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In the early summer of 2004 I was pregnant, living in a shared house near Cowley Road in Oxford, and drifting through my first year post-university. I was also writing a novel about a woman who built a hot-air balloon in her garden shed. Dilapidated is too strong a word to describe that house, but not by much: when the burglars I’m going to tell you about kicked through a window, half of the rotten frame came away with the glass.

The balloon novel and the disk I’d saved it on were stolen, along with a second-hand laptop. Ninety thousand words in, and nothing else to do but start again. A short story, I thought, looking over the garden fence at people sitting in the beer garden of the pub next door, maybe something about the neighbours. A tea party? A woman who doesn’t quite understand what his next-door neighbour means when he says, ‘some other time’.

I look back, as Annie looks back, and it’s very easy to force a novel’s logic onto that time in my life. I was lonely because I’d just moved away from a city that felt like the first place I’d belonged. The neighbours, drinking, laughing, playing Aunt Sally, were much more interesting than anything happening inside the house and I spent a long time in an upstairs room, watching them. On the bus to my job at the Bodleian Library I saw the same woman every day, always reading a romance novel. I was studying at night school to be a counsellor. I volunteered nightshifts as a telephone listener. My mind was full of the language of self-help, of unreliability, of the lies we tell ourselves when we’re trying to feel better, keep going and fit in.

    But these are ingredients. They aren’t causes. They could be knitted up into a story, but really, I am not sure where the idea came from. When I’d finished writing, my daughter was a year old, I was living in a different city and it was time to take a master’s degree and find my way through the editing process. I had a voice, a character, and an ending. One year later and I had a novel. Annie’s voice – strange, trembling, insistent – had finished telling her story. A story about how moving away from an old self is not as easy as moving away from an old house, about trying to make friends, getting mixed up, and ultimately, failing to start again.

I’ve been asked many times how my work as a librarian in a prison has informed this book (‘The characters you must meet!’). I finished this book when I was 24 years old; it was with my publisher long before I decided what I’d like to do next was work in a prison. While its true that I love my work and the unreliable narrators I meet on the job are some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met, my ‘material’ was more mundane – the house in Oxford, the pub, the sensation of loss and lost-ness that everyone who leaves University feels for a little while.

I’ve also been asked how Annie should be viewed as a character – did I mean her to be sinister, frightening, or sympathetic? Are we supposed to pity her, or fear her? Is she the damaged product of a loveless childhood, or did her parents struggle with this strange only child they’d produced? Did I really mean her to be so funny?

The possibilities are there in the novel. If I’ve done my job properly, Annie will be as contradictory and complex as any of her readers. As soon as I started writing I knew I wanted Annie to tell her story in her own words – the ‘I’ in the novel is insistent, self absorbed and trembling with self-righteousness and indignation. The things she does are unusual and yes, sometimes frightening, but she has a sense of humour, she’s worried about her blind spots, and she’d like to settle down with someone she can talk to without misunderstanding. Isn’t that, in her words, ‘the same as anyone else wants’?

Further reading...

A Kind of Intimacy
By Jenn Ashworth
Arcadia Books
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Meet the rest of Waterstone’s New Voices 2009: Matthew Plampin, Jenn Ashworth, Patrick deWitt. Francesca Kay, Amanda Smyth, Catherine Hall, Dave Boling, Richard Millward, Mari Strachan. Janice Lee, Anthony Quinn and Yiyun Li

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