FREYA NORTH is the bestselling author of 14 novels including my debut Sally, Pillow Talk and Little Wing. Good Reading caught up with Freya on the release of her novels, The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Eadie Browne is an odd child with unusual parents, living in a strange house neighbouring the local cemetery. Bullied at school – but protected by her two best friends Celeste and Josh, and her many imaginary friends lying six feet under next door – Eadie muddles her way through.
Arriving in Manchester as a student in the late 1980s, Eadie confronts a busy, gritty Victorian metropolis a far cry from the small Garden City she’s left behind. Soon enough she experiences a novel freedom she never imagined and it’s seductive. She can be who she wants to be, do as she pleases, and no one back home needs to know. As Manchester embraces the dizzying, colourful euphoria of Rave counterculture, Eadie is swept along, blithely ignoring danger and reality. Until, one night, her past comes hurtling at her with ramifications which will continue into her adult life.
Now, as the new Millennium beckons, Eadie is turning 30 with a marriage in tatters. She must travel back to where she once lived for a funeral she can’t quite comprehend. As she journeys from the North to the South, from the present to the past, Eadie contemplates all that was then – and all that is now – in this moving love letter to youth.
Q&A with Freya North
What inspired your book The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne?
I have always been drawn to quirky characters – and I’m really not sure where it came from but I thought about a young kid with eccentric parents who live next door to a cemetery. That notion in itself was the springboard into the story.
Two real life events that further shaped it was that I live near Welwyn Garden City and my children (then 18 and 16) were acting in a play called City of Tomorrow, written by famous playwright and poet Glyn Maxwell to celebrate the centenary of Welwyn Garden City. I realised I hadn’t known much about the visionary idea behind the Garden City movement – and I though oh! so this is where Eadie lives …
Also, at the time, my eldest Felix was leaving home for Uni and that was very emotional for me not least because it inspired me to really remember a vivid time in my life which I’d forgotten to think about for so many years.
Why did you set your story in Manchester in the 1980s?
I lived in that great Northern city from 1986-1991. It was such an exciting time for me – and for the city. Manchester nowadays is uber cosmopolitan, a really amazing and sophisticated place, partly because it was rebuilt after an IRA bomb in 1996. Back in the 80s it was a down-to-earth city, tatty at the edges, proudly Northern.
And then WOW! the Acid House scene took off with the legendary club the Haçienda and Manchester became the forefront of counter-culture. It was just such a great time and place to be young.
Did you draw from your own life to help shape any of the scenes or characters in your story?
Oh yes, without a doubt. But I’ll leave it ambiguous as to how much of Eadie’s experiences are based on mine! I felt so nostalgic for that time before email, whatsapp, social media – I used to write to my folks to say can you call me at 7pm on Friday … then I’d wait by the payphone hoping the call would come through. In some ways, it was so much more liberating a time. No one back home really knew where I was or what I was doing at any given time.
One of the loveliest things about researching and writing this novel was that it inspired me to reconnect with my own University friends. Most special to me was seeing my bestie from those years, Dan, who has lived in Melbourne since 1999. He came and stayed for a week last summer – and we picked right up from where we left off. We talked a lot about those times and realise that we both look back with such fondness and wonder at those heady days when we first left home and became a tight little community at Manchester Uni in the late 1980s.
How did you go about developing Eadie’s character?
She came to me fully formed. She really did. But during the course of the novel, I really set myself the challenge to write in her voice, that she came across as authentic as a young kid in Part I, a student in Part II and a thirty year old woman in Part III. I spent a lot of time thinking about language and speech and the way one thinks and reacts at different stages of life.
Can you tell us how your arrived at the title The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne and its significance in the story?
It’s a great title even if I do say so myself. Initially I was just going to call it Unfinished Business – but I love the longer title. It’s two fold – Eadie herself is a work in progress and we are alongside her as she messes up and then seeks and achieves resolution during the course of the book. But the other characters are absolutely crucial to the very fabric of the novel and I felt a lot for them – from the school bully who makes Eadie’s life a misery, to Josh and her Celeste her childhood friends with whom she must make amends. In essence, this novel is a gentle story, a search for self and an awareness of doing the right thing even if, at the time, that’s a challenge.
Your novel has been described as a powerful love letter to youth – what do you hope readers take away from your novel?
I hope that readers will be moved – I was, whilst I wrote it. I think, often, of the Robert Frost quote: ‘No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader’. There are reveals and dramatic moments in the book that really captivated me. Also, I hope the story may inspire readers to sit still for a while and really remember their youth – who they were, how they felt, how they reacted – and how influential that period of our lives is for the adults we then become. Memories don’t disappear, they are always there, you just have to commit yourself to accessing them.
Can you discuss any challenges you faced while writing your novel?
HUGE challenges writing this novel! My previous novel Little Wing just poured out in five months straight – but I was writing Eadie Browne nonstop for 18 months. When I’d written 60,000 words I printed it out, sat there with my red pen and deleted 37,000 of them!
I had to – I really tasked myself with this novel to write my best work to date. I was very strict – no matter how ‘lovely’ the prose, if it didn’t serve a purpose, if it didn’t move the story on, if it was lazy exposition it had to go. It was terrifying to do this – but I’m so pleased that I did because the book is the better for it. It is, by far, the best novel I’ve written.
One must always challenge oneself – don’t be complacent, don’t rest on your laurels.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I love books. Books have defined and shaped all the key stages of my life. A A Milne taught me about rhyme – and reason; Barbara Sleigh fired my imagination and my playtimes with the Carbonel stories. Black Beauty was the first book that made me cry, while Ruby Ferguson’s Jill books transported the pony-mad girl in me away from the city.
In my teenage years, I found solace in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Judy Blume’s novels, while To Kill A Mockingbird and Flowers for Algernon opened my eyes to justice, humanity and judging people. At University, I turned to Jilly Cooper for respite during exams and Mary Wesley’s books introduced me to characters whose shoes I wanted to step in to. When I gave up my PhD to write my first novel, the works of Mary Wesley, Rose Tremain, Jane Gardam and Barbara Trapido inspired me to write fiction with strong female leads and original, sometimes eccentric characters.
Since 2009 I have lived on a small farm in East Hertfordshire with my family – my offspring Felix and Georgia, my dogs Milo and Bee, my horses Nathan and Jack and my sheeps Brontë, Catkin, Emily, Eliza, Lovely and Willow. In my spare time, I enjoy ceramics classes (I’ve been going for years and basically make the same bowl over and over again, plus little porcelain sheep) or invariably I can be found in one saddle or other. I’ve ridden horses since I was little but I took up road biking after my back surgery in 2017 – and have become somewhat obsessed …
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