I'm delighted to welcome Kate Beaufoy today to share with us...
The Stories within The Gingerbread House.
Once upon a time …
For people like you and me, dedicated readers from the moment we
mastered our ABCs, those four words are among the most magical in the world.
From Grimm’s fairytales to Tales of the City, from Neverland to Necropolis,
we crave stories as a sugar addict craves Krispy Kremes. We lurk in libraries
and haunt second-hand bookshops and follow threads on online book forums until
we find our fix. Sometimes these once-upon-a-times end happily ever after,
sometimes they end in tears. But the biggest concern of all is the way the
story’s told.
For many years I worked as an actress in a television soap opera. It
was a hugely successful once-weekly drama that brought in massive ratings. And
then the powers-that-be in the production office decided that they no longer
wanted the series to be story driven. They wanted it to be issue driven.
Suddenly, characters whom the viewing public had invited into their sitting
rooms every Sunday evening, and whom they had grown to know and love, became
alcoholics or stalkers or adulterers overnight. There was no preamble - no story
behind what made them do what they were doing - they just underwent an
arbitrary personality transplant according to whatever psychological foible
happened to be the issue-du-jour. Ratings, unsurprisingly, slumped.
An eminent writer proclaimed recently that story is unimportant in his
novels. For him, style is more important than content. Reader, I gasped! Story?
Unimportant?!! The power of storytelling should never be underestimated.
For me, story is everything. It’s what keeps the pages turning, it’s what makes
us binge-watchers, it’s what kept poor Scheherazade alive, for heaven’s
sake!
The Gingerbread House, my new novel, is narrated by a fourteen-year-old
called Katia. Stories are the crux of her being; she tells them over and over -
classics like The Little Mermaid and Alice in Wonderland and Charlotte’s
Web - all the stories she remembers from her childhood. She curls up with
them the way people curl up with Netflix, to escape from the harshness of the
real world.
Being so young, Katia has not had the rich life experiences of her
mother, Tess or her grandmother, Eleanor (doyenne of the Gingerbread House),
both of whom have a deep well of life-stories to draw on. Eleanor is suffering
from dementia - an issue that has been much-discussed in the media lately. As
Eleanor’s carer Tess has - in addition to the stresses of the job - her own
problems. She has been made redundant, she is depressed, she is reaching for
the wine bottle at inappropriate hours of the day …
So far, so issue-driven, you might say. But the first draft of this
novel was written ten years ago, before complications arising from the ageing
demographic had become headline news, before ‘wine o’clock’ had become
synonymous with alcohol abuse, before the plight of carers nationwide had been
highlighted by mainstream programmes such as Woman’s Hour.
The original rough was written in the form of a memoir, with no
intention to publish. But then Katia came into my head, and told me that she
would take over the narrative because she knew it needed a more cohesive
structure. And so the story became one woven of three threads with three
protagonists: Tess, Eleanor and Katia.
I knew Tess’s story because I had lived it; I knew Eleanor’s because I
had witnessed it. But I didn’t know Katia’s until the very end of the book,
when it took me so wholly by surprise that it made me weep.
The Gingerbread House is not an ‘issue-driven’ book. It was written in a
spirit of tenderness at a troubled time. It was fuelled by a sense of
bewilderment at how unfair life can be, and how comedic, and how very, very
bizarre. As Alice says in Lewis Carroll’s children’s classic, half laughing
through her tears because it all seems so ridiculous: ‘If I wasn’t real, I shouldn’t be able to cry.’
The Gingerbread House by Kate Beaufoy is published by Black & White.
Kate Beaufoy has an MA in French and English literature from Trinity College, Dublin. She began her career as a professional actor – winning a Dublin Theatre Festival Best Actress award – before becoming a fulltime writer. As Kate Thompson she has had a dozen novels published, including the Number One bestseller The Blue Hour, which was shortlisted for the RNA award.
Kate’s novels have been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Czech and Dutch, and are available as audio books. She has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines in Ireland and the UK, written and broadcast for RTE, and is regularly invited to participate in literary events across the media.
As Kate Beaufoy her first historical novel – the critically acclaimed Liberty Silk – spent four weeks on the Irish Times bestseller chart. Another Heartbeat in the House – was shortlisted in the popular fiction category in the Irish Book Awards 2015. Inspired by William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, it tells the story of the woman who became governess to his children and who may have been the prototype for literature’s most enduring and engaging heroine, Becky Sharp.
Kate lives some of the year in Dublin and some on the West coast of Ireland. She is an advanced-level scuba diver, a wild swimmer, a keen practitioner of Bikram yoga, and the fond keeper of a bewitching Burmese cat.
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