STAR INTERVIEW

Beloved novelist Freya North has surpassed herself with a new tale of growing up and coming to terms with the past. She talks to Tina Jackson about memory and the magic involved in the craft of writing

Bestselling author Freya North has nothing to prove, with 16 novels under her belt and a deserved reputation for taking her readers on an engrossing emotional journey deep into the lives of her warmly engaging characters. But with her new novel, The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne, Freya really pushed herself out of her comfort zone.

‘I wrote Eadie Browne for about two years and it’s the first book of my 16 where I really deleted a lot and took myself to task as a writer,’ says Freya. ‘I was writing and writing and not quite sure where this was going – it was taking me to places I didn’t quite understand. At 60,000 words I thought if what you read doesn’t serve a purpose you delete it. So I ended up taking out 37,000 words. It’s the first novel I’ve ever written in first person. I wanted this to be the best book that I’ve written and I think it is.’

The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne is a poignantly coming-of-age novel that draws its reader deep into the story of Eadie and her growing pains, as she moves from life as a schoolgirl in a small Garden City in 1976 to university in Manchester during the heady halcyon days when ‘Madchester’ was the rave capital of the UK.

Like all Freya’s characters, Eadie is the kind of person readers want to get to know, and spend time with.

Human, relatable, not perfect – not the first person you’d notice in a crowd, but someone whose everyday exterior conceals a past history that has marked and shaped her.

‘I really love Eadie,’ says Freya. ‘She hasn’t had a troubled past, but didn’t have the easiest of childhoods. It’s not even a chrysalis to a butterfly story, it’s about how robust the human condition can be. You don’t have to do the ugly duckling story – I didn’t want to follow a trope.’ The seeds of Eadie Browne’s story, the pivotal relationships with friends and family that the novel explores, and the problems that ensue, are all sown in her childhood. ‘We have a tendency to look back on our childhood as halcyon days,’ says Freya. ‘I just wanted a normal kid, nothing special, and her journey to finishing off unfinished business so she can progress into her 30s. It’s a novel of looking at people, who come from a normal small town, and making sense of all the mistakes, all the joy.