Joanna Cannon and Ann Morgan Meet the Author


Joanna Cannon and Ann Morgan

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Now it's time for Meet the Author.

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Joanna Cannon and Ann Morgan are both first-time novelists.

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Joanna is a hospital psychiatrist in Derbyshire.

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Ann is a freelance journalist and writer in London who's already

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published one non-fiction book.

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Joanna's novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep,

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is set in the blisteringly hot summer of 1976 when ten-year-old

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Grace and her friend Tilly set out to discover why Mrs Creasy

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from No 8 has gone missing.

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Ann's book, Beside Myself, is the story of what happens

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when six-year-old twins Helen and Eleanor decide one day

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to swap identities.

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Joanna Cannon, this book is set in the summer of 1976,

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a famously hot summer, on a housing estate somewhere

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in the East Midlands.

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And one of the neighbours has gone missing and Grace and her friend,

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Tilly, set off to find out what's happened.

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Just fill us in a little bit more on the circumstances.

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Grace and Tilly, as you say, live on a very ordinary estate

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where nothing really happens.

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But Mrs Creasy, one of the neighbours, disappears

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overnight and nobody knows where she's gone.

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And all the very respectable neighbours who live around Grace

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start blaming each other for Mrs Creasy disappearing.

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And then they blame the heat for Mrs Creasy disappearing.

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But most of all they blame Walter Bishop, who is the gentleman

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who lives at No 11.

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And the reason they blame him is because he's a little bit

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different from everyone else.

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Two things about this book - one is it turns out

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everybody has secrets.

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They do.

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And the second is that we don't like outsiders.

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You coin a phrase, I've not seen this term before,

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you call them 'unbelongers'.

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What do you mean by that?

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It's people who live on the periphery.

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I think everybody knows somebody like Walter Bishop in the book.

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Somebody who is in the community but doesn't necessarily find

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themselves included in things.

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It could be because their hair is a little bit too long,

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or their glasses are a little bit too thick, or they keep themselves

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to themselves and their behaviour isn't necessarily "normal".

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So, as a community, people tend to reject them and they then live

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on the outside and the only time they are noticed

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is when something goes wrong.

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Ann Morgan, your book has a most intriguing premise,

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two identical twins, and one of them, Helen,

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the dominant one, decides that it would be fun to swap identities

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to wind up their mother.

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Ellie, the less dominant one, decides she likes it like that,

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and she doesn't want to swap back and it destroys

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Helen, doesn't it?

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Yes, that's right.

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What starts off as a game really, as a bit of mischief,

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a way of lightening a situation, or a moment of discomfort,

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becomes a serious problem for Helen.

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And what happens as time goes on is she tries repeatedly

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to reverse this swap, thinking that of course everyone

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will recognise who she is, she's Helen - we all have this thing

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inside us that is unique to us - and someone will see that in her.

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And yet time and again all of the people around her

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with whom she's grown up fail to see what's happened,

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or fail to accept it.

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And as time goes on she becomes increasingly dismantled as a person

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and pushed out, elbowed out of her life.

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So it's a book about identity and how far our identity

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and our sense of ourselves is dictated by others'

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preconceptions about us.

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Absolutely.

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How much are we inherently ourselves and how much are we what other

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people expect of us, or reflect on to us?

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Your character, Helen, who everyone calls Ellie,

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and who in the book as an adult you call Smudge, is living

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a tremendously chaotic life and at times she has some bouts

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of mental illness.

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I think you've both read the other's book, or at least are reading.

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Joanna, you are by profession a psychiatrist.

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I wondered how convincing you found the portrait of mental illness

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in Ann's book.

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It's incredibly convincing.

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I think when I first read about Smudge when you see that first

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opening scene and the kind of environment that she lives in,

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I thought this woman has manic depression.

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Because, you do tend as a psychiatrist to diagnose

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fictional characters quite easily.

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And immediately I thought this woman is very, very unwell.

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I thought it was beautifully and very sensitively portrayed.

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This is a first novel for both of you.

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Joanna, you started by writing a blog, I think.

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I did, yes.

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So how much of the book is drawn on the disguised but real-life

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accounts of real people in that blog?

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The people in the blog are all fictitious.

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When I started medicine I had to go through a lot of different

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departments before I did psychiatry.

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And I saw a lot of very distressing things that even in my 30s I found

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very difficult to deal with.

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And I used to get very upset about it, and I thought I've either

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got to lose that sensitivity or I've got to process it.

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So I started writing my blog.

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And from that developed the story of Tilly and Grace.

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Ann, you've had a more conventional route, you read English

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at university and then went and did a creative writing course

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at the University of East Anglia.

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You are a journalist and a writer by profession,

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but you started off writing non-fiction.

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A Year of Reading The World is your previous book,

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in which you tried to read a book from all 196 countries in the world

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in the space of a year, which is quite a challenge.

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Why fiction?

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I found that the many very different and often quite challenging

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and extraordinary stories I came across during that project remade me

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as a writer and made me much more creative and much more fearless,

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I think, and not afraid to tackle topics and things that perhaps

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previously I would have been intimidated to try.

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And so actually that non-fiction project I think prepared the ground

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for me to try again at novels.

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These two books have some superficial things in common.

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Both of them are told, at least for part of the time,

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from the point of view of a child.

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Both of them alternate chapters in the now -

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which in your case, Joanna, is 1976, and in your case it's contemporary

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Britain - with chapters looking back into the past,

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and gradually unravelling a mystery.

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Now, earlier this month I interviewed another first novelist

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And I wonder, all three of you have been on creative writing courses.

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So I decided quite early on we really had to go back a few

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years and see what actually happened on The Avenue.

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course, did you find?

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and to treat it as a vocation in a way.

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Writing is an odd thing, because, you do it on your own in your room.

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Unlike many of the other arts where you have to collaborate

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Telling people that you want to be a writer can feel a bit like coming

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out almost, because it's a bit embarrassing.

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No one really knows this about you.

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And so actually going somewhere where you can share that ambition

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and spend time devoted to it, and you are sort of justified

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in prioritising it, is a valuable thing.

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much of that.

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It was more a place to explore the story that you wanted to tell

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and how you might do that.

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Ann Morgan, Joanna Cannon, thank you both very much indeed.

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And that is the last of these Meet The Author interviews that

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with writers, I think it's probably time to quit while I'm still ahead.

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But Meet The Author will be continuing under new management.

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In a few weeks' time, Jim Naughtie from Radio 4 will be

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taking over in this chair.

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In the meantime, if you have been, thank you for watching.

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