Meg Rosoff

And the first holiday that my husband and I had, we borrowed a house from some friends of friends.

again in a funny little scruffy little place on the sea.

And I just suddenly thought this is like my childhood all over again.

It was, you know, the thunderclap or whatever they call it, the coup de foudre, I think it is.

And I decided I desperately had to spend more time on this coast.

And then the funny thing about the coast, and I'm looking out at it now, I'm looking out at the sea at the moment,

is that an awful lot of English people, fishermen and fisherman families, migrated from the Suffolk coast to Cape Cod in the late 18th and early 19th century.

So I really have made a kind of reverse migration to a place that is connected to the place of my childhood.

And then, of course, I brought my daughter up here and we've been surrounded with friends and have had the same kind of

crazy more drunken than my my family growing up but you know the big dinners and the kids running wild and and it's a i'd like to think of it as a collision between the me looking back on my youth and my and my childhood and my adolescence and then me in the moment living it again in a way and but from the viewpoint of a 60 something year old with a bit of extra added wisdom

Now, I can't remember what the question was and I probably didn't even answer it.

But anyway, that's sort of the, that's the location background.

It's all of those things.

I mean, I don't think I'm ever really writing pure and simple love stories.

I think I barely ever had one in my life, certainly never in my adolescence.

So it's, you know, even when I'm writing adult books, I'm writing coming-of-age stories.

Because my theory, of course, is that adolescence starts at about 13 and goes on until, you know, a couple of minutes before you die.

And it's those...

It's that triple trajectory of who will love me, who am I, what will I do with my life that we think of as being related to adolescence.

But in fact, it's their questions that recur throughout life.