Making the move from fact to fiction

“I felt that I needed to try and understand what had happened – I didn’t feel better for doing it; it wasn’t cathartic in that way but it was vital for me to make sense of it,” says York-based author Fiona Shaw explaining why she wrote her first book, a memoir entitled Out of Me. 
 It was bold and revealing in a way that memoirs can be – and laid bear some very personal issues. Published in 1997, it was written after Shaw suffered serious post-natal depression following the birth of her second child. She was hospitalized and underwent ECT therapy which affected her memory.

“I asked my then husband and my friends if they would write things down as well to try and put together a picture of what had gone on,” says Shaw, who takes care to acknowledge that this approach might not work for everyone. “Some people just want to put it away and get on with their life but I needed to understand it before I could move on.”

As she began writing she looked for books about post-natal depression and found that there were very few – and none written by women who had actually experienced it.

She says that even now at author events women who have been through it will come to speak to her afterwards and thank her for writing the book.

Out of Me was extremely well received by readers and reviewers alike, drawing comparisons with Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, a searing examination of a talented young woman’s emotional breakdown.

But while it was very satisfying, and moving, to know that her book was helping other women, Shaw says that she “would never write anything like it again” and that she moved on to writing fiction “with relief”, not least because she could “just make something up.”

Since 2003 she has written three novels. Her first, The Sweetest Thing, was set in Victorian York and features cocoa, morality and espionage. Two years later The Picture She Took was published.

A historical romance, it focussed on a young nurse during the First World War and her photographs of the Western Front. The third book, Tell it to the Bees, was a novel about prejudice and forbidden love in the 1950s.

Her latest novel is A Stone’s Throw, an exquisitely restrained and affecting account of three generations of one family.

It opens at the beginning of the Second World War when a young woman, Meg Bryan, escapes from her difficult family circumstances by agreeing to marry someone she doesn’t love.

Travelling over to Africa by ship to meet her buttoned-up fiancé, Meg meets a young sailor who could bring her true happiness and she has a choice to make. Shaw says that the story came out of a real-life incident described to her many years ago by an elderly lady who had made a similar journey across the Atlantic as a young woman.

“That story lodged in my mind and I didn’t think about it for thirty years, but I knew that it was going to be at the heart of my novel.”

The character of Meg is partly based on one of Shaw’s grandmothers. “She was a very smart woman but she never found a way of fulfilling that,” she says. “There was a sense of bottled rage; she should have gone to university.”

The book is about the paths we take, the lasting effects of our decisions and the impact they have on subsequent generations.

Both the writing and the emotional tone are stripped back and spare – what is not said is as important as what is. And it is in bringing to life those gaps between word and thought that Shaw excels.

“I think in life a lot of what happens, happens indirectly,” she says. “I suppose I wanted a lot of the most emotionally charged moments in the book to reflect that.”