How childhood illness can shape adult creativity - Guest Post by Jane Davis
Whether it is throughout history or within a single lifetime, cause and effect interest me. The great question: what is it that turns us into the people we become? In the case of my protagonist from My Counterfeit Self , Lucy Forrester, I knew from the very beginning that childhood illness was part of that complex equation. We meet Lucy in the first chapter, outwardly a wonderfully eccentric albeit cantankerous seventy-something poet and political activist. Imagine a cross between Edith Sitwell and Vivienne Westwood, standing in the magnificent rose garden she has created, dressed for the funeral of her on/off lover of fifty years, who also happens to have been a literary critic. Her husband brings her the day' s post, saying that it looks important. Lucy opens the letter. Unfolding the single sheet, she experienced a quiver of pleasure at the way both ends had been folded towards the centre, rather than the more usual Z shape. She admired the precision of it, remind...