Amanda Brookfield

I started work on ‘Relative Love’ in 2002, with little notion of what I wanted to achieve other than a story told from the multiple viewpoints of a single family.  It would take place over the course of a year – twelve chapters, one for each month – and the narrative would jump from viewpoint to viewpoint.

I thought that would be interesting enough – the dense, tightly threaded rush-hour of multi-generational gatherings. I knew all about that, thanks to coming from a big close family myself, one that still believed in trying to meet up for the big events of the year, albeit without anything resembling the alluring, grandness of Ashley House as a backdrop.  But it was the spirit of such a family that I wanted to capture, rather than the actualities – and I knew I could manage that.

In the beginning, I had no idea the plot would encompass the tragedy that it does, an event that still makes me weep to read it, just as I wept when I wrote it. All I knew at the time, was that I wanted to throw a stone into the millpond of the Harrison world, shake it up a bit, because in my experience that’s how life goes: you think you have it all mapped out, and then something unexpected and unforeseeable blasts you off course. The currents then sweep you on, whether you like it or not, forcing you to reconfigure, to adapt, to survive.

This is what happens, collectively, to the Harrisons – because a family is its own entity, with its own heartbeat. Nothing takes place in isolation. The ripple-effects of the aftermath of their ordeal play out; but even as I put the last full-stop on the manuscript, I sensed that I wasn’t done, that there was more to tell.  Which there was...