STAR INTERVIEW
KEEPING IT REAL
Author, broadcaster and fitness teacher Tina Baker talks to Tina Jackson about creating her no-holds-barred domestic thrillers, representing working class lives, the way she weaves lived experience into her writing and what it was like to embark on a Creative Writing MA in her 50s
Tina BakerTina Jackson
©Veerle Evens
She puts on a good show, Tina Baker. She put it on when she was a TV soap opera critic, and she put it on when she went on Celebrity Fit Club – to combat ‘widescreen bum’ – and won it. She puts it on in the flesh too, or at least on Zoom, where she rocks up looking a million dollars, glammed up despite having been quite recently ill – properly, hospital ill – and only just back to teaching the fitness classes that are how she earns her living.
And she puts it on, terrifically, as an author of gritty psychological thrillers. ‘Unputdownable’ is a bit of a cliché to describe the gripping books in this genre, but Ti na’s really are: raw and extreme and viscerally full of life. She rolls her sleeves up and properly gets her hands dirty, delving into the muck and murk that make up the lives of ordinary women under duress in her latest, Make Me Clean, the story of Maria, a cleaner with a mounting bodycount. Authenticity matters to Tina – really, really matters.
‘I swore that I’d write as honestly as I could, and have the honour of doing it to the best of my ability,’ she says. It’s a truism that authors should write from what they know, and in Tina’s case, that’s exactly what she’s doing.
“What if you’ve got an ordinary person? More sinned against than sinning? Drink, drugs, grief, postnatal psychosis, breakdown – extreme circumstances, the cracks in the psyche? When that red mist descends?”