What is your book If I Were You about?
Three years ago, sisters Tessa and Maddie lost contact after a fight at their mum’s funeral. Now Tessa is struggling with an illness that has damaged her perfect life and destroyed her successful career. Her marriage to Adam is shaky and she fears they might never have the family they’d planned.
Then estranged sister Maddie turns up on Tessa’s doorstep with a baby in her arms. Maddie tells Tessa she’s run away from a violent, coercive relationship. She says she and baby Leon are in danger and begs her sister to let them hide out for a while.
Maddie’s story is full of inconsistencies. Adam presses her to report her abusive partner to the police and is sceptical when she refuses. The next day, Maddie seems to have changed her mind. She asks Tessa to look after Leon for a couple of hours, saying she has a meeting with a solicitor. She never returns …
Now Tessa must deal with grief and anxiety for her sister, while battling her own illness and caring for baby Leon. When the police trail goes cold, Tessa realises no one else is looking for Maddie and sets out on her own investigation with life-threatening consequences.
How would you describe your novel in six words or less?
Gone Girl meets The Handmaid’s Tale.
What first inspired the idea of If I Were You?
I’m fascinated by the idea of a life swap. I don’t mean those staged for reality TV shows where couples from different backgrounds exchange homes and act out their new lives like a freak show hyped up for an audience. I’m thinking about quirks of fate that happen in real life where a death or tragedy means another family member must step in and take over a parent or sister’s role. How many of us would be equal to that challenge? What would you (or I) do? And how well do we really know those closest to us?
Tessa is dealing with long Covid and depression in the novel. How did you approach researching and writing her character?
After the Covid pandemic, there was a view among publishers and some authors that people didn’t want to be reminded of the horrors of lockdown and those times. They wanted to put that experience in a box and move swiftly on.
Sadly, not everyone has been able to do that. Healthy people of all ages have been left with lasting health damage from the virus, and some have yet to recover. Long Covid is now part of some families’ lives and impacts them and wider society. Instead of pretending this never happened, maybe we should try to understand how it affects them.
The character, Tessa in If I Were You suffered damage to her heart from the virus even though she was young and healthy. She was initially misdiagnosed by her doctor, disbelieved by her husband and, as the novel opens, is about to be sacked from her high-powered job. Tessa’s life has been upended so it’s not surprising she also has reactive depression. (I do know that, in long Covid, depression can also be neurobiological or linked to inflammation but, as the author, I get to decide my character’s diagnosis.) The treatment Tessa’s on is slowly working and the shock of Maddie’s return and being catapulted into caring for baby Leon, cuts through the fog of her depression. Caring for Leon, and trying to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance, gives her a purpose.