‘I loved books as a child. Never did I imagine that I would become a writer’

So it was an enormous stretch for me when Mum’s publishers approached us about writing a book together on our family’s experience of living with mental illness. I couldn’t possibly do this! I didn’t know how to write more than a minute-long story for a television news bulletin. How could I write a chapter, let alone a whole book?

“Darling, you just have to start,” said Mum. “Begin with a word, then a sentence, and keep going.”

So that’s what I did. We decided to write separately, having first come up with themes we’d cover in each chapter.

When it came time to share our work, I noticed the damp fingerprints I’d left on my manuscript, a sign of how nervous I was at sharing my words.

When it came time to share our work, I noticed the damp fingerprints I’d left on my manuscript, a sign of how nervous I was at sharing my words with my brilliant author mother.

Then the hard work really began. The notes back to me from the publisher, Annette, were different versions of “give me more here”. Thankfully, her editing was matched with a gentleness and nurturing that gave me the safety to open up on the page. Now the challenge was to unlearn my journalism writing style and use words to “show” rather than “tell” the reader what was happening.

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It’s a lesson I’m still learning. One that was given a huge boost, years later, with a memoir-writing course that helped me write in a much freer way. So much so that I wrote chapters on sex, which didn’t end up making the published version of my memoir – thankfully. I can only imagine what my teenagers would have made of that!

Recently I found my ballet book, stacked against the picture books I’ve kept from when my girls were small. The pages have yellowed but I can still make out those faint chocolate fingerprints on some of the pages. There is no way the little girl who was then dreaming of becoming a ballerina could have imagined she’d become a published author.

Now I have six of my own books on the shelf. Each one is different: our family story, a collection of interviews, a memoir, essays, a joke book and a cookbook. What next? I just have to start, one word at a time.