The Perils and Pleasures of Writing a Novel Set in My Hometown

Last night I kicked off my book shop tour for my sixth novel, Hunger and Thirst with an event at Blackwells book shop in Oxford. The interviewer was wonderful, the audience were engaged and there were lots of books to sign. Hunger and Thirst is the first of my novels to be set in my hometown where I’ve lived for almost 40 years, unnamed in the book but recognizable for anyone who knows it.

(What Is the Point of the Writing Life?)

In the audience I spied a face I hadn’t seen for many years—an old boyfriend whom I was going out with in the late 1980s, when the book is set. When the interviewer asked whether the audience had any questions, my old boyfriend was the first to put up a hand. He looked a little sheepish and then he asked, “Am I in it?”

I came to this town when I was 19 to study sculpture at the art school. After that boyfriend, I met my first husband here, had two children, various jobs, a divorce, and married my second husband, who moved in with me. This town is my home and in Hunger and Thirst I made it my main character’s home too. Ursula is a little younger than I was in 1987 and she works in the post room of the art school rather than being a student there, but she frequents the same pub as me, and she lives in the same squat I lived in, with a similar overgrown garden and slugs in the kitchen.

There wasn’t a particular reason for setting the novel in my hometown but once I’d decided that would be its location, I had great pleasure in allowing myself to spend time remembering. And of course, never has a setting come so easily, since so much of it was real. I wrote notes and drew maps and recalled the bungalow with its lime green bathroom suite and how the house was filled with the previous owner’s belongings. And in my head, I walked around the town, going back to a time when there was a Blockbuster and two or three butchers on the high street.

For the things I couldn’t quite remember (What damage was done when a great storm came through in October 1987? Where else could you hire videos apart from Blockbuster? What was the name of the café which did an all-day breakfast?), I joined a local Facebook group with thousands of members who share memories of the town, many of whom were willing to answer my questions.

But Hunger and Thirst is darker than real life. Things happen to Ursula in the squat that never happened to me and she does something that I never did. In real life, the house had a very particular name, and as in the novel, was eventually bulldozed. In real life, a new house was subsequently built on the same piece of land and the name was kept. Putting myself in the position of the current owners, what would I think if I discovered that someone had written a novel and set it where I live, albeit in the house that was there before mine? I might not like it. In the novel I changed the name to The Underwood.

If tapping into my memories of my hometown in 1987 was relatively easy, I still had to remember that I was writing this book through the eyes of a fictional character with a very different background to mine. How does she see the world, and how does she see this town in particular? For a lot of the novel Ursula is afraid and whether the demons are inside her or outside isn’t made clear, but I needed the setting to reflect the mood. When things are going badly, the old red phone box she uses is smelly and dirty, when things are becoming frightening the town is dark and it’s raining, when she’s unhappy she eats too much of that all-day breakfast in the café. But when things are going well, she sits in the cathedral grounds in the sunshine and eats iced buns with her friend, and draws chalk pictures on the pavement to earn money.

I know a lot of people in this town: I’m in two writing groups, I have friends I’ve known since my children were babies or started school. I was conscious of whether I was being negative or positive about the place these people have chosen to live—not enough to compromise the story but enough to tweak it. I also describe some of the sculptures in the art school studios—actual pieces made by students I worked alongside. I was careful to be neutral, except about one piece. Ursula examines a wood carving by a student and finds it lacking. She says it isn’t hungry enough. I felt I was allowed to be critical about that one, because it’s mine. And because the timings were almost right, I gave myself a cameo: On another visit to the studio, Ursula sees a sculpture student with straight brown hair and a turned down mouth. That is me at 20.

As well as putting myself briefly in this novel, I also included someone else who is real. In each of my novels I’ve given a character the name of a real-life friend, but this time I included someone who I’ve recently reconnected with, and someone I was at art school with. The painter, Georgie Bates appears as herself back in 1987, inviting Ursula to a private view at the art school. But she is the only one. Ursula has a few brief relationships with men in the novel, plus one romance that is threaded throughout the story in an on/off relationship that lasts many years. But this man came straight out of my head and isn’t based on anyone real, in my hometown or otherwise.

So I was able to say to my old boyfriend in answer to his question, “No, you’re definitely not in it.”