What made you choose adoption as the focus of your new novel?
Most of the novels seem, in some way, to grow out of the novel before...and in Girl from the South I was, among other things, looking at how where we come from shapes us (or doesn't!). And that made me think about the wider and deeper question of identity, and how hugely important it seems to be to know where, and who, we come come from. And, that, in turn, set me thinking about what it must feel like not to know the answers to those vital questions....and so, on, quite naturally, to adoption.

In the course of your research, is it something that people find it difficult to talk about?
No, rather the reverse. For adopted people, understandably, the story of their journey to find their identities is of central significance and those who are naturally talkers - and therefore those who would want to talk to me - are open and eloquent on the subject. Not since researching Other Peoples' Children have I heard such outpouring of feeling. One of the most vivid of writers on the topic, the American, Nancy Verrier, says that "the abandoned baby lives within the adoptee all his life". I have to admit that I didn't hear anything in my researches to contradict this.

Brother & Sister has a very large cast of characters. Was this particularly challenging when writing the novel?
Well, not really, because I got to know them one by one, rather as I hope the reader will do. And although I know that there's a danger of confusing the reader initially, I wouldn't be faithfully reflecting the complexity of modern family life, and relationships, if I made the cast list tidier for artistic reasons!

Managing them all got easier as the novel wore on, but I always like the change of pace that dealing with very varied characters automatically involves, so even if I needed to be very vigilant, I never needed to worry about energy flagging.

Do you have a favourite character within this novel and also generally within your novels?
I always like child and teenage characters because writing about potential rather than settled personalities always has such hope and vitality to it. I grew fond of Ellen and Polly in this book (maybe as an eldest daughter myself, I always sympathise with other eldest daughters!) but I also had a softspot for David, who behaved with that endearing (or maddening, depending on your point of view) clumsy male honesty that women don't quite ever seem able to appreciate or emulate. I like all my characters who can manage some degree of candour, especially about themselves, and who don't whine - I am allergic to self pity...

Did any character in Brother & Sister take on a larger role during the writing of the book?
For once, no. It's usually the case that some character or other gets away from me and monopolises the action (sometimes to its enhancement!), but this time, I was so determined to give everyone a chance to feel their own perfectly valid reaction to Nathalie and David's actions that maybe I unconsciously kept a rather tighter grip on the cast than sometimes. So, even if I didn't LIKE them all equally - Cora, for example, is a more appealing human than Carole in my view - I wanted them all to have the chance to, as it were, say their say, and be listened to by the reader.

The trigger for Nathalie to want to find her birth parents is having her own child. Is this typical?
Very typical. Which is why, I suppose, most people begin to want to find their birth mothers (if they do, that is) in their late twenties and early thirties.There's a very practical reason after all, quite apart from the psychological one - you'd want to know what your child might have inherited genetically, wouldn't you?

Fifty years ago adoption and the stigma of illegitimacy seem to be inextricably combined. Have we successfully moved on and created a new, more positive blueprint within society?
The received wisdom now is that a more liberal society means there are no stigmas left about birth circumstances. I discovered, during my researches, that this is partly true but not as true as is promulgated. Whether your parents married no longer matters, but what continues to matter deeply - and rightly in my view - is who your parents are, and whether they are interested in your welfare. Several people said sadly to me that if your mother didn't love you (ie she could give you away) how could anyone else ever find you really loveable? And the need to know names, especially boys of their vanished fathers, was urgent. Almost all the adoptees I spoke to confessed to problems with intimacy and several said that being adopted was something they didn't regularly or openly confess to. So it looks as if there may be no social stigma as such left, but that there is still an abiding sense of being an outsider, being different, being in some way eternally slightly lost...

It seems that much more media attention is focused on infertility than adoption. Brother and Sister does touch on the heartbreak of infertility within marriage and I wondered if your research had thrown any more light on this area?
Like being adopted, I don't think the pain of not being able to conceive, if you long to, ever goes away. As with most human griefs, infertile people devise ways of living with this profound unhappiness, but it's always there and I can't see that it doesn't profoundly colour the way you see yourself all your life. Re-production is too basic and visceral a need in most of us for it to be other than literally life-changing if you find you can't do it, and although adoption can be a wonderful channel for nurturing feelings, it seemed, from the people I spoke to, that the anxiety and disappointment of these being legally rather than naturally your children, never goes away. One woman said to me of her adopted daughter, "When X began her periods, I went straight back to where I'd been in my head when I first learned I'd never conceive".

Without giving too much away, do you feel hopeful or apprehensive about your characters in Brother and Sister having a happy future after the timespan of the novel? Do you know what happens to your characters after the story ends?
Funnily enough, I felt more hopeful about Steve and Nathalie than I did about the little Canadian family. Once Nathalie had stopped flouncing about seeing herself - oh yawn yawn - as the little victim, I think she'd have seen that Steve truly loved her, and that she had been pretty provocative in her way. I even think they might have had another baby, and relations with Lynne would have improved without David there, inadvertently adding to the tensions. As to David and co, I'm not so certain.I wasn't sure that Marnie being back permanently in her mother's orbit was a good thing, and oddly enough, I think David's quest wasn't over - I suspect he was going to want to find his father...

 

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