My first book, The Weight of Mercy, was a memoir about my initial three years as pastor of a church to the homeless - the story of a middleaged former journalist dropped into a drug-riddled inner-city mission in the Southern United States. It was painful to write, and I didn’t let anyone see it, not my husband, not my grown children, not former colleagues.
‘People are surprised by that. “You wrote professionally for 27 years,” they say. “You knew you could do it.”
‘It’s hard to explain how different this was, how personal, yes, but also how difficult to sustain a narrative over 85,000 words rather than 2,000. I simply wasn’t sure the book did that.