Sarah Moss Meet the Author

Now on BBC News it's time for Meet the Author.

Sarah Moss is an academic by trade who's worked

at the universities of Oxford, Kent, Exeter and Iceland.

She is currently Professor of Creative Writing

at Warwick University, but alongside her teaching,

she's built a career as a writer, tackling subjects as diverse

as the Vikings, chocolate and 19th-century asylums.

Her fifth novel, The Tidal Zone, is different again.

Set in the Midlands, it's about a teenager who collapses

at school and stops breathing for no apparent reason,

and the effect that event has on her family, whose life

is turned upside down.

Sarah Moss, where did the idea for this novel come from?

I think it started on a day, actually listening to the Today

programme, which we always do in the mornings.

And the news was that a hospital in Syria had been bombed and 27

children had died in the bombing.

I went on into my day feeling sober about that, as you would.

When my kids got home from school I heard that a child at the school

had collapsed that day and the helicopter ambulance

had been scrambled.

Of course, we were all very concerned for that family,

and it was so hard to hold, at the same time, the idea that

in one place in the world when a child collapses you scramble

a helicopter ambulance to help them, and in another place,

if there are helicopters in the context of children's

lives, they are scrambled at any cost to kill them.

And thinking that every one of those families in Syria

was going through something much worse than the family

whose child had survived.

It was so strange and so hard to hold those two traumas together,

I started looking for stories or narratives that might let us see

both those kinds of things at the same time.

You start the novel with the phrase, "Once upon a time," which I can't

believe you didn't think very carefully about that.

Why did you begin the novel in that way?

Because I was interested...

As a novelist I was interested in how stories and narratives

sustain us or give us pathways through times of trauma on any

scale, whether the small-scale and domestic or the much bigger

national and international crises.

We look for stories all the time to navigate those things.

We imagine ourselves in a story.

We have fairy tales to tell us what's going to come next.

So I was thinking about the limits of those kinds of narratives.

The teenager Miriam has this condition -

exercise-induced anaphylaxis - which is rare.

Yes. How did you come across it?

It was suggested to me by a medical friend, actually.

I was looking for a condition that would be sudden, devastating,

but also at risk of happening again.

Exercise-induced anaphylaxis is a kind of allergy,

it's an allergic reaction, but you don't always know what's

triggering the allergy.

And in fact, this is vanishingly rare.

There are only a handful of deaths in the UK each

year from this, if that.

But it seemed like such a good parallel for all those

moments of sudden disaster, all those things that come out

of the blue into an apparently prosperous and well-ordered life

and change everything.

And we watch how that unravels in the course

of the novel, of course.

And you create this family in what you describe

as a state of emergency, the shadow of death is lurking

around every corner.

It's not the first time you've written about mortality.

Why are you so obsessed with death and dying?

I don't think I'm obsessed with death and dying,

but I think once you've seen it, it's very hard not

to think about it.

I think I'm interested in stories that help us to live

with difficult things, and of course the most difficult

thing is the knowledge of mortality.

But I'm also interested in how we live with quite ordinary

small-scale traumas.

I mean with the difficulty of having a new baby in one of my books,

various kinds of fear that surround us.

I'm interested in making stories that help us to decode those things

and think about them, not make them easy,

but just think about them.

And it's not until a little while into the book that you realise

that you are telling this story through the eyes of a man -

Miriam's father Adam.

Why did you choose to tell this story through the male eyes?

It never feels like as much of a choice as I think it seems

later, how you tell a story.

I mean, the narrative voice is there in your head or not.

But I had written half of the previous book

from a male point of view, Signs For Lost Children,

which switches between a husband and a wife's point of view,

and I thought that was going to be a very difficult...

And it probably was difficult, but also quite interesting

and quite liberating.

He's a stay-at-home dad, he's the one fitting work in around

the school run and doing the laundry and clearing away

the breakfast things.

And his wife goes out to work.

How much was that drawn from your own experience?

A bit.

My husband and I have been able to do it both ways.

So I have been the stay-at-home parent, he has been

the stay-at-home parent.

Each of us has been part-time.

We had a brief phase where we were both full time,

so I know those roles from both sides.

I wanted to write about somebody who was simply and primarily a good

man, whose main ambition in life was to be a good person.

And interestingly, I think to do that, you need to lift away a lot

of the ambition and drive towards career and success that

motivates many of us.

If his primary interest in life is to love his wife

and daughters and to behave as if he loves his wife

and daughters, then it just shifts the idea of success.

Rather success is no longer about how much money you can make

or being better at things than other people.

It's just about enacting love on an hourly basis.

Alongside the story of this family in crisis, Adam is writing -

he works as an academic - and he's writing about

the destruction after the Second World War

of Coventry Cathedral and then its subsequent rebuilding.

Why did you want to tell the two stories in parallel?

There were some obvious parallels.

It's about reinventing beauty after trauma,

finding a way forward after loss.

But I'm also very interested in that post-war moment.

The late 40s and 50s were a time of austerity, but also a time

of rebuilding and hope.

And that's where you see the building of the welfare state,

huge changes in the architecture of our cities in ways that are now

quite hard to see as beautiful, but at the time clearly were,

and were important.

The redesign of Coventry was meant to replace the medieval city

with one that really worked for modern citizens,

for ordinary people, and it's built so that,

for example, you can do your shopping with your pram

without everybody getting wet.

It's that level of concern for the ordinary lives

of ordinary people.

And I think it's very interesting to look back now at that moment

and see these cityscapes we think of as ugly, but were built with such

hope and such ambition, in a way that I don't think we have

at the moment.

It's interesting that you say that, because one thing that struck me

about the novel is that in some ways it's quite an angry book.

You're quite angry about poverty and homelessness and tuition fees

and private education, but you seem most cross about the state

of the health service.

Why did you want to write about the NHS?

Because I think the NHS is where the body politic

is also intimately in us.

I think one of the reasons we all care so much about the NHS

is because it's the one thing that unites what happens in Westminster

with what happens in our own bodies.

And our daily experience of aches and pains, or fears or disease

connect so closely and so immediately there

with what happens in Parliament, in the highest

places of power.

You teach creative writing... Yeah.

How important is it to be a published author to do that well?

I don't know, because I haven't done it as an unpublished author.

I think it's very useful to be able to be realistic with students

about the publishing process, about what it's

like to be published.

I also think it's very important that we don't say that creative

writing is an apprenticeship in becoming a writer.

Teaching people to write is not just about getting publishing contracts

and making a professional life in the literary world.

It's about controlling narratives, understanding how

they're constructed.

It makes people good readers as much as it

makes them good writers.

Do your students critique your books for you?

I don't think they would dare!

LAUGHTER

Sarah Moss, thank you so much for talking to us

about The Tidal Zone.

Thank you.