Elizabeth Enfield Meet the Author

as much money for them as possible.

Now it's time for Meet the Author.

Two children are inseparable.

They're torn apart by an accident;

late in life they meet again.

Then we're taken into a parallel

world, where they meet in middle-age

and have a passionate affair.

Then another, in which they marry

young but confront unhappiness.

They are Ivy and Abe,

and in Elizabeth Enfield's novel,

each of these stories reveals a part

of their character as if all of us

aren't just who we are here and now,

but are always carrying with us

the weight of the oldest

question of all - what if?

Welcome.

In this book, we are reminded that

life and your fate can change

in the blink of an eye.

Do you think of that

as being reassuring or alarming?

I think it's both but I think it's

one of those tantalising thoughts

that people have a lot,

that sort of "what if I'd done this"

and "what if I'd done that,"

and I think the thought is very

alarming, especially if you've

based your whole life or you've

lived your whole life dependent

on one route you've gone down.

But I actually think

the exploration of it,

which I've tried to do in the book,

is less alarming because

I think that life...

There are a lot of themes

to the book, not just the issue

of the relationship between the two

people, but I think life has

a habit of turning out

as it's going to turn out,

and those paths not taken

have a sort of way of rejoining

almost, so that you can look back

and think, "If I hadn't done,

that my life might have been very

different," but very often it's not.

It's similar.

That is the reassuring answer,

but what's interesting

about Ivy and Abe of course -

the couple we follow and then go

backwards with in this book -

is that it's not so much

what they have done,

decisions they've made,

it's about things that have happened

that are beyond their control,

an accident for example

when they are children,

that throws them apart.

A lot of it is accidental,

so they're not to blame,

or it is not something they have

done that's produced good or bad,

it's just stuff that happened.

I've tried to work in...

There's something else in that,

that there are two things

in the book that Abe's life...

so the two people have different

things going on in their lives

and Abe's life, as you said,

is there's an accident which happens

in each of his parallel lives and it

always has a different effect.

So it's a completely

random accident.

Whenever it happens,

the effect of that accident

plays out differently.

And against that, I wanted

something that was more sort

of set in the stars,

if you like.

So Ivy has something which is -

when I was writing it,

I was thinking what can she have

that's just almost immutable,

that's not going to suffer

the same random effects,

so she has something in her genes

which also plays out,

which I don't want to give too much

away, but that was my thing

of what can you have in your life

that is absolutely set that

you can't affect, and that

seemed to me like it's

something you're born with,

your cards are marked,

your genetic card is marked,

and that's going to play out no

matter what happens really

in the rest of the world,

the way that it will.

We don't want to give too much away

but we can say that we see them

operating in parallel worlds.

I mean they're children,

then they meet when they are much,

much older, elderly really.

Then there are two other episodes

when they're in midlife,

and we see these things

almost acting simultaneously.

It is inevitable when this book

is reviewed that people will look

back to that film Sliding Doors

and say, "Oh, that's the kind

of thing we are talking about here."

People will remember that movie.

As you say, Ivy and Abe

meet again and again,

and it's like Sliding Doors but not

in that it's not that same time that

might have gone differently,

it is at different times

of their lives.

They are children, they're

in their 70s, in their 60s,

in their 50s, 40s, 30s.

We go right through,

and within those chapters

we have a little bit of background

and a bit of information so we know

what that particular life to date,

how it's been slightly different

than it was to another version.

You are writing a fascinating story

because it's absorbing, you know,

what will happen in this

circumstance and how does it compare

with what's happened

before or what's to come.

Were you conscious at all,

when you were writing the story

and as the novel developed,

that you wanted to say something

about the nature of life

or our own experiences,

or how we look at our emotional

lives, or were you just saying

I want to tell a good story?

Both.

I think...

You know, one of the premises

of this novel was I gathered

a lot of stories of,

A, people who'd had relationships

that they had thought maybe if I'd

met someone at another time it might

have played out differently.

So the circumstances of their life

at that particular time had affected

a particular relationship.

And, B, that almost everyone

I suppose, especially as they reach

the end of their lives,

and the stance at the end

of Ivy and Abe's lives

has a sort of slight...

Not really a yearning

but a wistfulness.

And I don't mean a deep sad

wistfulness but a slight

nostalgic "I wonder

what might have happened..."

A natural curiosity.

Yes, a natural curiosity.

"What if I hadn't done that?"

I think generally people think, "I'm

glad that I didn't because my life

has turned out fine."

I'm interested in the

names, Ivy and Abe.

Both very simple and

almost very intimate.

You know, my friends, Ivy and Abe.

You can think of them.

There's nothing

artificial about them.

It's the kind of question readers

always want to know.

How did you come to Ivy and Abe?

Well, I started actually,

and there are traces of this

this still in the book,

I started with Robert and Eleanor

because I wanted names that

I could change and give

a variation of.

And then when I finished the book,

I decided it was too confusing

and I just wanted names that

were easily recognisable,

not unusual, not "how do you spell

that," but also unusual so that each

time you met them it was

obvious it was them.

It wasn't another Tom,

Dick or Harry, or Sarah or Kate.

It was like, "Oh, it's Ivy."

Then actually on the

page, they look...

They look nice together.

They look sort of right.

I like the way that

words look on a page.

I love the way they look

on the cover of the book.

You talk about the cover,

it's interesting because you've got

the names on Scrabble tiles

and a heart on another tile.

It's a lovely idea because we all

know how infuriating and how

wonderful that game is according

to how the tiles fall.

Exactly.

It's a lovely analogy

for the story really.

Exactly and you can, you know,

if you were playing Scrabble,

they might land anywhere

on the board, they might repeat

themselves on the board

so it is a great sort of metaphor

for what the book is about.

I come back to the idea

of alternative lives,

which were always waiting out

there for us and we

could have taken.

How did the idea come to you?

It came...

I mean, I'd love to say there was

a eureka moment but there wasn't.

It came...

I sort of am constantly

collecting people's stories

so from reading the paper,

from listening to the radio,

listening to television,

talking to people, and I sort

of ended up with this collection

of stories which was the sort

of theme running through them

all was, you know, is there a right

person or a right time.

You've written a lot of short

stories so your mind, in a way,

you know, for some years,

has been used to that idea of taking

a lovely little episode

and constructing a beautifully

chiselled story, and this book,

it seems to me, has a lot

of that skill in it.

You've put a lot of these things

together and say, hang on a minute,

there's a big mosaic

here which hangs together.

It was lovely to write from that

point of view because it did feel

much more like initially I'm writing

a series of short stories

but there is a thread of a lifetime

and of similar circumstances

which runs through them all.

But I was almost able to let

the characters live their life

at a particular moment

without worrying about the before

or after, and then thinking

about that afterwards.

Elisabeth Enfield, author of Ivy &

Abe, thanks very much.

Thank you.