10 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Maggie O'Farrell...

Ten things you (probably) didn’t know about Maggie O’Farrell

1. Her latest book, The Hand That First Held Mine, was inspired by the work of photographer John Deakin, who was once described by jazz singer George Melly as “a vicious little drunk of such inventive malice and implacable bitchiness that it’s surprising he didn’t choke on his own venom”.


2. To pay tribute to him, she gave Deakin a walk-on part in her new novel: an acquaintance asks if he might spare “a bob or two” to buy her a drink. He replies; “‘F--- off’; ‘Buy your own.’”


3. Her first agent said of her first novel, After You’d Gone: “You’ve got about five plots and far too many adjectives but if you can sort it out I'll take you on.”


4. She lists the authors who have most influenced her as: Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Albert Camus, followed by Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Tolstoy, Edith Wharton and Angela Carter.


5. Maggie has kept a diary since she was “about nine” years old, and used the entries she made after the birth of her first child to inform her writing of The Hand That First Held Mine.


6. She was bedridden and off school for two years with a mystery illness when she was eight, during which time she recalls; “I was physically incapacitated, so I couldn't hold a book. I listened to a lot of story tapes. When I had a bit more motor control, I read. Reading was a way to escape.”


7. Her fourth novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, was in fact the first novel that she tried to write, but put the idea on the back burner as she felt “too young” at the time to construct it properly.


8. When she begins a novel, she doesn’t plan the ending: “if I do begin with an image for the ending in mind usually by the time I get to the end it’s all changed.”


9. She has observed that the locations in which she wrote her first three novels were exceptionally disparate: “a borrowed desk in an unheated flat, my parents' dining-room, on my lap in a damp bedsit, various trains, a shed in Yorkshire, a bench overlooking an Italian forest [and] an alarming bus ride in Bolivia.”


10. In a travel piece for The Times, she wryly noted that there are a number of reasons she likes to visit Ireland, “but one of them is that I don't have to constantly spell my surname.”