New faces of fiction 2015--The Observer’s literary editor Lisa O’Kelly introduces the new year’s crop and we meet the most promising new authors! Claire Fuller took inspiration for her tale of a girl and her survivalist dad in the woods from a true hoaxer’s story from Germany Claire Fuller’s route to writing was reassuringly – even inspiringly – far from the stereotype of the committed fictioneer who has spent every waking moment since the year dot scribbling away and dreaming of publication. Now 47, she didn’t begin to write until she was 40, and even then for a long time thought of it more as an interesting way to feed her creative urges than as a possible new career. And when Our Endless Numbered Days – a strikingly claustrophobic, tense story of a young girl spirited from her home to a hut in the woods by her survivalist father – had been taken on by Penguin, real life loomed large; on the weekend when offers from foreign publishers were flooding in, Fuller was busy getting married. “The whole thing was surreal,” she says with a smile now. Not that this should make her sound remotely blase about her success; as we chat over a coffee, she comes across as thoroughly delighted, with an understandable mixture of excitement and apprehension about the book’s February publication. But she gives a strong sense of being determinedly level headed; the very first time she met her agent, Jane Finigan at Lutyens & Rubinstein, she and her fiance, Tim, sat on the train practising the questions that might face her. One imaginary poser was about whether the book might be seen as a YA novel, a question that, in fact, nobody asked her. I can see why: despite its teenage narrator, Peggy, who spends much of the book recalling her eight-year-old self, the book is resolutely grown up. Where did the idea come from? It has its roots, Fuller explains, in the story of Robin van Helsum, the young Dutchman who in 2011 claimed that he had been living in the German forests for several years, only emerging when his father died. The “Forest Boy” turned out to be a runaway and the story a hoax – as Fuller says, “a sad story in itself. But it just made me think, what if it had been true? If he had lived in the woods with his father, what would have taken him there? What would have made his father take him there, what would have made them, or him, come out of those woods? And because I’m a girl, I wrote it from a girl’s point of view because I thought that was easier.” Her decision to introduce a survivalist theme was partly pragmatic; as she points out, if Peggy and her dad managed to live in the wild for so long, they’d need to know how to stay alive beyond the first winter. That led to her beginning the story in the memorably baking summer of 1976: in the 70s, she explains, the survivalist movement had taken hold in the States and was beginning to spread here, where its adherents referred to themselves as “retreaters”. Bottom line, then: could she do a Ray Mears if she had to? She laughs. “I spent a lot of time outside when I was growing up, with my father, who’s not a survivalist, in the woods, in the countryside, around my house, always in the garden, not really inside with my mum, outside with my dad. But I still had to do a lot of research; I had never skinned a squirrel before.” Has she now? No, she admits, she still hasn’t, but she has watched a lot of YouTube videos. Fuller, who has lived in Winchester since she attended art school there, spent 23 years running a marketing business with her first husband, drawing and sculpting in her spare time. On a whim, she took part in NaNoWriMo, the national creative writing month (she produced a lot of material, but “it was so bad I threw it away”), then began to read her work at a local short story slam. Finally, she took the plunge and signed up for a creative writing MA at the University of Winchester. Now, she’s busy working away at her second novel, which is “definitely draft zero rather than draft one” and is not about survivalists. It is, as they say, all go. “The book’s being published by Penguin. I left my job. My son’s started university. My daughter turned 18. I’ve got married. Don’t they say you’re not meant to have three life changes at once!?”
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 17:23:46 +0000
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