My Secret Sister
This isn’t an ordinary love story. But then Grace isn’t an ordinary girl. Emma Henderson talks about the real life inspiration for her debut novel, Grace Williams Says it Loud.
“How many brothers and sisters have you got?”
“Two brothers and two sisters, but one of them doesn’t count.”
That’s what I used to say as a child about my older sister, the spazzo. Defective, deficient, physically handicapped, mentally subnormal. The words swirled in my ears, but so did the grim semi-silence that met my questions about the sister who lived in a
mental hospital, which we visited. Which terrified me. However, while I remember the terror and the unspoken bleakness of it all, I also remember a woman whose shocking disabilities couldn’t mask an undeniable, if indescribable intelligence: her sense of humour, her romantic tastes and adventures, her ability to relish the beauty and absurdity of the world, and, above everything, an astonishing determination to communicate with that world, at all costs.
To create Grace in Grace Williams Says It Loud, I used and confused my own and my family’s memories of my sister. I did the same with the few remaining records of her life: an incomplete and random, but jaw-dropping jumble of photographs, medical
records and private correspondence. My intention was to invent a life-story for someone who scarcely had one, and to make it a conventional – yet exceptional – love-story.
Enter Daniel. No models for him. He appeared, characteristically, as if by magic, fully formed, mending shoes and stitching scraps of paper into their soles. I was living and working in the French Alps at the time, which probably accounts for his background, some of his taller stories, and for the fact that I almost fell in love with him myself. I was certainly sad to see him go. But he had to, since the reader knows from the opening sentence that Daniel will die.
Most of the novel is set in the Briar Mental Hospital. While, again, memory served for certain details, I needed to research the history of disability and what went on in the enormous nineteenth-century institutions, built in a circle around London, to house it. The hospital Grace is sent to, in 1957, is one, none and all of these. I’ve mixed and matched – unreliable facts, my unreliable memory and a large dollop of merry old make-believe – to make you laugh, cry, think. There was an awful truth in my childhood lie, which the fiction of Grace Williams challenges – as loud as possible.
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June 27th, 2010 at 9:02 am
[...] Read about Emma Henderson’s real life inspiration for this book over at Bookhugger Bookmark to [...]
June 27th, 2010 at 9:02 am
[...] Read about Emma Henderson’s real life inspiration for this book over at Bookhugger Bookmark to [...]