It's impossible for me to disentangle how much of my storytelling urge is the product of growing up with novelist parents and how much is a genetic legacy from those same parents.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes.
I have two parents who are brilliant storytellers. The art of developing a story and nurturing a story was present in my household from the day I was born.
My stories are fundamentally about the love of family.
When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.
The thing is that my father's story helps to communicate what was at stake with my mother, and my mother and father had so much a partnership that his story is integral to her story, as her story is to his - really, her story can't be told without his story.
I'm attracted to stories that deal with the family and what it's like to be a member of that family, whether it's together or apart, given the pressures that are put on it by the outside world.
I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.
My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.
Storytelling is my passion, and it rises from a love of reading.
When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.
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