Joanna Cannon and Ann Morgan Meet the Author

Now it's time for Meet the Author.

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

Joanna is a hospital psychiatrist in Derbyshire.

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

published one non-fiction book.

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

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

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

from No 8 has gone missing.

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

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

to swap identities.

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

a famously hot summer, on a housing estate somewhere

in the East Midlands.

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

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

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

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

where nothing really happens.

But Mrs Creasy, one of the neighbours, disappears

overnight and nobody knows where she's gone.

And all the very respectable neighbours who live around Grace

start blaming each other for Mrs Creasy disappearing.

And then they blame the heat for Mrs Creasy disappearing.

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

who lives at No 11.

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

different from everyone else.

Two things about this book - one is it turns out

everybody has secrets.

They do.

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

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

you call them 'unbelongers'.

What do you mean by that?

It's people who live on the periphery.

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

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

themselves included in things.

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

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

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

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

on the outside and the only time they are noticed

is when something goes wrong.

Ann Morgan, your book has a most intriguing premise,

two identical twins, and one of them, Helen,

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

to wind up their mother.

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

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

Helen, doesn't it?

Yes, that's right.

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

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

becomes a serious problem for Helen.

And what happens as time goes on is she tries repeatedly

to reverse this swap, thinking that of course everyone

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

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

And yet time and again all of the people around her

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

or fail to accept it.

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

and pushed out, elbowed out of her life.

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

and our sense of ourselves is dictated by others'

preconceptions about us.

Absolutely.

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

people expect of us, or reflect on to us?

Your character, Helen, who everyone calls Ellie,

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

a tremendously chaotic life and at times she has some bouts

of mental illness.

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

Joanna, you are by profession a psychiatrist.

I wondered how convincing you found the portrait of mental illness

in Ann's book.

It's incredibly convincing.

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

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

I thought this woman has manic depression.

Because, you do tend as a psychiatrist to diagnose

fictional characters quite easily.

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

I thought it was beautifully and very sensitively portrayed.

This is a first novel for both of you.

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

I did, yes.

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

accounts of real people in that blog?

The people in the blog are all fictitious.

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

departments before I did psychiatry.

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

very difficult to deal with.

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

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

So I started writing my blog.

And from that developed the story of Tilly and Grace.

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

at university and then went and did a creative writing course

at the University of East Anglia.

You are a journalist and a writer by profession,

but you started off writing non-fiction.

A Year of Reading The World is your previous book,

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

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

Why fiction?

I found that the many very different and often quite challenging

and extraordinary stories I came across during that project remade me

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

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

previously I would have been intimidated to try.

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

for me to try again at novels.

These two books have some superficial things in common.

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

from the point of view of a child.

Both of them alternate chapters in the now -

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

Britain - with chapters looking back into the past,

and gradually unravelling a mystery.

Now, earlier this month I interviewed another first novelist

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

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

years and see what actually happened on The Avenue.

course, did you find?

and to treat it as a vocation in a way.

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

Unlike many of the other arts where you have to collaborate

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

out almost, because it's a bit embarrassing.

No one really knows this about you.

And so actually going somewhere where you can share that ambition

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

in prioritising it, is a valuable thing.

much of that.

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

and how you might do that.

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

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

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

But Meet The Author will be continuing under new management.

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

taking over in this chair.

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