How long did it take you to write and how many drafts did you have to work through? Certainly, I found it very cathartic to try and imagine how my mum might have been feeling as she faced the erosion of her memories. I hope I was a better carer and daughter as a result of writing this book. When you ask what the book means to me - I have to say that it is probably the most personal of the three books I’ve written, because my own mother had Alzheimer’s and became very unwell and died while I was writing Unbecoming. It became obvious very quickly that there were family secrets to be unearthed and rules to be broken and wild adventures to be had and that Mary would be the catalyst for change. She was being bullied at school and she was struggling with who she was and how she might fit into the world. She decided that solving these mysteries would make her life better, like some kind of magical salve. What was the nature of their estrangement? It made Katie question everything she thought was true about her family.

Katie also wanted to know why her mum hated her own mother so much. Katie wanted to know what this was (so did I at this stage!). She was desperate to find something, said it was imperative, but when questioned, couldn’t be more specific. I put them in a new town where they knew no one and gave them all a few problems to deal with and then I threw Mary in as the long lost grandmother who needed somewhere to stay because she had Alzheimer’s and could no longer cope alone and suddenly, the story began to buzz.Įvery time I wrote, Mary kept trying to run away (even if doors were locked ). A little triangle of a family came next - 17-year-old Katie and her younger brother, Chris, and their very controlling mother, Caroline. Most of it goes in the bin, but the strongest voices keep returning.Īn elderly woman called Mary, appeared very quickly and I liked her a lot - she had such a zest for life and she kept making me laugh. This is a bit like improvising in theatre – throwing words down and not planning anything in advance. I use free writing techniques when I start a new project. I had a few ideas, but they were abstract, theoretical, as if I knew the tone of the piece, but nothing else. I knew very little about the book when I started writing it. Where did you draw your inspiration to write Unbecoming ? What does the book mean to you?

Before I Die by Jenny Downham