I was 24 when I signed up for an Arvon creative writing course and set off with 40 pages of what I hoped might be a novel. It was based on my early childhood on the hippy trail in Morocco and was structurally complicated, full of flashbacks, anecdotes and jumps in location. I’d begun it on another course at the City Lit, where I was encouraged to present a longer piece, breaking the habit of short poems, songs and sketches that had made up a show I performed – I Didn’t Know Celery Could Kill You – with a friend from drama school, which we’d taken to the Edinburgh festival. I was happy pursuing this life, writing and performing with Kitty Aldridge (also now a writer) but her acting career took off in a way mine didn’t, and I was thrown back on my own resources.
Tell the story, was the advice I received at Arvon, start at the beginning, and keep going to the end. So I went to an old summer house and wrote what became the first chapter of Hideous Kinky. The rest might have flowed from there, but I hadn’t found that other vital ingredient – discipline. In order to write a book, apparently, you had to sit down and actually do it, and I still hoped that wasn’t true. Two years later I was out of work, again, single, again, and in a surprisingly despairing mood for 26. I made a decision that the following Monday I’d write for three hours, and I’d keep on writing until my agent called and told me I was needed immediately for a round-the-world Shakespeare tour.
That didn’t happen and so I applied myself, at first with difficulty, slowly with more ease, until soon there was nothing else I wanted to do but sit at my kitchen table and move on with my story. Memories came back to me, some humorous, others chilling, whole conversations, word for word. When I was stuck I’d traipse across London to interview my mother, and as she spoke I’d reimagine her stories from the perspective of my five-year-old self. By chance I was living in an area with a large North African community, a Moroccan advice bureau on the corner, where sometimes I queued up, to their surprise, with questions about places I’d visited, the spellings of half-remembered names. I did wonder, on difficult days, if I should go back to Marrakech, remind myself of the 18 months we spent there, but I was worried that the memories I’d stored for 20 years, along with my kaftan, a bead choker and my sister’s Arabic school book, would evaporate. It was only when the book was finished that I rewarded myself with a visit, and as soon as I stepped off the plane and breathed in the familiar scent of dust and heat I felt at home. I stayed in an old hotel, three floors around a courtyard, one toilet on the landing, a tap and a basin to wash clothes on the roof. Nothing it seemed had changed.
By then I had an excited feeling about the book, and indulged in fantasies of being interviewed and photographed, who might play the part of “Mum” when it was made into a film. But in the same breath, I wasn’t surprised when it was turned down by the first agents I sent it out to – being an actor had prepared me for disappointment. Then all of a sudden an agent liked it, gave it to an editor (the same editor I still have, 30 years later) who bought it on the spot. I was exultant. I remember sailing down Portobello Road, walking on air, amazed that my life was about to change, that I’d changed it through sheer force of will. Within days I’d started on a second book, and that’s when I bumped into a friend of my mother’s, a woman who’d visited us in Morocco, bringing along her baby, Mob. She congratulated me and asked what I was doing now. I’m writing another book, I told her. Another one! She looked amazed, but no one could have been more amazed than me.
• I Couldn’t Love You More is published by Bloomsbury.
