast aside men too and be part of this thrilling new world of independence. But Tamsin is seducing Mona with a lie, just as Britain was seduced in a similar way.

5. How much is Mona’s attraction to Tamsin based on class, and how much sexuality?

HC: I'd say 90 per cent class. I'm rather of the opinion that we could love anyone, young or old, black or white, man or woman, if they tap into our deepest darkest reserves of loneliness, hope and loss. Mona loves Tamsin for many things, but ultimately for the deep kinship that comes with her lie.

6. Why did you choose to write the novel in the first person? How do you think it would be different if it were in the third person?

HC: Voice, voice, voice. I like books that allow the characters to tell their own stories in their own language. I also like unreliable narrators, where
characters try to both reveal themselves and conceal themselves. We do this all the time in our social relationships. I'm less keen on the godlike overview of the third person, where the masterly author is in charge and the brain seems to come before the body. This is Mona's own dark bloody story and only her words could tell it.

7. Which books would you recommend our book club to read?

HC: Madame Bovary by Flaubert; The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott; The Orchard on Fire by Shena Mackay.

8. I didn’t like either Tamsin or Mona. Am I supposed to? Did you?

HC: Oh yes, I do like them. They are funny and determined and willing to break the patriarchal rules around them in order to be true to their desires.  But I'm not surprised that you didn't because I try to expose the most hidden parts of my characters. These two are mean, devious, vain, manipulative little liars, as well as pioneers. But way down we are all animals. And these two have less experience to rein them in.  If you think those two are horrible, you should check out the monsters in my second novel!

9. The book has been made into a film. Is the book very different? What was your involvement in the film process? How does it feel seeing your book transformed by somebody else into another art form?

HC: I had nothing to do with the making of the film and they didn't want anything to do with me. I think it's a super film and a lovely evocation of the mood of the novel. The actresses are wonderful.  But I don't think of the film and the novel as closely related. They are like distant cousins in my mind, related by DNA but totally separate. A novel is a completely different beast to a film, I'm writing interiority and they are creating visual images to show the story. Sometimes I feel like the birth mother of a gorgeous baby bought by a wealthy infertile couple. They bring up the baby with all sorts of glamorous and beautiful advantage, and are keen to conceal their baby's more humble origins.

10. Would you be interested in writing in another form? A play? A film?

HC: Yes, I have written a play for the stage and several plays for the radio. I have just completed my first screenplay, which is a psychological ghost story. It's about an eleven year old Muslim girl who gets lost on a school trip to Stratford upon Avon. Following a series of eerie and unnerving meetings she becomes convinced that she is a ghost.

11. Why did you set the book in the 1980s? From what age is Mona looking back? It doesn't feel like twenty years.

HC: The miners' strike really, for the reasons I gave earlier. This is a story about two girls meeting and falling in love at the time of great social change. I'm interested in writing stories about relationships between people, and those people's relationships with society. We don't love in isolation, though we pretend we do - we love according to the modes of the day. Tamsin and Mona completely misunderstand one another and so fictionalise one another based on the cliches of their world, and their limited life experience. It's important that Mona tells this story many years later - yes, about twenty years later when she is her thirties, because there is a problem with child and teen narrators; their innocence can become ignorance. It's never good if a reader is wiser than a character and this could have happened if the naive, arrogant girl Mona had told her story as it happened. The fact that she looks back on events with a wiser hindsight allows her to know her story in a way that she didn't twenty years before. Also a time shift in a novel
hints at the way our human lives are so painfully short and how the experience of being alive is really one of brilliant dazzling hurtling confusion - which is exactly the mood I wanted for the book.

Find out more about Helen Cross. 

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