Interview with Victoria Delderfield, author of The Secret Mother

I first met Vicky on the MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster, and loved the premise of this book, which she was working on at the time. Now, at last, two children and a whole lot of work later, The Secret Mother is finally out, and getting the recognition it deserves. Winner of the Hookline Competition for Book Group reads, this is a book that will make you ask questions about your cultural expectations, your relationships with your children, and what it is to be a mother.

What inspired you to start a book set in China?

The novel emerged out of a short story I wrote featuring a Chinese factory worker called Mai Ling. She wouldn’t let me go until I’d written more of her story. Mai Ling is one in a million – or several million – but her life became special to me, I think because I wanted to understand what it might be like growing up in a culture so vastly different to my own. For me, an exciting part of writing – and reading - is making journeys through time and place that everyday life precludes.

I felt strongly that the best way to explore China’s massive social change would be through the life of an individual whose life was also in a state of economic, social and emotional flux. Whilst researching the novel, I was personally moved by the many stories of women, like Mai Ling, who leave homes and families and undertake physically exhausting work in factories in order to earn their own living and support their families. Mai Ling’s journey – both physical and psychological - from peasant girl to dagongmei (‘working girl’) and eventually mother is particular to China and the era in which it became a market economy.

The novel developed into a story about overseas adoption when I realised that the global significance of Mai Ling’s life exceeded pure economics.

Are there any Chinese images from your novel that have particular resonance for you?

I was very inspired by the photographic work of Polly Braden, Michael Wolf and Edward Burtynsky when writing The Secret Mother. Their work documents the lives of workers, like Mai Ling, caught up in the largest migration in human history as it occurred in China in the early nineties. I was haunted by their visual depictions of the mechanisation of the female body that’s required to support mass production and consumerism: factories teeming with identical uniforms, workers seated in grid formation - all carefully spaced and monitored to ensure maximum productivity. I liked the idea that Mai Ling’s pregnant body is in revolt against this homogeneity.

Photo Credit: Polly Braden 'China Between'

You started this book before having children of your own. Has being a mother made a difference to how you view Mai Ling as a character?

I have an incredibly close relationship with my mum and this undoubtedly influenced Mai Ling’s characterisation, especially the fiercely protective and tenacious nature of Mai Ling’s love for her daughters. Letting go of one’s children is something all parents do to varying degrees and at various ages and stages so I hoped this theme would resonate with readers. Mai Ling must face the heart-wrenching decision of who will care for her babies, but she never relinquishes the emotional bonds. Mai Ling’s predicament is all the more poignant now that I’m a parent. I also appreciate more fully the absolute horror and fear that Nancy (the twins’ adoptive mother) feels at the prospect of losing her girls.

Motherhood and family are themes I am sure to return to because my own family relationships are so personally significant.

I loved the way the twins were so different. Which was the easier twin to write, and why?

I’ve breathed my sixteen year old self into both girls – sixteen is a fun age to write about because characters are naturally evolving and identity is in flux. The twins definitely change throughout the course of the novel as their sense of identity matures. Jen is exceptionally smart, hard-working, brave, curious, sensitive and caring. Ricki would probably call her the goody two shoes of the family. I chose to write certain chapters from Jen’s point of view to show what was going on beneath the surface: her uncertainties, fears and deep desire for acceptance – especially from her twin. Jen has been learning GCSE Mandarin and wants to reconnect with her cultural heritage. Her openness is contrasted with Ricki’s seemingly stubborn refusal to confront the past. Ricki has internalised a lot of her hurt and confusion concerning her Chinese birth mother and I wanted her to heal. The scene featuring Ricki and May towards the end of the book was one of the most moving to write, but writing about characters with intense emotions is never easy because there’s always a big risk of tipping over into melodrama.

What is your favourite book club read, and why? Can you recommend a book to read as a companion volume to The Secret Mother?

I love my book club – we’re a small group of friends that spend half our time getting passionate about books and the rest catching up on life and sharing our laughter and troubles over tea and cake. The books that we read have become special to me because through them I can chart the ups and downs of our lives. Our most recent read was The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. We heard him speak at Manchester Central Library the day after its publication. This greatly helped our understanding and appreciation of the novel – which is enigmatic, imaginative, ambitious and very moving. He is a writer I have long admired for his thoughtful ability to re-invent genres.

A good companion to The Secret Mother might be Emma Donoghue’s Room, a novel which also depicts the tenacity of a mother’s love for her child, albeit in very different circumstances.

find Victoria on her website or chat to her on twitter @delderfi

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Confessions of a historical fiction writer - Leftovers

The question I get asked the most, and the thing people are most obsessed with when I talk to them about historical fiction is historical "accuracy".

Recently whilst working on my novel "The Gilded Lily" which is set in 1661, I was working with minor characters that were twins. In those times according to my research, people still were very suspicious of twins, viewing them as something unnatural, eerie and an enigma. The most common view of the time was that twins were sired by different fathers (if they were not identical) or that the mother had conceived twice by the same man (and was therefore a bit of a nymphomaniac) if they were identical. In the case of non-identical twins one of the babies was therefore often labelled "the bastard" and the woman ostracized as an adulteress.

During the research I went off on many intriguing sidetracks, fascinated to discover the story of conjoined twins, who were even more suspect to the 17th century eye, and viewed as an aberration against God or monsters. The conjoined twins born at Isle Brewers, Somersetshire, in 1680, were among the earliest live-born English conjoined twins and people travelled from all over the country to see them. The twins died, probably in 1683, after being bought from their mother and exhibited for money by a certain Henry Walrond, an unpopular country squire who also by the way was a great persecutor of the quakers. A memorial plate in Lambeth Delft still exists that was made after their death to commemorate their popular appeal as a sideshow attraction and to mourn the passing of a unique "monster".

All this was engrossing, so I duly included back-story scenes about the twins birth and wrote them into the plot. At the end of the first draft I realised that all the stuff about the twins was unbalancing the main thrust of the narrative and undermining the main characters, so reluctantly I cut most of it out, leaving a few sentences so as not to "waste" my research. After the second draft, leaving in the information about attitudes to twins raised questions in the reader, rather than being illuminating. So I cut it further. In the finished draft a mere veiled reference is made to my identical twins birth and back-story.

What a shame, I thought. There is such a good plot in there, but unfortunately not for "The Gilded Lily". My research on twins went the way of much of my research - cut to make way for a better story.

This often happens. The research cannot show too much in a novel or it turns into a history book, or readers get frustrated whilst you go down back-alleys of the plot. I recently read Mary Novik's brilliant book, Conceit, (set in a similar period to The Gilded Lily) about the daughter of the poet John Donne. At the back of the book she says,

"I have consulted all the usual scholars and biographers but, after all is said and done, this is my seventeenth century and I have invented joyfully and feely."

There can be thousands of individual views and reconstructions of an era, and all will contain accuracies, inaccuracies, omissions and inventions. That is the nature of fiction.

Whilst browsing online the other day though, I suddenly came across this - the cover drew my eye as it looked historical. When I clicked on it I found this blurb:

"London 1661. In this era the old belief that twins cannot be sired by one man still prevails, a superstition which automatically makes the mother of Edgar and Emma Torbet an adulteress. Desperate to protect her children from their violent father she flees, finally settling in London......

It made me laugh because all the time what I thought of as bits of my story had already been germinating and sprouting in someone else's imagination. It reminded me that we can never own history, and that what are the leftovers to me will make a very nice main meal for someone else. Good Luck with Twins, Katherine!

But what's the betting that when The Gilded Lily comes out, a reader somewhere will say, "she didn't get that right, about the twins. In the 17th century they...."