Welcome to The Enlightenment Show, Laura! I’m so excited to have you joining us. Your book, Two Little Girls, was an emotional, character-driven book that held me from the beginning. I couldn’t put it down!
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· Can you give the readers a brief synopsis of what Two Little Girls is about?
Lizzie is a professional working mother in a marriage that’s beginning to feel the strain of work commitments. On the way home from a holiday with her daughters, she crashes the car into a lake and has to make a terrible decision when she can only get one daughter out of the car. The rest of the book deals with the consequences of her choice until events take a more sinister twist. And I’m in spoiler territory there so I’ll have to stop.
· Where did the idea for Two Little Girls spring from? Where were you when the first idea came in?
I was on a coffee break in the office kitchen at work. At
that time, I was the Principal at a school for children with special needs. One of
the office staff was telling us about a recurring dream she had about crashing
her car into a lake and knowing she could only get one of her two girls out –
and then she always woke up. It’s a classic expression of maternal anxiety and
we all had some form of dream-like that so everyone was super-sympathetic,
except me. I just stood there, frozen, and exclaimed ‘That’s such a great start
to a book!’ It’s a good job she knew me well by that point and they all
laughed. And the rest of the book came from that opening scene.
· Your main character Lizzie Fulton makes a choice that haunts her throughout the book. What’s a choice that you’ve made that’s haunted you at some point in your life?
My mother and I were very close. She suffered from ill
health for years but towards the end of her life, she deteriorated quite
quickly and her kidneys began to fail. She had vascular dementia and so
dialysis wasn’t appropriate as her dementia was accelerating too. In her last
few days, she became really unwell and couldn’t stay in her own home with visiting
care staff so I made the decision to ask for her to go into a nursing home in
the village. I had to really battle to get this as they wanted to send her to a
cheaper one miles away, where me and my daughter (who was three at the time) would
have struggled to visit daily. My other option was to have her at home in our
sitting room but we had no downstairs bathroom and also I was working full time
and couldn’t afford to take extended leave. The nursing staff said she wasn’t
close enough to the end of life for a hospice, although our family doctor said
she wouldn’t have long. I finally got her into the nursing home in the village
and we visited every day but she died less than a week later in her sleep. If
I’d known she had so little time left, I would have brought her home with me. I
still wish I had.
· I love how you brought in the reality of how a traumatic experience causes PTSD. Have you personally gone through that? What kind of research did you do to make this aspect so relatable to connect to the readers?
I hadn’t experienced it myself at the time, although last year I was in a serious car crash and I did have some issues for a while after that and I got treated with EMDR because I recognized what I was experiencing. My husband was in the Army and I used to teach a Public Services preparation course so PTSD is something I was relatively familiar with when I was writing this book. I was Principal at a school with a number of children who had suffered early childhood trauma so I had read a lot about it as well as having direct professional experience. There’s one example I always quote about PTSD. I was watching a documentary on the conflict in Afghanistan to show to my class and there was a helicopter pilot talking about his PTSD. He said he’d flown 35 Med-Evac flights in close succession, bringing out casualties under heavy fire. He’d never had a problem until flight no. 36, but that one broke him. There was nothing different about it. It was just one flight too many in too short a space of time. That’s the thing with PTSD and what I wanted to convey – it can happen to anyone. Nobody is immune. In fact, PTSD can be defined as a natural response to an unnatural set of events.
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· What was one thing that surprised you about writing this story?
Dan, Lizzie’s husband, surprised me as a character. I
thought he’d be far less sympathetic than he is after she makes her choice but
he simply refused to be as judgmental as I believed he would be when I actually
came to write the story. He took the first part of the book down a quite
different track to my vague idea of where it would go.
· What are some of your current fears that you’d like to examine and explore?
I’ve been doing that a little in my next book, where two
of my characters are facing the impact of menopause and old age. It’s an
uncomfortable place to be when you realize you’re past the halfway mark of
life. While I think there’s so much about women’s lives post-menopause that is
great and should be celebrated, there are moments when my breath catches at the
thought that one day I won’t be here anymore. My daughter is still under ten
so I think it hits me harder because of that. I want to be around as long as
possible for her. I was 44 when my mother died and it was too soon – it’s
always too soon when you’ve had that close mother/daughter relationship.
· What’s one thing you loved about your two main characters, Lizzie and Dan?
I love how their roots are so entwined with each other
that despite everything, how they’ve drifted, how damaged they are by their
daughter’s death, and the fallout from that, they find their way back to each
other. All marriages go through rough patches but some couples keep finding
their way back to each other through the hard times. There’s tremendous hope
in that and I love it.
INNER
CHILD SEGMENT
· As
a teenager, what was your favorite thing to do? Eat? Wear?
I was quite a moody teen. Very hormonal! I liked hanging out in my bedroom in the dark listening to music as a younger teen. But in my late teens, I blossomed into a much more feisty and outgoing character. I was shy as a child but that vanished. I was into the alternative music scene so was usually found in second-hand combat boots, stripey tights, and cut-off shorts with my hair in cotton hair wraps with beads or twisted up into two matching top knots. My favorite meal would have been, as it still is, a Sunday roast with the family. And I’ve just remembered, I used to collect quotes as a teenager! I had diaries full of them. I’ve always loved words. I’ve still got those diaries in a box somewhere. I might need to dig them out and read them again.
· What’s something mysterious and suspenseful that excites you, and that most wouldn’t know about you?
I’m laughing as I write this because I’m absolutely the
worst person around mystery and suspense. I always cheat and look at the back
of the book because I can’t wait to find out. I’m much happier with predictability
and I like being comfortable, physically and emotionally. That doesn’t reflect
my writing in any way, except I do like endings with some positivity to them.
I am scared of werewolves though if that counts, and
that’s something most people don’t know about me. Yes, logically I know they
don’t exist and it’s utter nonsense but put me in a strange rural location at
night with odd noises and I’ll remember every werewolf film I’ve ever seen and
frighten myself silly. We were once staying in a gite in France and I made my
husband get up at 2am to close the skylights because I’d convinced myself a
werewolf could get in when I woke in the night to a strange noise. My mother
used to say I have a very vivid imagination, but I guess that goes with the
territory of being a writer. My husband is the exact opposite and he just rolls
his eyes and laughs.
· If you could take a theatre workshop for any play, what would it be and why?
I absolutely love theatre and I used to go all the time before my daughter was born. I’m hoping she’ll come with me when she’s older. She’s just starting to show signs she might love it too. I’ve got no interest in acting myself though, so I think I’d have to be a director or do lighting and take a workshop around that. And I adore Shakespeare so it would have to be Twelfth Night because it’s my favorite. The use of language in that play is just so clever.
· What’s the oddest food combo that you’ve liked and tried, or just tried?
Mint sauce on
toast. I used to love it as a kid. I invented it as a combo. I haven’t had it
for years but I might just try it again now.
· What advice can you share with our readers about living a joyful life?
I can find a quote or a story for most things and this is no exception. ‘If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life but still the same amount of snow.’And one that I think of when the fear of aging edges into my mind is ‘Do not regret growing old. It is a privilege denied to many.’ It re-grounds me. Fighting aging is a battle we will lose. The secret is to embrace it and find joy in it. Some cultures are much better at this than Western society and we can learn from them.
· Where can the readers connect with you? Where can they find your book?
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Thank you so much for being with us, Laura. Congratulations on the release of Two Little Girls!! It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you.
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