MY WRITING DAY
Sam Mills
The novelist and memoirist tells Lynne Hackles about combining caring for her father with creative writing
In the summer of 2004 Sam Mills sent the opening chapter of a novel called A Nicer Way to Die to Faber & Faber. It was pulled from their slush pile and, within a day, Sam had a reply asking to see the rest. ‘This sent me into a panic,’ Sam says, ‘as I hadn’t actually written it. I spent a year crafting the book and worrying that they would have forgotten me, but fortunately my editor remembered and loved the whole book.
‘Since then I’ve been a full-time author. Then, four years ago I also became a carer for my father who has schizophrenia and, after my mother died in 2011, was living alone. He began having sudden attacks of catatonia, which were like a waking coma, where he’d be unable to eat, talk, walk, but would be conscious. He had to be hospitalised. Being a carer was something that happened to me, rather than something I chose.