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It’s not easy, when a story’s finished, to remember how or why it was begun. Out of a tangle of images and ideas, how do those threads emerge that are woven together in the end? Analogies between childbirth and writing are overused, but there may be a similarity in the way that the details of the experience are difficult to recollect or to relive, when the end result is there, wrapped up on your lap. Maybe it is because the writer, like an efficient cat-burglar, needs to hide, even from herself, the traces of the routes she took to find the fragile thing that she was looking for. Or, to go back to the first metaphor – with apologies for mixing them so madly – perhaps she wouldn’t care for you, the reader, to turn the finished product inside out and see a straggle of untidy stitches and loose ends.

So what was in that tangle, then? In the beginning, whiteness. I’d been reading about polar exploration and was fascinated by the hints of a subliminal connection between those great expanses of untouched snow and something even harder to confront – infinity, perhaps, or perhaps death. That made me think about white paintings; apparent emptiness; things that could only be expressed in the spaces between brushstrokes – and whatever lay beyond.

But I didn’t want to write about abstractions. I wanted to tell a real story, the story of a real life. And that was another strand – the idea of a woman, trying, as we all must do, to make sense of her life. Jennet Mallow is a daughter, mother, wife and lover, and each of these relationships is complex, bringing pain and pleasure. She is also a painter – she had to be, I think, to let me link the image of those icy deserts with an exploration of the ways by which we try to come to terms with them.  

Writing about a painter was a source of pure pleasure. I have never painted anything myself, but in the person of Jennet I had the luxury of imagining painting after painting, and the techniques that each required. Jennet’s paintings mirror the developments in her life – are in a sense a visual commentary on it. They are closely related also to the places where she lives:  so there was yet another skein, and another luxury for the imagination.  All my life I have wondered about the definition of ‘home’. That interesting Old English word, which has no exact equivalent in Spanish, say, or French. Some people seem to know by instinct where they belong.  Others are by nature gypsies, and stay rootless. I had a gypsy childhood and early married life, and I enjoyed it, as I enjoy living in Oxford now, but I do sometimes daydream about another place, where I have not yet  been, which will feel magically and at once like home. In my quest for this quite possibly illusory place, I have loved many others – Cornwall and west Yorkshire for example. In both of these there is a special quality of light, and that light found its way into Jennet’s paintings. Light, water, stone and colour – these are vital elements in Jennet’s work and in my novel too.

Colour. Another important part of that original tangle. Colour as counterpart to whiteness, of course, but also for its own sake, for the sheer delight of the words. Ultramarine, amber, apricot, viridian – these are such beautiful words in themselves and simply writing them is thrilling. How else could I have done so, except in the story of a painter? And, because I wanted that painter and her paintings to be real to a reader, rooted in an actual time, connected to actual events, I wrote her story as a biography.

And why should anybody want to read the biography of a made-up painter? It’s a reasonable question. I would like to propose an answer. Yes, Jennet Mallow is a painter but she is also an ordinary woman, doing ordinary things – changing nappies, cooking meals, looking after an ageing parent, loving unwisely, being loved. I hope her story will ring true to anyone who has ever tried to create anything, love anyone or looked for a way across those frozen wastelands towards an equal stillness.


Further reading...

An Equal Stillness
By Francesca Kay
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Buy now

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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