Interview with Gabrielle Lord

What are you reading?
I'm reading Irvin D. Yalom's 'The Gift of Therapy' Augusten Burroughs 'Running with Scissors' and Bernad Lewis's 'Crisis in Islam'.

Your favourite book of all time?
Fiction: Graham Greene's 'The Comedians' and George Eliot's 'Middlemarch' Non-fiction Krishnamurti 'On Relationship'.

When did you start writing?
I started writing a serial when I was eleven. Ten years later a line in a biography lying on a remainder table, quoting Gertrude Stein who said: 'I decided when I was 30 I'd write,' caused me to put the book down thinking, 'yes, that's what I’ll do too.' And I started writing a novel on my 30th birthday.

Who have been your influences?
Writers who've influenced me would be Dickens, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Coleridge, and an English writer, Francis Derbridge who used to write serials for BBC-TV years ago.

Where do you get your ideas?
My ideas come either as a visual image of a haunted man looking over his shoulder 'who turns no more his head', because he knows 'a fearful fiend doth close behind him tread...: BONES or a piece of music - the character of Jack McCain walked out of Rachmaninov's programmatic piece for orchestra 'The Isle of the Dead': DEATH DELIGHTS, LETHAL FACTOR or a crime scene photograph: FEEDING THE DEMONS or a song title: BABY DID A BAD BAD THING

Your favourite books as a child?
My favourite books as a child were the Greek Myths and a book about Australian native animals. I also reread 'Peter Pan' although it made me very anxious. These days, I understand why.

Best things about being an author?
The best things about being a writer: flexible hours, no workplace bitchery, freedom to walk, sing, make cups of tea, do a spot of gardening when things get ugly upstairs in the studio, or nip down to the beach for a touch of Dr Pacific. Having wonderfully expert and interesting people tell me what I need to know about anthrax, autopsies, weapons, surveillance, war crimes, ASIO, looking down microscopes... Getting my shooters badge when I practised with a .38....

The worst things?
Getting to that place about three quarters through a novel with five or six involved plot lines all needing to be connected in, stitched up, collided together in an elegant and suspenseful way so that the reader experiences what Hitchcock called 'the suprising inevitability' and not having a CLUE about how to do it. It happens with every book. I think it's the equivalent of the so-called 'transition' stage of childbirth.

Who would you most like to meet?
I'd most like to meet Ira Levin to congratulate him on 'A Kiss Before Dying' which I reckon would have to be about the best thriller of all time. Can't work as a film, though.

What makes you laugh?
My grandkids make me laugh heaps - the way kids learn and speak - thegreat words they come up with: 'Can I please have the flying magna glass?' (Magnifying glass) The wonderful chats my two year old granddaughter has with herself.

What makes you cry?
Any story about coming home after a terrible abandonment brings me undone,no matter what its form: Lassie Come Home, 'The Little Match GIrl, poor, mad old Lear...
But nothing does it like the First World War memorial at the Botanical Gardens: 'To The Gallant Horses: They carried us over Sinai, they suffered wounds, exhaustion, thirst. Then the last line: 'They did not come home.' The army would not pay to quarantine them and so, rather than let them fall into the hands of Arab traders, their soldier-owners (I imagine with tears running down their faces) shot them.

What's your work in progress about?
My work in progress is about Gemma Lincoln, from 'Feeding the Demons' and 'Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing". In this book, as yet looking for a title, Gemma is investigating the disappearance of two students from an exclusive Ladies' College as well as about five other things.