Dot (Araminta Hall)

that is a solitary and lonely place. My best advice to any of my friends who get pregnant is always to find themselves a network of women as quickly as possible.
    Would you say these relationships change and evolve over a woman’s life, especially after having children?
    Absolutely. The first relationship that changes is the one with your mother as you suddenly need her help in a way you haven’t done since you were a child. You also of course see her differently, suddenly understanding the reasons why she said and did the things that annoyed you in your own childhood. Then of course you develop relationships with other women who are sleep deprived and feeling like they’re going mad, you drink tea and laugh at the fact that you haven’t even brushed your teeth in a week and everyone feels better. My children are all at school now, but I still have a network of friends who I don’t need to explain anything to and we still help and support each other constantly. And then of course life comes full circle. I have just watched my mother help my grandmother through the last years of her life, where the roles were reversed and it was often like watching my mother deal with another child. I think women are always like the central pin in the wheel, with an eye on all the moving parts and only other women really understand this.
    Are any of the characters and relationships in Dot based on people you know or knew?
    Clarice is very like my grandmother. All Clarice’s strange beliefs are hers and the not being allowed to sit many of the chairs round the dining room table comes straight from her house. Like Clarice though my grandmother was very intuitive and caring if you got beyond her hard exterior. She was worth listening to, something I only realised quite late in her life. The other characters however are totally made up and nothing like anyone I know.
    Much of the novel is centred on Dot’s search for her father, with Chapter 20 being wholly comprised of letters from him to Dot. How important, would you say, is the presence of a strong parental figure in one’s life and to what extent does it impact a child’s identity?
    I think it is totally essential to know where you come from. Which is a different thing from saying that we all need to be part of a nuclear family. We live in a modern world in which the idea of family has blurred and evolved. Dot’s problem is not that her father is absent, but that she has no idea who he is, or if he even existed. I know families of every shape and size, with almost every permutation of relevant adults as you can imagine and what makes their children secure is a knowledge of where they came from and that they were wanted. On the cusp of adulthood Dot needs this information before she can move on with her life.
    Are there any authors who influenced Dot , or who have influenced your work in general?
    I don’t know whether any writers have influenced my work, although I think it is sometimes hard not to find your writing marked by a very good book. It is probably however no coincidence that my favourite writers are ones who deal with families and our relationship to the world, like Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, John Irving and Charlotte Brontë (to name but a few!).
    On p. 26, Alice concludes that her mother Clarice ‘saw the world as a place of threat and violence and manners and rules. It was obvious now to Alice that she had simply never been in love.’ Is love presented as a source of liberation in this book?
    I wish I could answer yes to that and I wish life was that simple; that love can save us. Of course love can do this, but no emotion is one-dimensional and the flip side of love is fear, paranoia and heartbreak. I sometimes think that loving someone is one of the bravest things we do as humans. When I had my first child fourteen years ago I felt proper fear for the first time and spent the first two years of his life in a pretty constant state of anxiety. We love in so many different ways, as children, parents, partners and friends and each brings its own perils and joys. A life without love would be miserable and I think that many of the characters in this book are unhappy because they are holding back what they feel for each other. I’m not trying to say that learning how to love will bring them unbridled happiness, but it seems like a good place to start. Learning to let go in love is an important lesson that we all need to learn at some point. We are