0:00:03 > 0:00:07Now it's time for Meet the Author.
0:00:07 > 0:00:10Joanna Cannon and Ann Morgan are both first-time novelists.
0:00:10 > 0:00:13Joanna is a hospital psychiatrist in Derbyshire.
0:00:13 > 0:00:16Ann is a freelance journalist and writer in London who's already
0:00:16 > 0:00:18published one non-fiction book.
0:00:18 > 0:00:22Joanna's novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep,
0:00:22 > 0:00:25is set in the blisteringly hot summer of 1976 when ten-year-old
0:00:25 > 0:00:31Grace and her friend Tilly set out to discover why Mrs Creasy
0:00:31 > 0:00:33from No 8 has gone missing.
0:00:33 > 0:00:36Ann's book, Beside Myself, is the story of what happens
0:00:36 > 0:00:38when six-year-old twins Helen and Eleanor decide one day
0:00:38 > 0:00:46to swap identities.
0:00:58 > 0:01:01Joanna Cannon, this book is set in the summer of 1976,
0:01:01 > 0:01:03a famously hot summer, on a housing estate somewhere
0:01:03 > 0:01:05in the East Midlands.
0:01:05 > 0:01:12And one of the neighbours has gone missing and Grace and her friend,
0:01:12 > 0:01:13Tilly, set off to find out what's happened.
0:01:13 > 0:01:16Just fill us in a little bit more on the circumstances.
0:01:16 > 0:01:19Grace and Tilly, as you say, live on a very ordinary estate
0:01:19 > 0:01:20where nothing really happens.
0:01:20 > 0:01:25But Mrs Creasy, one of the neighbours, disappears
0:01:25 > 0:01:28overnight and nobody knows where she's gone.
0:01:28 > 0:01:30And all the very respectable neighbours who live around Grace
0:01:30 > 0:01:32start blaming each other for Mrs Creasy disappearing.
0:01:32 > 0:01:34And then they blame the heat for Mrs Creasy disappearing.
0:01:34 > 0:01:41But most of all they blame Walter Bishop, who is the gentleman
0:01:42 > 0:01:43who lives at No 11.
0:01:43 > 0:01:45And the reason they blame him is because he's a little bit
0:01:46 > 0:01:47different from everyone else.
0:01:47 > 0:01:49Two things about this book - one is it turns out
0:01:49 > 0:01:50everybody has secrets.
0:01:50 > 0:01:51They do.
0:01:51 > 0:01:53And the second is that we don't like outsiders.
0:01:53 > 0:01:56You coin a phrase, I've not seen this term before,
0:01:56 > 0:01:57you call them 'unbelongers'.
0:01:57 > 0:01:58What do you mean by that?
0:01:58 > 0:02:00It's people who live on the periphery.
0:02:00 > 0:02:04I think everybody knows somebody like Walter Bishop in the book.
0:02:04 > 0:02:06Somebody who is in the community but doesn't necessarily find
0:02:06 > 0:02:10themselves included in things.
0:02:10 > 0:02:13It could be because their hair is a little bit too long,
0:02:13 > 0:02:16or their glasses are a little bit too thick, or they keep themselves
0:02:16 > 0:02:18to themselves and their behaviour isn't necessarily "normal".
0:02:18 > 0:02:21So, as a community, people tend to reject them and they then live
0:02:21 > 0:02:24on the outside and the only time they are noticed
0:02:24 > 0:02:27is when something goes wrong.
0:02:27 > 0:02:30Ann Morgan, your book has a most intriguing premise,
0:02:30 > 0:02:34two identical twins, and one of them, Helen,
0:02:34 > 0:02:38the dominant one, decides that it would be fun to swap identities
0:02:38 > 0:02:42to wind up their mother.
0:02:42 > 0:02:46Ellie, the less dominant one, decides she likes it like that,
0:02:46 > 0:02:49and she doesn't want to swap back and it destroys
0:02:49 > 0:02:51Helen, doesn't it?
0:02:51 > 0:02:54Yes, that's right.
0:02:54 > 0:02:58What starts off as a game really, as a bit of mischief,
0:02:58 > 0:03:01a way of lightening a situation, or a moment of discomfort,
0:03:01 > 0:03:05becomes a serious problem for Helen.
0:03:05 > 0:03:09And what happens as time goes on is she tries repeatedly
0:03:09 > 0:03:12to reverse this swap, thinking that of course everyone
0:03:12 > 0:03:15will recognise who she is, she's Helen - we all have this thing
0:03:15 > 0:03:19inside us that is unique to us - and someone will see that in her.
0:03:19 > 0:03:22And yet time and again all of the people around her
0:03:22 > 0:03:24with whom she's grown up fail to see what's happened,
0:03:24 > 0:03:27or fail to accept it.
0:03:27 > 0:03:32And as time goes on she becomes increasingly dismantled as a person
0:03:32 > 0:03:34and pushed out, elbowed out of her life.
0:03:34 > 0:03:37So it's a book about identity and how far our identity
0:03:37 > 0:03:41and our sense of ourselves is dictated by others'
0:03:41 > 0:03:44preconceptions about us.
0:03:44 > 0:03:45Absolutely.
0:03:45 > 0:03:50How much are we inherently ourselves and how much are we what other
0:03:50 > 0:03:52people expect of us, or reflect on to us?
0:03:52 > 0:03:56Your character, Helen, who everyone calls Ellie,
0:03:56 > 0:03:59and who in the book as an adult you call Smudge, is living
0:03:59 > 0:04:01a tremendously chaotic life and at times she has some bouts
0:04:01 > 0:04:05of mental illness.
0:04:05 > 0:04:08I think you've both read the other's book, or at least are reading.
0:04:08 > 0:04:11Joanna, you are by profession a psychiatrist.
0:04:11 > 0:04:15I wondered how convincing you found the portrait of mental illness
0:04:15 > 0:04:16in Ann's book.
0:04:16 > 0:04:18It's incredibly convincing.
0:04:18 > 0:04:21I think when I first read about Smudge when you see that first
0:04:21 > 0:04:24opening scene and the kind of environment that she lives in,
0:04:24 > 0:04:25I thought this woman has manic depression.
0:04:25 > 0:04:28Because, you do tend as a psychiatrist to diagnose
0:04:28 > 0:04:31fictional characters quite easily.
0:04:31 > 0:04:35And immediately I thought this woman is very, very unwell.
0:04:35 > 0:04:39I thought it was beautifully and very sensitively portrayed.
0:04:39 > 0:04:41This is a first novel for both of you.
0:04:41 > 0:04:43Joanna, you started by writing a blog, I think.
0:04:43 > 0:04:44I did, yes.
0:04:44 > 0:04:48So how much of the book is drawn on the disguised but real-life
0:04:48 > 0:04:52accounts of real people in that blog?
0:04:52 > 0:04:56The people in the blog are all fictitious.
0:04:56 > 0:04:59When I started medicine I had to go through a lot of different
0:04:59 > 0:05:00departments before I did psychiatry.
0:05:00 > 0:05:04And I saw a lot of very distressing things that even in my 30s I found
0:05:04 > 0:05:07very difficult to deal with.
0:05:07 > 0:05:10And I used to get very upset about it, and I thought I've either
0:05:10 > 0:05:13got to lose that sensitivity or I've got to process it.
0:05:13 > 0:05:14So I started writing my blog.
0:05:14 > 0:05:19And from that developed the story of Tilly and Grace.
0:05:19 > 0:05:21Ann, you've had a more conventional route, you read English
0:05:21 > 0:05:24at university and then went and did a creative writing course
0:05:24 > 0:05:25at the University of East Anglia.
0:05:25 > 0:05:33You are a journalist and a writer by profession,
0:05:33 > 0:05:35but you started off writing non-fiction.
0:05:35 > 0:05:37A Year of Reading The World is your previous book,
0:05:37 > 0:05:41in which you tried to read a book from all 196 countries in the world
0:05:41 > 0:05:44in the space of a year, which is quite a challenge.
0:05:44 > 0:05:45Why fiction?
0:05:45 > 0:05:49I found that the many very different and often quite challenging
0:05:49 > 0:05:53and extraordinary stories I came across during that project remade me
0:05:53 > 0:05:56as a writer and made me much more creative and much more fearless,
0:05:56 > 0:06:00I think, and not afraid to tackle topics and things that perhaps
0:06:00 > 0:06:06previously I would have been intimidated to try.
0:06:06 > 0:06:09And so actually that non-fiction project I think prepared the ground
0:06:09 > 0:06:14for me to try again at novels.
0:06:14 > 0:06:18These two books have some superficial things in common.
0:06:18 > 0:06:21Both of them are told, at least for part of the time,
0:06:21 > 0:06:23from the point of view of a child.
0:06:23 > 0:06:25Both of them alternate chapters in the now -
0:06:25 > 0:06:28which in your case, Joanna, is 1976, and in your case it's contemporary
0:06:28 > 0:06:31Britain - with chapters looking back into the past,
0:06:31 > 0:06:35and gradually unravelling a mystery.
0:06:35 > 0:06:50Now, earlier this month I interviewed another first novelist
0:06:50 > 0:07:23And I wonder, all three of you have been on creative writing courses.
0:07:23 > 0:07:27So I decided quite early on we really had to go back a few
0:07:27 > 0:07:31years and see what actually happened on The Avenue.
0:07:31 > 0:07:39course, did you find?
0:07:39 > 0:07:44and to treat it as a vocation in a way.
0:07:44 > 0:07:47Writing is an odd thing, because, you do it on your own in your room.
0:07:47 > 0:07:51Unlike many of the other arts where you have to collaborate
0:07:51 > 0:07:54Telling people that you want to be a writer can feel a bit like coming
0:07:54 > 0:07:56out almost, because it's a bit embarrassing.
0:07:57 > 0:07:58No one really knows this about you.
0:07:58 > 0:08:01And so actually going somewhere where you can share that ambition
0:08:01 > 0:08:04and spend time devoted to it, and you are sort of justified
0:08:04 > 0:08:08in prioritising it, is a valuable thing.
0:08:08 > 0:08:11much of that.
0:08:11 > 0:08:15It was more a place to explore the story that you wanted to tell
0:08:15 > 0:08:16and how you might do that.
0:08:16 > 0:08:19Ann Morgan, Joanna Cannon, thank you both very much indeed.
0:08:19 > 0:08:27And that is the last of these Meet The Author interviews that
0:08:27 > 0:08:30with writers, I think it's probably time to quit while I'm still ahead.
0:08:30 > 0:08:34But Meet The Author will be continuing under new management.
0:08:34 > 0:08:37In a few weeks' time, Jim Naughtie from Radio 4 will be
0:08:37 > 0:08:40taking over in this chair.
0:08:40 > 0:08:45In the meantime, if you have been, thank you for watching.