Gilly Macmillan grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire, and studied history of art at Bristol University and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She worked at the Burlington Magazine and the Hayward Gallery before starting a family. Gilly lives in Bristol, England with her husband and three children and now writes full time. Her new novel is To Tell You the Truth.
Susan Lewis is the internationally bestselling author of more than forty books across the genres of family drama, thriller, suspense, and crime. She is also the author of Just One More Day and One Day at a Time, the moving memoirs of her childhood in Bristol during the 1960s. Following periods of living in Los Angeles and the South of France, she currently lives in Gloucestershire with her husband, James; stepsons, Michael and Luke; and mischievous dogs, Coco and Lulu. Her new novel is My Lies, Your Lies.
Susan Lewis
You mention a couple of times the importance of writing what you know about. Is this something you hold firm to?
Gilly Macmillan
I’m not sure I hold firm to it, I’ve certainly written about things I don’t have experience of, and it would be very limited if we never did that as writers, but I think it can be a sensible place to start for a new writer and if writing time is short, it has the practical advantage of saving research time. What I love most about it, is that it allows you easily to write in depth about something, bringing nuance and confidence to aspects of the novel.
Susan Lewis
What drew you write in the genre of crime/thriller?
Gilly Macmillan
I love a good page turner. If I’m traveling, I’ll always pick up a thriller at the airport, and it made sense to write in a genre that I enjoy personally. Also, I’m interested in the history of crime fiction writing and I love the noir aesthetic. I was excited by the idea of trying to write something in the crime/thriller tradition.
My eyes were on stalks as I read your biography! What a fabulously glamorous life you’ve had, and so many extraordinary experiences, including an affair with someone on the FBI’s Wanted List! How much do your real-life experiences feed into your novels?
Susan Lewis
In my earlier books I’ve drawn on many real-life experiences, very often expanded and romanticized to make a better, or more dramatic story. The FBI’s most wanted fiasco inspired Summer Madness and Last Resort and has a lasting effect on my life for many years.
Gilly Macmillan
There’s a dark and timely theme at the heart of My Lies, Your Lies, concerning a romance between an underage schoolgirl and her teacher. I loved the way you explored this through the different characters, especially the female ones, and the way the fallout rippled through time and families. Can you talk a little more about that?
Susan Lewis
The romance was always the core idea, everything else came from it. I guess I was trying to illustrate how so many lives can be affected by a young girl falling in love with the “wrong” person. And how this can reverberate down the years to a point where misunderstandings and a psychotic need for revenge is visited upon new generations.
As I was born in Bristol and have set several books there. I’m fascinated to know what aspects of it persuaded you to use it as a location for this book.
Gilly Macmillan
My first novel is a traditional crime novel in the sense that half of it is written from a detective’s point of view. I’ve always been a fan of the way crime fiction uses location vividly, sometimes making it feel as if it’s character in its own right. Ian Rankin does this brilliantly with Edinburgh in his Rebus novels. At the time of writing my debut I was living in Bristol, having moved there only a few years before, and loving it. Bristol is the gateway to the South West of England, and is a vibrant, mixed city, fairly large. It’s also geographically and architecturally interesting with a long and challenging history, full of darkness. Those seemed to me to be exactly the ingredients required to make it a compelling setting for any crime novel.
Susan Lewis
What do you enjoy most about being published?
Gilly Macmillan
It allows me to keep writing and also to meet a whole world of people, including publishers and readers, who I wouldn’t do otherwise.
Susan Lewis
What do you enjoy least about being published?
Gilly Macmillan
Self-promotion. It’s something authors have to do, but it doesn’t come naturally.
You’ve written so many novels, in different but related genres, that I wondered if you have any advice for a thriller writer who’s just at the beginning of the middle of her career? Or indeed any aspiring writer? Do you enjoy swapping genres? Does your experience of writing in one genre feed into another in a useful way? What might all your books have in common?
Susan Lewis
I believe one of the most difficult parts of publishing my books over the years has been trying to decide which genre they fit into. I’ve never actually focused on one in particular, either in my head or my intentions. For me it’s all about the story and characters, and in some cases crime/thriller might fit better than in others. Some have described My Lies, Your Lies as Gothic, which never crossed my mind while I was writing it. My advice to aspiring writers, put simply, is to listen, listen, listen, not only to your characters and instincts, but to people, news, all kinds of entertainment, simple conversations even. And of course, READ! There is never any knowing where the next surge of inspiration might come from, and a book isn’t only one idea. Apart from the central one or two, it’s made up of hundreds of others, big, small, crucial and possibly just background. As far as reaching the middle of a career, there might come a time when you have to reinvent yourself, but when, if, it comes, it’ll probably happen naturally, provided you don’t resist it.
Did you visit any of the bunkers mentioned with fantastic description in the story?
Gilly Macmillan
I intended to. There’s one that’s really well-preserved and not too far from where I live, but I never got there in the end, relying instead on the internet to provide me with diagrams, photographs and all the history. I will go one day. The story behind the bunkers fascinated me. There’s a book in that!
Susan Lewis
How important do you think it is for readers to identify with the main character?
Gilly Macmillan
Very. If readers don’t like the main character, they’re going to lose interest in the book quickly. In To Tell You the Truth I knew from the start that Lucy, my main character, would be quirky, to say the least. Finding aspects of her personality that readers could relate to and invest in was something I put a lot of work into.
The setting of My Lies, Your Lies, is incredibly dramatic and vivid, both the North Devon coastal location and the extraordinary house where much of the action is set. Both are such an integral, unsettling part of the story. I love it when crime novels use location in this way, so that it is almost a character in its own right. Did you plan the novel that way or did the location grow on you as you were writing?
Susan Lewis
I’m so glad you loved the location. It’s a very beautiful and atmospheric part of the North Devon coast. As soon as I visited I knew it would be perfect for this book, so I set about exploring, talking to locals and researching the history before returning to write at home. I rarely write in situ; I find it difficult to focus when a location is a reality around me. It kind of takes over, and I was advised many years ago to beware of allowing location, or research of any kind, to become more dominant than the story and characters.
A great telling of the Lucy/Eliza relationship. Do you intend to pursue this “partnership” for further books? (Asking for a friend ha! Ha!).
Gilly Macmillan
Thank you! No plans for now but never say never!
Was it fun to write about a writer? Or a bit too close to home? What made you chose to have a writer at the heart of your mystery?
Susan Lewis
I’ve long wanted to put a writer at the centre of a story—odd that I haven’t done it before, I guess. In this case there are two, but Freda was certainly the greater challenge and boy is she a piece of work!!! All the mind games she plays with Joely, her ghost writer, felt as though they were being played on me as I was writing them. I usually needed a lie down, or glass of wine at the end of the day, often both.
