Dot (Araminta Hall)

especially my friends Polly, Amy, Craig and Richard, my sisters Posy and Ernestina and my mother, Lindy.
    The biggest champion of this book has however been my father, David, who has read Dot in every version, not just with encouragement, but also with constructive advice. Which is not a surprise, as he is the reason why I love reading and writing as much as I do. I was lucky enough to grow up in a house filled with books, with a father who guided my reading and was never too busy to talk to me about it. If I have learnt anything from my parents it is that the things that matter in life are not what we would expect and certainly not material, which is a lesson I hope to pass on to my own children.
    So, whilst Dot’s parents are somewhat absent, mine have been ever present, something for which I am truly grateful.

A Q&A with Araminta Hall
    What inspired you to write Dot ?
    No one thing inspired me, I have just always been very interested in our relationships with our families and how myths and mistakes can seep through generations. I wanted to explore how we are often most secretive with the people we are closest to and how small actions can have huge consequences that reverberate down the generations. I’m also very intrigued by the idea of story-telling itself and, for me, Dot is as much a story about stories as anything else. All of our history, both public and personal, is only a succession of stories and each time they are told the person telling them brings their own experience to bear. So, as such, nothing that we know can ever be called completely real. I wanted to write about people trapped in their own stories but unable to tell their way out of them, not even really aware that they are trapped. The events of the book, however, evolved. I completely re-wrote this novel four times over ten years, writing another novel in between and sometimes not going back to it for years at a time. As a result the finished book is very different from anything which could have inspired me in the beginning.
    You mention in your Acknowledgements that Dot is a book which ‘has been rattling around in my head for a long time’. Can you expand a little on this and on your own creative process?
    Yes, this book has had a very long gestation. I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, since I was a little girl and Dot has in some ways been my first real attempt at a book. I’m not sure that I will ever write another book in the same way that I wrote Dot . Certainly my first published novel, Everything and Nothing , was a very different process and the one I am working on now is following a more straight-forward pattern. As a rule however, writing for me is always based in character. I like to know my characters inside out and often they do things I am not expecting, which sounds bizarre, but is true. As yet I have never planned the events of a novel, but find that they evolve because that is how my characters would behave. Which is not to say that plot is not fundamental to a good book. I am very aware that you cannot just write about people and relationships, but that you need to ground it within a believable and good story. I am a great believer in sitting down and writing and not caring about how good I think it is as I know I will change it so many times. I re-wrote Dot so many times simply because I knew it wasn’t working as a story and of course with every re-writing your characters and plot get tighter and hopefully your writing gets better. In a nutshell my creative process involves copious reading and writing and re-writing.
    Much of the book focuses on different female relationships, often as a source of conflict but also great intimacy and protection. How important would you say the role of female relationships is throughout a woman’s life?
    For me women are absolutely integral to my happiness and wellbeing. I am lucky to be married to a lovely man and have a fantastic son, but without the women in my life I would flounder. From your mother to your sisters to your daughters to your friends, women support each other. It is women who I turn to when I have a problem or feel low because women are so great at honesty. There is a chapter in Dot when Alice meets Sandra and feels enclosed by their friendship, which is what women do for each other. We break down society’s myths and reassure each other that we are not alone, that what we are feeling is normal. Because women still operate primarily in the domestic arena and