I’m delighted to be writing a piece for Writing.ie magazine because my father’s family originally came from Cork and Kerry. And so it’s also appropriate that the book I’m going to talk about – The Beautiful Blue – was hugely inspired by my father. Let me introduce him.
Chris Hart – Paddy to us – was the bravest man I have ever met. Cancer came for him again and again, but he never gave up. He was one of my lost loyal supporters and it breaks my heart that he never lived to see me finally realise my dreams with writing fiction.
In 2016, just as Paddy was recovering from an oesophagectomy I noticed a change in his voice. This was the first sinister symptom of the laryngeal cancer he’d had ten years before. And it had returned. Within weeks he’d had a laryngectomy, and many other structures and glands in the throat were removed. A permanent tracheostomy was created for his breathing and speech.
I was also having to learn to breathe differently. As a child I had never been able to swim. I’d had lessons and gone with the school, but it simply never happened for me. Lack of confidence, body image, fear – all these things conspired against me. So at the age of 39 with a two-year-old daughter I found a swimming group for adults at my local pool. And yes, I can now do a fairly decent front crawl and butterfly.
And so I began to craft The Beautiful Blue. In the book Guy Lovell is a radio presenter so he relies on his voice for his job. His wife Heather is one of a group of adults learning to swim. Together they discover the power of water and air, how they can work together and in conflict. The original title book was Saturations on Air, but my publishers and I decided it was too medical, too bleak. The book is not all sad. Guy does not have a happy outcome but other characters find romance and triumphs, and come to terms with tragic events from decades before. Even when it appears that cancer eclipses everything else in life, there are other things going on. People fall out, make up, discover things, make bad choices. The bins have to be put out. I try to convey the sense of all the rest of life going on behind Guy’s terrible prognosis.
I think this is true of my books generally. I concentrate on the everyday events of life – family, love, motherhood, illness – that happen to us all. I’m not trying to write high literature; I would prefer to be described as someone who wrote interesting and moving books. Above all, I want my writing to make people cry (at the right time and for the right reasons).
This book required a lot of medical knowledge. During my father’s illness I kept a journal of events which was very helpful when I came to turn his story into a novel. Research has to be done correctly as there is always someone out there who’ll be happy to correct an author who makes an error. I take all my research very seriously, and have done all sorts of things for it, including going to a post-mortem, spending a couple of nights with hospital porters, and finding out how to sink a narrowboat.
Interviews with authors often describe beautiful writing rooms and desks where they do their work. I don’t have anything like that. I simply have a laptop and an ancient cloth bag for the printed manuscript and accompanying notebook. I take my laptop round the house to wherever I am going to work. It might be the sofa, it might be in a chair by my guinea pigs’ pen. I am writing this piece in my bed.
I am a night owl through and through. I don’t start writing until after midnight when the girls are asleep and the house is quiet. I still find distractions in the form of playing cards online and the usual suspects of Amazon and Wikipedia. I aim for 1,000 words in a session. It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes I do more. I only plan out the next 5,000 or so words at a time. I usually have a fairly good idea of the end of a book by about a third of the way through, and I may even have written that in my head or in note form, but I’m not always entirely sure how I will get there. I do “writing in my head” when I am running or exercising, and before I fall asleep, which is at about 4.30am.
The Beautiful Blue is set in my home county of Cornwall. I love using my favourite places in my work, and I’m lucky to live in such a beautiful wild corner of the world. I think the landscape is very important in my writing and can almost become a character in its own right.
This book is very personal to me because of my father and I was convinced no one would want to publish it, that it would be too brutal for the market. I was overwhelmed when Vulpine said they would like it.
I cannot bring Paddy back, but I hope this book highlights the trauma and difficulties suffered by those with laryngeal cancer. The loss of the voice is as personal as the loss of a limb or a womb, yet we never speak about it.
Loving someone who is so ill and so vulnerable is a terrifying experience. There are many moments that haunt me now, and always will, but it was also a huge honour to be part of his story. Not all stories have happy endings, but they still need to be told.
(c) Lucinda Hart
About The Beautiful Blue by Lucinda Hart:
How many words does it take to end a life?
On a rainswept hallowe’en night two decades ago, it was only five: “She’s there with him now.” These few syllables sealed the fate of Amy Langford, in one cruel moment turning a student navigating love and life into a corpse on a treacherous Cornish road. But who is to blame? Her cheating boyfriend Olly? Her best friend Chloe? Or Kathryn, the girl he destroyed? The answer is in the wind until they all return, years later, pulled inextricably back to Cornwall in search of answers. Some remain their old selves, despite the horrors of that night, but one wears a cloak, a new persona crafted like a butterfly from the chrysalis of their past.
Their old teacher, Guy Lovell, and his wife Heather may hold the answer. But just as their lives all begin to converge and they find their voices, Guy loses his, forever. Will the truth make the survivors swim, or drown?
They can only find the answers in The Beautiful Blue.
Order your copy online here.
