The growth of a book - from the germ of an idea to 'The Things You Do For Love' - by Rachel Crowther

I'm very pleased to be introducing my very first blog tourist - Rachel Crowther. Rachel's thoughtful and highly enjoyable novel, published by Bonnier Zaffre, is about a woman at a turning point: a highly successful surgeon, Flora Macintyre loses her career and her marriage at the same time, after she retires to nurse her husband through his final illness. The book is about how she - and her two daughters - negotiate the next part of their lives, and in so doing find they must also come to terms with the past. 

I'll be reviewing it soon, but in the meantime, here's Rachel on what inspired her book.

A long time ago (writes Rachel), when I had a small baby, a job as a hospital doctor and a few thousand words of a novel that I’d written on maternity leave, I had the wonderful good fortune of meeting Fay Weldon – an idol, both then and now. To my embarrassment, the journalist friend who took me with her as chauffeur told Fay about the embryonic novel, and among many words of wisdom I’ve treasured from that occasion was her pronouncement that it’s hard to manage more than two out of three things – work, babies and writing – at a time.

Since then, often struggling to manage even one thing properly, I’ve regularly been astonished by quite how much many women juggle – but I’ve also been very much aware of the cost. Guilt, maybe. A belief that they are not good mothers, or good doctors, or good wives or daughters or friends or sisters. Having no time to themselves, to think or read or sleep, let alone write. Marriages that are perhaps complicated by their success, or at least their preoccupation with careers in which they have to fight harder than their male colleagues to succeed.

As the women I’d looked up to and admired in my twenties and thirties approached retirement age, I began to wonder what it would feel like for them to let all the plates they’d been juggling all these years fall to the ground. There was an influential and hugely energetic consultant I’d worked for as a junior doctor who very sadly died on a mountain climbing expedition around the time she was due to retire, and I was haunted by the thought of what she might have done in retirement: whether she’d have had as busy and fulfilling a time after stopping work, or whether she’d have found it hard, having invested so much in her career, to manage her life without it. Then my aunt, a lawyer who had sustained a brilliant career for several decades while her children were growing up, retired early – and almost immediately seemed just as busy again, and in particular blissfully happy to be a granny.

As writers do, I started thinking not just about real-life examples, but ‘what ifs’. What if a woman who’d made it in a truly male-dominated world – surgery, for instance – had done so partly thanks to the support of a husband who had driven a hard bargain in return? What if she found herself retired and widowed at more or less the same time, so that she lost her career and her marriage at the same time? What if she actually gave up work to nurse her faithless husband through his last illness – and why might she do that, pray? What if, after he died, she realised she’d lost sight of her daughters, and that she had no interests, no hobbies, no friends – absolutely nothing to fall back on?

Rachel Crowther
(Photo:Roger Smeeton)

That was the beginning of ‘The Things We Do For Love’. I actually started with a line constructed as a sort of pastiche of the famous opening of Jane Austen’s Emma: Flora Macintyre, retired, widowed and entirely without occupation, had nearly twenty-five years of life expectancy left to her and very little idea what to do with it.

As novels do, ‘The Things We Do For Love’ took a circuitous route from that first germ of an idea to the finished article. For a while it was going to be a pair of novels, one from Flora’s point of view and one from her daughters’, rather like Jane Gardam’s Old Filth novels or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series. At various points there were three daughters rather than two, a literary festival in France with a fully fledged organising committee, a medical crisis in a French hospital – and the shadowy woman Flora meets on a cross-channel ferry in the first chapter reappeared several more times throughout the book. Quite near the end of the editing process, Kitty’s second-string boyfriend was cut, events were reordered, relationships were subtly reshaped.

But the basic premise stayed the same through all this, and it remains the driving force for the novel. What price had Flora paid for her success, and what exactly was the final reckoning she’d been left to face? How was she to rebuild her life when so many things had gone from it? Had she, as she believed, failed as a mother and lost her daughters for good? What had become of the things she’d done for love?

Rachel's website is here. For more dates on her blog tour, please see below.