Brought To Book
Karen chats to popular drama author, Susan Lewis
BELIEVE IN ME BY SUSAN LEWIS, Century HB, £12.99 It’s cause for celebration when a new Susan Lewis novel lands on my desk. She can’t be beaten for gritty family dramas with true-to-life characters and situations that immediately draw you in. Believe In Me opens with Leanne, a widow whose husband has killed himself. Despite the deep hurt, Leanne has love in her heart for everyone, including the immigrant family next door and Daniel, the young boy she fosters. Daniel’s father is in prison for murder, and Leanne comes to believe he is innocent. But is she right to campaign to have him freed?
I never intended to write books. Then, inspired by my job in TV drama, I wrote some scripts. A literary agent said, “Oh you need to turn this into a book.” I’m glad that I did, though it was the second book I wrote that was actually first published. The best advice I’ve ever had was from a Thames TV drama controller who’d written books himself. I’d written a book and got it horribly wrong and he just said, “Put it into the past tense”. He was right. You get into such a muddle dipping in between tenses. So much easier to stay in the past! Georgette Heyer gave me a sense of impossible romance! I used to keep little notes about her books and all the books I read. I think what was happening there was my inspiration gathering its strength. My first, unpublished book was a children’s adventure story and helped create a bond between me and my husband’s two boys. When we met and I told them about it they began to think up new characters for the story. We sat over lunch and laughed as we devised these new characters. If I revisit that book, I’ll have to use them!
The books of my own that mean the most to me are my two memoirs. Just One More Day, is very much about my mother and One DayAtATime is very much about my father. My mother died when I was nine and when I wrote that book I felt her coming back to life. I was nervous about writing the second book as I was aware of how much pain I had caused Dad. I felt I needed so much forgiveness from him for what a nightmare I had been as a teenager. It’s wonderful to be in the bestseller lists but what I would absolutely love is to have one of my books televised. That’s the goal. Andee Lawrence has been a real friend to me – it would be great to see her as a TV detective.