Bestselling author Adele Parks talks to HANNAH STEPHENSON about kicking off the ‘chick lit’ tag, resisting ageism and living well
NCE branded one of the ‘chick lit’ brigade, Adele Parks is much happier to be sitting firmly in the ‘domestic noir’ section of bookstores these days.
The chatty Teesside novelist – who’s had a string of international bestsellers, averaging a book a year since her first novel, Playing Away, was published 19 years ago – has long insisted her work should not be branded pink and fluffy.
“People have said to me, ‘You’ve gone so dark’, but actually all of my books have included difficult circumstances. I’ve had lots of heroines who are quite unlikable and unsympathetic – I’m just pushing that more,” she says.
“But in the past, the ‘chick lit’ thing happened because of how you were branded. If you were a woman writer, you immediately fell into the chick lit category – irrespective of what you were writing. As time has moved on, people have realised that’s not particularly helpful.”
Indeed, her earlier book jackets, often featuring a pair of sexy legs in stilettos against soft purple or pink backgrounds, belie a lot of the serious subject matter within the novels themselves, which includes family turmoil, theories on love, parenting and fidelity.
As an ambassador for The Reading Agency and a judge for the Costa Book Awards, as well as being a bestselling author in her own right published in 26 languages, Adele is clearly a major talent.
She says her writing has changed as she has aged.
“As you get older, you are perhaps a little bit less flippant. My earlier books were quite humorous and the characters were less concerned about consequences. As I’ve got older, from the beginning the characters are saying, ‘Actually, this is probably going to go wrong’.
“That brings more depth and darkness to the subjects and the greater level of threat.”
Adele turned 50 this year, and is excited about the decade ahead.
“I think ageing is way better than the alternative. Getting old is a privilege. Dying young sucks. I’ve never had a problem with ageing,” she shares. “In my 30th year I got my first book deal, in my 40th year I changed publishing houses and got a brilliant deal and we moved houses, and now I think, ‘Ooh, what’s going to happen in my 50th year?’ I find it kind of exciting.
“If anything, I’ve upped my game,” she continues. “I’ve joined a gym, which was health-based. There’s a lot of things you can avoid if you exercise more.
“With my clothes, I was determined not to slip into ‘Beige-ville’ and stop caring how I looked. There’s a lot of ageism in our country, particularly towards women, whereas men get to be seen as wiser.
“Women are tricked into believing we are no longer useful or at our best – and we should resist that as much as we can.”
Her 19th novel, Lies Lies Lies, is a domestic noir centred on a couple, Daisy and Simon, who are trying for a second child. But with fertility problems, IVF attempts and his alcoholism, things spiral out of control in their relationship, and then an accident changes both their lives forever.
Adele is a mother – to son Conrad, 18, from her first marriage. Was it a conscious decision to only have one child?
“Yes and no. I had my son with my first husband and then we split up. Then when I met my second husband, I felt I was kind of done. I already had one and didn’t want anything more complex than that. But if you’d asked me that when I was 25, I would have thought that I’d have more than one child,” she says.
“My husband (Jim, a website designer) was very happy with that decision. He didn’t want any more children. He met Conrad when he was a tiny toddler and he is his dad and we’re done. By the time we got married, if I’d had another child there would have been such a big age gap. I didn’t want that.”
She admits she went through the whole biological ticking clock experience, however.
“I had Conrad when I was 31, which was perfect, but when I got to 45, I thought, ‘Oh, I think I’m done’. That was when I stopped looking back and thinking, ‘Is it a possibility?’ I didn’t grieve over it. I’m a practical person who takes responsibility for my own decisions. I have a terrific child, who I’m super proud of. I just thought, ‘Let’s concentrate on what we’ve got’.
Was she nervous about bringing a new man into Conrad’s life?
“No. I split up from my first husband when Conrad was 10 months and I met Jim about five months after that,” she says. “The difference for us is that we were a family from the get-go. We weren’t really a couple and then a family.”
Fertility struggles – one of the themes in her new book – isn’t something she went through herself, but it’s a subject that resounds in so many people’s lives.
“It’s a shock to all of us when it comes to trying to have babies or planning a family, because some of us are very lucky, but it’s one of the things in life that we can’t control, and we are increasingly used to being able to control our own environment,” she says.
“If your raison d’etre is to be a mother and that seems impossible, it’s truly heartbreaking.”
Today, Adele writes in a converted bedroom at her home in Guildford, Surrey, and is as disciplined as any office worker, doing set hours, five days a week. She already has two further domestic noir books planned, but despite darker subject matter she still likes happy endings.
“My writing is relatively uplifting. There’s dark and shade but there’s light as well,” says Adele. “I don’t want my readers to feel worse after
the experience.”