From the Reluctant Writer... Mari Howard (Clare Weiner)

Desk and tools!

Some writers say ‘I always wanted to write’ and they can point to reading out to the class a story they had written, aged about six. My stories were always drawings, but always ‘narrative’ drawings, as the A-level art teacher described them. Writing, as such, evolved much later, after school, after university. 

My stories come straight from my interest in people, their motivations, their underlying cultural beliefs, what they want from life. School is a microcosm of society and it’s where aged five, I first realised the enormous differences between me and the other children. Why, for example, do some kids bunch together as a group in the Wendy House, and then disallow any others to join them? It seems some of us arrive at  school to discover we attended the “wrong” nursery! What makes kids think “us and you” style? Why does someone come behind and pinch you, or kick you under the table in class?

So, I became fascinated by people and observed them, trying to figure out why they did the things they did —  why some disrupted the class and others always came top in everything, some were intellectual and sporty… 

Or how families come in so many kinds. There was my friend whose parents were university teachers, whose house was deliberately Bohemian and never saw a duster, and had a rumpus playroom stuffed with old sagging sofas and chairs and scratched tables. Her little brother used to drop through the hatch from the kitchen to frighten us and get in the way of our games. 

There was another friend whose mum offered us (aged 11 or 12) Babycham, a fashionable, 6% alcohol, drink back then. And her dad built an extension onto their bungalow so that my friend could have a lovely bedroom, and filled it with super-girly white painted furniture, including a kidney-shaped dressing table.

There was also the girl in the senior school who loudly disrupted Scripture lessons by declaring her atheism, hoping it might mean she didn’t need to do the homework.

Back to my books: the key themes are the variations and often consequent interactions between human beings, especially between two families. The Guthries are a ‘blended’ family: Dad is a well known fertility expert permanently working in the States due to regulations in the UK and Europe, after abandoning his family. Mum, a GP, has moved into a lovely converted-chapel house in Cornwall, with with stepdad Des, an art teacher and his daughter Daze (Daisy). The very different Mullinses, five children, all highly organised, have a stay-home domestic mum, making cakes and growing vegetables, while their dad is a faith-fuelled patriarch.

School, university, curiosity, and life generally have taken my early fascination into the wider society. Having had one or two articles accepted for magazine or newspaper publication, but not wanting to embark on journalism in the midst of raising three kids, I came instead to explore some of the questions our society asks, using narrative. Inevitably these are ‘family’ novels, stories of interactions, clashes, romances, between family members and the wider community. A census form might throw them into the same categories by ethnicity, income, class, religion (or none). But move from one to the other, and the differences, around motivation, relationships, about what we want and how to get it and at what cost, are revealed. 

The two stories Baby, Baby and The Labyrinth Year, kick off with the meeting of two students from very different homes, and move on to the pursuit, by one of these protagonists, of a career in cutting-edge life science while running a family. Though that’s it in a very small nutshell: there’s mystery, and a fair dollop of controversial issues. And in order to write this, I found myself involved in quite extensive and fascinating research, and weaving a plot which poses questions about our society’s ambitions and perceived needs.

The third novel (hopefully to be published later this year) involves the  daughters of those two protagonists questioning the parental expectations, looking for a future based on their own interests and ambitions. While their busy parents try to organise their lives, revealing that they possibly don’t know their children as well as they think.