Her Mother’s Daughter: Writing and Inspiration

My book is not an easy read. I know that, because it was not an easy write. It is not a true story, but there are elements that were inspired by my childhood, and many of them I wasn’t even aware of at the time I was writing.

Rather than having inspiration for this novel, there was more a need to dig into my soul and pull out the knot. That sounds dramatic, but it really was, and if you read the novel you’ll see what I mean. Writing was catharsis. Sometimes, after an hour or so of writing I would sit and cry at the table with the laptop in front of me and my boyfriend would come in and ask if I was OK and what the hell had happened?

‘I was writing,’ I would reply. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t always crying because I was writing from real life, by any means. Often, it was just the emotion and intensity of it all.

There are themes that intrigue me, and that I find myself writing about subconsciously, like identity, femaleness, family. Family relationships and traditions, how they make us as people, their positive and negative effects, all interest me in a big way. Then there’s sexual abuse, which I’ve heard so much about and which was rife in Ireland years ago in schools, orphanages, within families… I am so affected by cases of abuse, that I was drawn to write about it, and the effect it can have on a victim in the long-term.

My parents are divorced, so I have personally lived through the breakdown of a marriage. My parents are also Irish, and I really did feel a longing for and affiliation with Ireland over England – interestingly to a far greater degree than my older sister, who was more grounded in her Englishness. As for the heart of the novel – the spiralling descent of the mother’s mental health – this is inspired by the many women who have been victims of abuse, and have had to deal with it for the rest of their lives. It’s also inspired by the pressures that society puts on women: to be perfect, to be beautiful, to not miss out… The list goes on and on. I’m also fascinated by inter-generational trauma, and how suffering can be passed down from, for example, a mother to her daughter.  

When I began writing this novel it was a quite different book. It has been through so many drafts I’ve lost count, going through multiple facelifts. A tuck here, a pull there, cutting away here and there. A whole character was deleted. The child, now a ten-year-old, was a teenager originally, until at a writing group I wrote something from a child’s point of view and someone commented that I did it well. What did I do? Went back and rewrote the child. What did that do? Have a huge impact on the entire novel – meaning that it needed a complete overhaul.

Writing this book has been as painful as it has been beautiful. Sometimes there were tears, and sometimes there was elation at having written a great scene or reaching a new word count. There were celebratory glasses of wine – and a glass of cava when I bagged my lovely agent. Then there were more tears and dismay when nothing happened for a long while afterwards, and I realised the publishing process is one long, windy road. But that just means there’s even more excuse for that glass of cava.

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Alice Fitzgerald is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has been published in the likes of HELLO! magazine, Goodhousekeeping.com, and Huffington Post, and whose fiction has been featured in literary journals. Her Mother’s Daughter is her debut novel. Born in London to Irish parents, she now lives in Madrid.

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/AliceFitzWrites

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About HER MOTHER’S DAUGHTER

Hello! magazine’s April 2018 ‘book of the week’

Set across two decades in London and Ireland, Her Mother’s Daughter sees the lives of a troubled and emotionally abusive mother and her innocent ten-year-old daughter change forever after one summer holiday.

1980: Josephine flees her home in Ireland, hoping never to return. She starts a new, exciting life in London, but as much as she tries, she can’t quite leave the trauma of her childhood behind.

Seventeen years and two children later, Josephine gets a call from her sister to tell her that their mother is dying and wants to see her – a summons she can’t refuse.

1997: Ten-year-old Clare is counting down to the summer holidays, when she is going to meet her grandparents in Ireland for the first time. She hopes this trip will put an end to her mum’s dark moods – and drinking.

But family secrets can’t stay buried forever and following revelations in Ireland, everything starts to unravel. Have Josephine and her daughter passed the point of no return?

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing