Maggie O’Farrell

You've got to know what the floor's made of, what the windows look like, what might be on the table.

Are they wearing any hats?

Yeah.

You know, everything.

Are there dogs?

What kind of animals are outside?

What's the weather like?

You need to know all that in order to have the confidence to create that scene and make these people feel real and to set them talking.

But I think, anyway, in the final draft on the page, you need to make sure that

maybe only 2% of that research is showing I find there's nothing that makes me put a book down faster than if somebody is trying to show me that they've done all their homework it just kills it dead for me anyway it just pulls you out of it and you can't suspend your disbelief so I'm always quite careful about that and I tend to put a little bit of detail in and then as I'm revising a novel I will take it out and take more out and take more out

No.

As you can probably tell by the way I speak, no, I left when I was really young.

I was born in Derry, and then we moved to Wales when I was still quite young, and then Scotland.

I mean, maybe I said wary, but I think, you know, I can't listen to myself in my very British voice saying the sentence, I'm Irish, just because it just sounds grating to my ear and probably I'm sure to other people's too.

So I think it's a strange thing.

You know, I think anyone who...

doesn't grow up in the country they were born in or has maybe an accent at odds with their name, as I do, there's always a sense of a kind of ghost self that walks along beside you.

And you always have this awareness, I think, of what could I have been?

Who would I have been if we had stayed?

And I know that I would have sounded completely different and I might have been a different person.