Hi. One of the major themes of this novel is adoption - whether or not children know they are adopted, and how - and when - they're told about it. I wonder if you chose to write about subject this from personal experience?
Hello, Pym, and thanks for your question. I have always been fascinated by this subject, and by stories where there is a mystery about someone's origins, but I haven't had direct experience of adoption within my family. I tend to write about something outside of my own experience - I enjoy exploring something new and unfamiliar and working out how the characters would act and feel. But I have been asked this question a lot since the book came out so I've been thinking about what first sparked my interest in the whole topic of birth families and adoptive families.
When I was a teenager I had a friend who was an adopted child. In contrast to Carol, my troubled narrator in 'Living In Perhaps', she was an adored - and adoring - only child, who had been told she was adopted at an early age so that it was just something she grew up knowing about. No surprises for her. It did lend her a slight aura of exoticism, and occasionally we speculated about her origins, but only in a light-hearted way. Then there was the other side of the adoption equation: when I was 10 or 11 another friend's teenage sister got pregnant. I think she was seventeen at the time. Being what was then called an "unmarried mother" was not an option, so she went away to a mother-and-baby home and came back some weeks later, without either bump or baby. I remember being told that she had had to look after the baby for three weeks until it was handed over to the adoptive parents. I still can't decide whether having this opportunity to bond with a baby she was having to give up was cruel or kind - and cruel or kind to whom? It's such a complex and emotive issue.
So perhaps these two experiences were bobbing around in the back of my mind when I began to formulate Carol's story. I made her the sort of child who lives a great deal in her own imagination. And fantasising about "really" being someone quite other than the person we are, some other parent's child, is not such an uncommon daydream. Somewhere in the creative process Carol's fantasy and the possible reality of a 1960s adoption came together. Attitudes to adoption were not so open then as they have become, but I took a chance on creating a character who had been told nothing until she was 16. Then I took part in a radio phone-in on the subject, and right away several people called in to tell their stories and the way they found out that they were adopted, which were even more blunt and heart-breaking than the one I had made up!
Hi. One of the major themes of this novel is adoption - whether or not children know they are adopted, and how - and when - they're told about it. I wonder if you chose to write about subject this from personal experience?
Pym.
Hello, Pym, and thanks for your question. I have always been fascinated by this subject, and by stories where there is a mystery about someone's origins, but I haven't had direct experience of adoption within my family. I tend to write about something outside of my own experience - I enjoy exploring something new and unfamiliar and working out how the characters would act and feel. But I have been asked this question a lot since the book came out so I've been thinking about what first sparked my interest in the whole topic of birth families and adoptive families.
When I was a teenager I had a friend who was an adopted child. In contrast to Carol, my troubled narrator in 'Living In Perhaps', she was an adored - and adoring - only child, who had been told she was adopted at an early age so that it was just something she grew up knowing about. No surprises for her. It did lend her a slight aura of exoticism, and occasionally we speculated about her origins, but only in a light-hearted way. Then there was the other side of the adoption equation: when I was 10 or 11 another friend's teenage sister got pregnant. I think she was seventeen at the time. Being what was then called an "unmarried mother" was not an option, so she went away to a mother-and-baby home and came back some weeks later, without either bump or baby. I remember being told that she had had to look after the baby for three weeks until it was handed over to the adoptive parents. I still can't decide whether having this opportunity to bond with a baby she was having to give up was cruel or kind - and cruel or kind to whom? It's such a complex and emotive issue.
So perhaps these two experiences were bobbing around in the back of my mind when I began to formulate Carol's story. I made her the sort of child who lives a great deal in her own imagination. And fantasising about "really" being someone quite other than the person we are, some other parent's child, is not such an uncommon daydream. Somewhere in the creative process Carol's fantasy and the possible reality of a 1960s adoption came together. Attitudes to adoption were not so open then as they have become, but I took a chance on creating a character who had been told nothing until she was 16. Then I took part in a radio phone-in on the subject, and right away several people called in to tell their stories and the way they found out that they were adopted, which were even more blunt and heart-breaking than the one I had made up!
Julia