What is the background to the novel?
A. There had been quite a few cases in the newspapers about women facing death and writing about it movingly for their children. I kept thinking about that and wondering how strange it would be if the children who receive these letters after the death of their mother were not necessarily thrilled by them. The assumption is that it would always be so heartbreaking for them, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe, if their life goes on to be happy and they go on to have a stepmother, they may not want to be reminded. That was one thought. Q. Did anything else inspire the story? A. It also happened that a daughter of a friend of mine, who’d died when the daughter was only six weeks old, turned up on my doorstep aged 18. She had come to see me because she thought I would be able to tell her what her mother was really like. Her father had never married again and remained absolutely devoted to the memory of his dead wife. She was tired of this saintly woman and she was sure this picture couldn’t be true.
