In 2013, after the publication of her third book,“I thought, that’s it – three’s a nice number,” she says over video call in the present day, recalling her decision to lay down her pen. “I tried it for about a year, but I found it incredibly stressful. I’m an anxious wreck at the best of times, but with nothing to focus on, I really go to pieces.”
As Lawson suspected when she started writing – sitting down each day around 9 a.m. after her cup of tea, finishing by 3 p.m. when she was “completely run out of brain” – the story follows Clara, a little girl whose older sister Rose has vanished. The man next door, moving into the house once occupied by Clara’s beloved elderly neighbour Elizabeth, is Liam, a thirtysomething from the city who has inherited the property under slightly mysterious circumstances.
That clear-eyed humanism – the sort that is rooted firmly in the reality of life, but holds out a glimmer of potential for a measured, minor-key redemption – is classic Mary Lawson, although she confesses that’s ending, gentler than in her other books, might be evidence that she’s “getting old and sentimental.”
“I went over there on holiday, ran out of money, and needed to find a job,” explains Lawson, who grew up in a small farming community in Southern Ontario. “I met a guy at work – and he’s now in the next room, forbidden to leave in case I encounter any tech-y problems.” For years, Lawson had been writing what she thought people wanted to hear – like the stories she sold to women’s magazines to supplement the family’s income when she was raising her children. “They had to be contemporary, and they had to be set in the U.K., so that’s what I was doing,” she says. And then one day, she decided to write about a little girl called Kate, growing up in a small Northern Ontario town after the Second World War.
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