What inspired you to write The Sun was Electric Light?

Actually, it was a strange experience where the character of Ruth appeared to me in an image that wouldn’t go away. I was devoted to writing and had been mainly focused on poetry. But this image of Ruth appeared to me suddenly and she demanded my attention! She kept popping up when I was washing the dishes, walking to the supermarket, etc. Finally I realised that I was going to have to write this book that was being asked of me.

I had no concept of what I wanted to write. I just wanted to understand this character of Ruth, who was similar in some ways to me. I could see that she was stuck and didn’t know how to move forwards and I felt a responsibility to write her way through the other side. That was how the story came to me – just moving Ruth forwards, feeling what she was feeling, seeing what she wanted to do next. Eventually, I still didn’t have any answers for her but in writing the story, I no longer had the same questions and that was how I knew the book was finished.

What were the most challenging and enlightening aspects of writing your book?

It was the creative process itself which was both the most challenging and enlightening aspect. I discovered that there was a certain mental state that I could get into where the story began to write itself, and things happened that I would never have expected. It was as though the characters were alive and the novel was fully formed, out there somewhere, and I didn’t have to ‘write’ it but I just had to ‘find’ it.

This was also the most challenging part – how to consistently get into that state where the novel gives itself to me. There were many, many hours and hundreds of thousands of words written just to find my way to this mental state. I had to have faith that if I kept showing up, no matter how much it felt like I was not getting it, eventually, the story would come to me. So this consistency and absolute determination to find the story and to do whatever it took was both difficult and incredibly rewarding.

In what ways do you think the narrator in The Sun was Electric Light might be an empowering figure for women and young girls?

I was very conscious about wanting to be truthful in my depiction of the experiences of my characters. I wanted to expose their inner worlds because in the ‘real world’, we very rarely know the truth behind someone’s facade. I read literature in order to go behind this curtain of social persona, and it is also why I write. So, while my character are all fictional, there is a psychological truth to them which I was very deliberate about. 

I find that there are still rules about what emotions women are allowed to express. For example, it’s now okay for us to be angry – it’s even a bit fashionable! But it’s not encouraged for us to be sad, odd, etc. These rules are never stated but often implied and you feel the weight of them as you move through the world. I hope that this book is empowering for women and girls in the sense that they feel like they are more able to own the truth of their own psychology and inner experience, that they are able to feel what they feel, regardless of whether it is a ‘permissible’ emotion for a woman to have.

How do you think literature helps to shape our understanding of ourselves and others?

Literature allows us to get inside the inner reality of another human being. Sometimes this gives us solace, sometimes permission, sometimes it broadens our experience. For me, it has been a vital aspect of learning how to live as a human being. So much is unspoken in daily life that, for me, it is a huge relief to turn to literature and discover that the intense, complex emotional world I am experiencing is not mine alone! It’s a human thing, it’s just that no one is talking about it. There is a truthfulness, or at least, an attempt at truthfulness, in literature, that is utterly unique. I think music does this too, on an emotional level. But literature uses words and images and in this way it is refreshing and renewing and helps us find places inside us that we didn’t know were there.

What was the most recent book you’ve read about women or girls that moved you?

I’ve just read A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux, and I am staggered by her ability to describe the very specific experience of being a woman in modern western society. Many times in that book I was blown away by her razor sharp precision in describing fairly common experiences that are so nebulous and complex and often so complicated that we can’t even tell ourselves what we have experienced, let alone each other. Annie Ernaux has shone a light on the subtle impact of society’s expectations of ‘women’ on the individual experiencing it, and it feels as though she is bringing out into the open something that is usually so deeply hidden in the recesses of the human mind.