Fanny And maybe also: How and when did writing your memoir come about?
I started writing quite organically. I just felt the urge. This was about 20 years ago. And over the past 20 years I have written five novels. Really, I think of myself as a novelist. Which is what makes it strange that this book — the first I have managed to get published — turned out to be non-fiction. In the UK it was published as ‘Memoir’ and ‘non-fiction’. But my German language publisher, who has also published it as non-fiction, has also placed the word ‘Roman’ next to the title. I’m actually proud of this, because I think I used my novelistic skills to sculpt this book into a story, in exactly the same way as one might do to create a work of fiction. It’s a novel that happens to to about things that really happened. But getting back to the question…. I wrote alone for many of those years, and then, around 7 years ago, I did a part-time writing degree, which was incredible as it put me in touch with other writers. Working together in workshops was a fantastic way to grow and learn as a writer. And during that course, the idea occurred to me to try to write about my actual childhood. I felt I still hadn’t got to the bottom of the question ‘why was I so obsessed with famous people when I was a child?’ So, I found I wanted to interrogate this question, and try to find some answers, which I think I managed to do with this book, by seeing everything through the lens of growing up, and by understanding my journey in terms of an effort to figure out who my parents were.
