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	Despite my recent move to London, I'm still associated as a novelist with suburbia - probably because I've lived there so long and have used it as the setting of many of my books. et even as a child, confined in a small semi in a cul-de-sac, I longed to escape to an enchanted castle in the wilds. Life was strict at home. My father (like his father before him) had spent several years in a seminary training to be a Catholic priest, and he sent his wayward daughter to a convent boarding school to learn discipline and piety. Alas, the plan misfired and I was expelled for heresy at the age of 17 and told by the nuns that I was in the Devil's power. Somehow I got in to Oxford (still living with nuns!) and after graduation travelled to America, where I worked as a waitress, barmaid and artist's model, definitely more fun than my subsequent job in advertising, which left little time for my own writing. I'd been turning out poems and stories since early childhood and wrote my first "novel" aged 11 - "A Pony At Last", sheer wish-fulfilment.
I now work part-time only, as a teacher of Creative Writing, which I find an exhilarating contrast to the solitariness of composing my own stuff. I always urge my students to write by hand – a more natural process, I feel, than typing at a keyboard, and one that brings faster access to the rich storehouse of material lodged in our unconscious. Letting rip in a near-illegible scrawl is often liberating. I still write very much as I did as a child – untidily and messily, with a cheap Bic biro in a series of red exercise books. (They must be red. The only novel of mine that failed to find a publisher was written in green notebooks.) I'm often at my desk by 6 in the morning - a hangover from my convent school, where we were woken at the crack of dawn for daily Mass. I am like a nun in some ways. I find it impossible to lie in bed, and I even wear a "habit" to write in - a navy dressing gown that shrouds me neck to ankle. Should my faith return, I've decided which Order to join: the Poor Clares in Arundel, who kindly let me stay with them when I was researching my novel, "Devils, For a Change" (the story of a nun who leaves her convent after twenty-odd years and finds herself a naïve and frightened novice in the world). They were the first nuns I'd ever met who were loving and humane, so that made a huge impression. They attend chapel eight times daily to pray for sinners and for all those suffering in the world. I, too, have long been fascinated by sinners (having been classed as one myself so early on in life), and also by people living on a knife-edge, whether they land up in a priest's confessional, on an analyst's couch, or in bed with a lost soul.
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