On September 24th we welcomed Louise Doughty to the Authors’ Club for a convivial lunch. Over coffee, Lucy Popescu interviewed her about her new memoir, On This Spot Fell One Tear of Love.
Louise has written screenplays as well as bestselling novels, including the psychological thriller Apple Tree Yard which was serialized on TV. She has also worked as a cultural critic for newspapers and magazines and was the presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme A Good Read from 1998 to 2001. Her books have been translated into thirty languages. She grew up in Rutland and now lives in London.
While she was clearing out her parents’ East Midlands bungalow after they died, Louise found a battered black suitcase full of the love letters Ken and Avis had written to each other in the 1950s, before she was born. They had lived in that house since Louise was two. Her father, Ken, came from a Romany background and left school at thirteen. He was a determined autodidact who read widely, believed passionately in education and ended up with a PhD in his fifties. His father was a traveller, and his mother was a gypsy. He wanted his kids to be middle class and educated and was ashamed of his Romany background, but Louise feels now that her colourful gypsy relations helped to form her as a novelist. She entertained us with anecdotes about her lively aunts who told her stories about ghosts and spirit guides (including Jesus and Buddha).
At the end of his life Ken had Alzheimer’s and his wife Avis looked after him without any support for five years He ended up paranoid and psychotic. As Louise said, the failure to give support to people who suffer from Alzheimer’s and Dementia is a national emergency: five million unpaid carers like Avis have to do what the government ought to be doing. The NHS will only help you if you are physically ill.
Louise’s parents were both hoarders; the house was full of rubbish she and her brother and sister had to sift through before they found the battered black suitcase. Their parents’ love letters weren’t dated, so Louise had to try to put them in chronological order. She told us that through these letters she got to know her parents better and felt she had underestimated them before. She didn’t tell her siblings she was working on a book about their family until it was about to be published. Fortunately, they didn’t object.
When Lucy asked Louise how she writes, she replied that she works in the mornings, often in local cafes, and is now working on a new novel.
Miranda Miller