Alison McQueen has one of those lives that makes for great imagination that a writer benefits from with every word written.
With an Indian mother and an English jazz musician father, life experiences were hers for the taking as she grew up in London. Thus began her inspiration for her latest book, Under the Jeweled Sky.
We want to introduce you to both Alison and her book. Be sure to read our review of Under the Jeweled Sky and also enjoy these few minutes with Alison in today’s Duck Chat.
Duck Chat: I see from your bio on your website that your mother is Indian and your first book, The Secret Children, was inspired by her personal life story. What specifically led you to write this story?
ALISON MCQUEEN: I dedicated The Secret Children to my mother, Mary. She and her sister were the children of a British tea-planter, born to his Indian concubine, and the shame of it had followed her like a shadow her whole life. It was a tragic, complex situation that caused untold damage to a great many people.
Nobody talked about these things. They still don’t. I wanted to give the scattered fragments of her story some kind of cohesion, to give it back to her as a whole, to replace the missing pieces for her. Opening in Assam in the 1920s, The Secret Children offers a glimpse into a colonial world that has long since disappeared.
DC: I’ve heard writers often say their stories take them in surprising directions, or dialogue flows from some unknown place. Do you experience that?
AM: When I begin writing a novel, I know where it is going to go, but I don’t necessarily know how it will get there. The story will unfold in its own way. It will tell you what it needs and what it wants to say. All I have to do is to give it the room it requires to grow, and to be there when it asks for a pencil. This is the theory. Of course, in practice it’s utter torture.
DC: Do your characters surprise you sometimes? Do you model them after real-life people you’ve met? I’m especially struck by Lucien and Dr. Schofield, two such contrasting characters.
AM: Sometimes a character will come crashing in fully formed. Others are far more coy and will keep you waiting a long time before they decide to show their true colors. I need to know my characters inside out, but you can’t rush a deep relationship. My characters always surprise me, even the ones who remind me of people I know. I don’t model my characters consciously at all, they just sort of turn up on the doorstep and ring the bell.
DC: Which fictional character would you like to hang out with?
AM: That’s a no brainer: James Bond.
DC: You brought Sophie’s visits to the Zenana and her romps through the palace courtyards to life. Were you reliving memories from a personal visit? Or are they perhaps from family stories and anecdotes?
AM: The 1947 part of the story is set partially in a maharaja’s palace. Although the fictional palace and its location are anonymous, I did have an inside track into life inside an Indian palace. In her twenties, my mother was hired as the private nurse to the Maharaja of Indore’s mother-in-law. She arrived there from Bombay and was shown to her quarters, an enormous suite in a grand building set across the grounds from the main palace.
A car was sent for her every morning, but she said that she preferred to walk. So off she would go, strolling through the grounds while the car followed along a few yards behind, driving at snail’s pace in case she should change her mind. Her breakfast would be served to her on a solid silver service, with a footman standing by should she want for anything.
From what she has told me, I am not sure that she handled it particularly well. She said that she didn’t want any fuss, which was quite the wrong way to go about things in a palace. There was also an incident when she was caught preparing her own boiled egg, which didn’t go down at all well. The cook was quite overcome with grief, and my mother never ventured to lift a finger again.
DC: Do you have a set time every day when you write or do you wait for your muse to strike? What is sure to distract you from sitting down and working/writing?
AM: I don’t have a particular routine. There are too many interruptions and life constantly gets in the way. As with all working mothers, it’s an ever-changing balancing act, juggling a family. When I am in the thick of the writing process I completely lose track of time. Seasons come and go unnoticed and my husband drops hints like “I might as well be living on my own.”
I write in my bedroom which has a lovely view of the garden. In the summer months, I sit at the desk with the windows wide open to let in the bird song. In winter, I drag everything I need into bed which feels fabulously bohemian but causes havoc with one’s back.
The two things that drive me mad while writing are telephones and doorbells. They have the power to completely destroy my train of thought for the rest of the day.
DC: What advice would you give to your younger self?
AM: Don’t worry too much. Stay away from vexatious people. Enjoy your life. Everything will work out just fine. Oh – and don’t eat those oysters in Le Suquet in the autumn of 1991.
DC: What book would you like to read again for the first time?
AM: Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales.
DC: Why did you chose to give Jag and Sophie the ending that you did?
AM: The ending of Under The Jeweled Sky was, for me, the starting point of the story. It could never have been any other way.
DC: If you were a book, what would your blurb be?
AM: One woman’s roller-coaster ride through a series of increasingly bizarre events while trying to write novels.
DC: What would your “voice’s” tagline be?
AM: Here lies truth.
DC: Thank you for spending the day with us, Alison!
