Byron Writers Festival talked to British novelist Esther Freud in the lead-up to this year’s festival.
Your new book My Sister and Other Lovers explores sibling relationships and personal identity. What inspired you to centre the narrative around sisters?
This book started as a collection of short stories and when it was finished I realised the most interesting part was the recurring relationship between the sisters. The lovers, they came and went, but the relationship between the two sisters was the mainstay. This prompted me to turn it into a novel, to give it a new title, which helped remind me what the book was about. I’ve always been interested in birth order, and I wanted to explore the complicity and competitiveness of siblings, their rivalries and alliances, and how unrecognisable the experience of their own shared childhoods can be.
You’re appearing in several sessions at Byron Writers Festival. What are you especially looking forward to?
I’m looking forward to The Secrets We Keep, as I’ve always had an eye for the unspoken shame at the heart of almost every family. Secrets are often buried so deep it’s possible to forget that they are there, and lives can pass without them surfacing, even when the shadows they cast are long, and powerful. This is where the splinter of glass in the writer’s heart comes in. Giving us the capacity to excavate where others fear to tread!
The theme for the festival is Passion and Purpose. How do these concepts shape you as a writer?
I do think about these words, especially when work is going slowly. I ask myself: is this what I’m supposed to be doing, moving a coma from one part of a sentence to another? I always start a novel with passion, and with purpose, and then I hit what I call ‘the murky middle’ where I lose sight of everything and it’s only when the book is done that I understand this was where the real work took place. When I’m losing faith and considering how much more meaningful life as a doctor working for Médecins Sans Frontieres might be, I remember it is books that have saved and comforted me, and I’m grateful to those who’ve taken the trouble to write them.
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