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After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published.

When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.

I've had a family my entire adult life; I started raising kids when I was 21. I suspect that being part of a family has probably informed my life as a writer as much as anything else has.

My mother wrote a book. Unfortunately, it ended up being published posthumously. But I'm glad she did, because it taught me a lot about my family that, otherwise, I probably wouldn't know.

My friends I grew up with were so supportive to me. And I'm not the only one who's done well.

I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.

I'm a family-based person, even though we didn't exactly have a very happy family. I was never in any doubt that this was a centre of writing.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.