Writing about abuse is not easy. Tell us about how you detach from feeling the emotion while writing, especially when you wrote from Peter’s perspective.

I find it very easy to step away from the laptop even when the subject matter is quite dark. Once I close the laptop, I can escape it very easily. Sometimes I just go down and watch television or cook dinner, or do anything to rid myself of the darkness that was inside my head. But to be honest, I don’t take it into my everyday life. Writing from Peter’s perspective was challenging. There was one scene in particular when Peter is a small boy and he has his first encounter with his birth mother. That was the one scene that really made me squirm. I felt that maybe it was too much, maybe it was too strong and dark. I had conversations with my editor about it and she said that because it was a gasp moment – it really is a horrible scene – things that happen in it are awful, and my editor said that gasp moments are good so we’ll keep it. That was the only scene really that gave me sleepless nights. That is the darkest point of the book. You find more terrible things later in the book, but that was the worst.

What inspires you to write about dysfunctional characters?

I think fully functioning, happy everyday characters might be a little bit dull to read about. If you look at any of William Shakespeare’s tragedies, they have much more interesting characters than any of the characters in his comedies. In fact, I found his tragedies full of depth, with stories of jealousy and pride and revenge; it’s all there. Dysfunctional characters in literature have always appealed to me.

You write for a living and have dystonia, a neurological disorder that allows you to type only with one hand. Tell us about it.

I have a condition called dystonia, which affects my mobility and the use of my right arm. My right arm and leg are quite limited in their movements and capabilities, so I can walk but I walk with a limp. I am having a minor brain surgery in December to see if we can reverse the effects of the brain haemorrhage that I had when I was seven years old, almost 50 years ago. Technology has caught up and there’s a slight hope that I might be able to get fixed up a bit.

I spent a lot of time in the hospital as a kid and at that time, there was no X Box or a phone to play with. We only had books to distract us. If I hadn’t spent so much time in the hospital, reading, I would never have become a writer. Books became my source of escape. In school too, I was a bit of a writer because I couldn’t take part in a lot of sports and things like that. So it was very easy for me to observe from the outside and I became quite an observer of human nature.

Deteriorating mental health and getting help for it is one of the themes in the book. Sally accepts it but Peter doesn’t. Talk us through writing about these two opposing views and characters.

Sally doesn’t discover until the age of 42 why her behaviour is so unusual. She knows that she is different, that she is antisocial and therefore pretends to be deaf to avoid social interaction, but she has no understanding of why she is the way she is. She eventually discovers the true trauma that she was brought up in, that she was rescued from a very traumatic situation. Luckily, she doesn’t remember any of it. When she discovers this trauma and explains some of her behaviour to herself, she is encouraged very strongly by her adopted father’s friend Angela who is a doctor to go and seek help from a psychotherapist. Through that work with the psychotherapist, she begins to find tools and ways to integrate with her community and build relationships and friendships with people. She develops her own personality and she discovers that she has a really good sense of humour, that buying clothes is an enjoyable thing to do, she enjoys a shopping spree for the first time, she develops very well through psychotherapy. But with Peter, the thing is that he doesn’t really know there’s anything wrong with him. He has grown up in such isolated circumstances. He’s never really had a friend except for a really brief time. He has only had his father in his life and then later, Lindy, who comes into his life in really horrific circumstances. He eventually develops a relationship with her but he’s not aware. He knows he’s not like other people and he knows why – his absolutely isolated childhood.

A sort of parallel is drawn between Sally’s biological father and Tom. Both were controlling in different ways. Is there a message you’re trying to send about men and their dominant nature, even if they mean well?

Tom is a product of his time and in 1980, when Sally is rescued, Tom is the leading psychiatrist in the country. At that time, in medical science and in Ireland, there would be very few female consultants in any field. So, as a leading psychiatrist, he would have been given a case like Sally’s. Nothing like this has ever happened in Ireland that we know of, and hope it never does. Tom behaves with a sense of male privilege and entitlement in taking away Sally’s seven years of traumatic memories. It’s just the way it was; it’s not that way anymore. Sally’s biological father, on the other hand, is just a psychopath and I didn’t want to get into his head for even a second. There is a little hint about his background and his relationship with his mother, which was strange.

Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.

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