The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Catriona Silvey has been writing fiction since she can remember, as she tells Nora McElhone
Reading and writing have always been important to Catriona Silvey, who was born in Glasgow and grew up in Perthshire. “I’ve been writing fiction ever since I can remember,” she explains. “I started writing seriously for publication in 2008, so it took me about 11 years to get from there to selling a book. In the meantime, I worked in scientific publishing, did a Masters and PhD in language evolution, and worked as an academic researcher for a while. I now work four days a week for a software company and spend the other day writing.”
Catriona’s mum was a primary school teacher who taught her children to read very early and the author recalls that: “Even before I could read, I would memorise my favourite books – Angelina Ballerina is one that springs to mind – and pretend to ‘read’ them out loud as my parents turned the pages.”
Her love of books and passion for writing led in turn to a fascination with language itself. “I always loved writing, but until my mid-twenties,” says Catriona, “I hadn’t really stepped back to think about the raw material for writing, which is language. When you think about it, it’s completely bizarre that we are able to move each other to tears or laughter, or invent entire worlds that don’t exist, just by making noises with our mouths (or movements with our hands, if we use sign language). It’s also fundamentally weird that humans are the only species with this ability.
“When I realised I wanted to study the origins of language, I applied to do a Masters and then a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. I had an amazing time there with fantastic supervisors and colleagues. In the course of my studies, I also met my husband, who luckily shares my fascination with language and will happily argue theories with me for hours on end!”
Catriona focuses her writing on two themes: “I love the idea of time travel, both literally and in the sense that we’re always mentally time travelling: going over and over events that happened in the past, or dreaming about who we want to be in the future.
“I also love writing about characters who have a strong connection or spark – not necessarily romantic, but that balance of similarity and difference that draws two people together. Meet Me in Another Life is about both of those themes, and also their combination: how two people with complementary perspectives can learn from each other and change each other over time.”
It is also a story that explores the idea that we know other people in a partial, limited way: “If you’re a parent, you see your child as your child, even when they’re an adult; their friends know a very different person, and their work colleagues, a different person again. I started thinking about whether it would be possible for two people to know each other completely. It seemed to me that they would have to somehow be all those different things to each other. From there came the idea of two people living multiple lives, gradually figuring out this weird, complicated relationship at the same time as they unravel the mystery of what is really happening to them.”