Jon McGregor on writing So Many Ways To Begin
“The idea for this novel came from a few different angles.
First, there was the character of the boy who wanted to be a museum curator when he grew up; it was a simple idea, but it seemed to stick. Later, I realised that he could have a reason to be so concerned with history, and narrative, and authenticity. (As does the writer of novels, you’ll notice: it is possible to read this book as that dread thing, a fiction about fiction).
Next, there was the sense of unfinished narrative business from my first novel, in the character of the narrator and her mother, their relationship, and the history of that family up in Aberdeen. I wanted to explore that further, and it seemed obvious to do that by going back to the mother’s childhood.
Then, because my mind was in a particular place at that time, it seemed natural to have these characters meet, and fall in love, and marry, and try to make that marriage last. (I’d just got married myself, and my grandparents had all died after more than fifty years of marriage, and we were thinking about having children… it was a time of Big Thoughts).
So, in David and Eleanor I had my portrait-of-a-marriage storyline. And with David, I had my secret-adoption backstory. And, because I was thinking about David’s love of museums, I came up with the idea of the story being told through objects and photos, and the idea of David laying these objects and photos out in different sequences as he tries to make sense of his family’s history and, later, of Eleanor’s history.
Everything else just seemed to develop, slowly, during the writing process. For example: simple chronology made it necessary for David to be a 1950s child, and since the contrast between post-war reconstruction and his love of history was then going to be an interesting focus it made sense to have him grow up in Coventry, a city which seems to epitomise English post-war socio-economic history. (The bombed cathedral and its modernist twin; the massive public housing developments; the car industry, and the city reshaped to fit the car; Philip Larkin; The Specials…) And since there’s a large Irish community in Coventry, the idea of David having an Irish connection sprang up quite naturally. Not to mention the fact that when I looked into the history of secret adoptions they very often seemed to involve young Irish girls who had come over to England to work and who couldn’t possibly take a baby back with them.
(Note: when I say ’secret’ adoption, I don’t necessarily mean that they were underhand or illegal – although they were sometimes informal at best – but rather that they were never discussed. The social histories of the period are littered with people who enter adulthood discovering that a much older sister or aunt or friendly neighbour is actually their mother.)
I realised, as I traced the narratives of David’s and Eleanor’s families, and the narratives of the places they lived, that the book I was writing was actually a book about exile: about what happens when people leave their place of birth and start a new life somewhere else, either from economic necessity or from a desire to begin again. It struck me that this was one of the main stories of post-war Britain – people returning from the war, building new homes and new cities and new industries, moving around the country to where the work was, watching people from around the world arrive to build a new life alongside them. In this context, David’s adoption, and his discovery of it, is just another form of exile; something which, he and Eleanor come to understand, they have in common.
The book didn’t take all that long to write, but it took a long time to put together. The stories emerged quickly, but, in a neat parallel with David’s efforts to assemble a museum exhibition, I struggled for a long time to put the individual episodes together in the right sequence. How should the story best be told? Where was it best to begin?”
For more bits and pieces about the background to So Many Ways To Begin, including pictures of some of the artefacts featured in the novel, go here.
