Rachel Joyce: ‘People often ask questions about Harold Fry, as if he were a real person’

This is the third time you’ve written about Harold. Will it be the last?

Yes, I think that’s it now. I honestly think I’ve said all I have to say about Harold. I hadn’t meant to write about him again after finishing The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy but at an event for the book somebody asked me if I could tell the story of how Harold met his wife Maureen. People often do ask questions about Harold as if he were a real person. It started me thinking and the next morning I woke up with the opening sentence to this story in my head. That very rarely happens. Writing it was unusually effortless. It poured out.

What made you return to Harold and Queenie in your latest book, having written your second novel, Perfect, about something completely different?

It was the readers again. It was people writing to me asking about Queenie, and talking about her at events. Some were quite distressed about the way she looked at the end of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, when she was disfigured by cancer. It wasn’t what they were expecting – or what they wanted. The book was based on my own experience of my dad dying of cancer and I explained to people that what Queenie went though was exactly what I’d seen happen to him. But the more I said it, the more I felt I was short-changing my dad. I realised I needed to give Queenie a full life, a lived life, just as I wanted to acknowledge all the things my dad had done in his life before he became ill. I realised I found the prospect of reversing the camera on the Harold Fry story really quite exciting. I got to the point where I just couldn’t not write it. I was writing another book and I had to abandon that and start writing … Queenie.

How did your family react to you telling your father’s story in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?

My mum had wanted to commission a park bench as a memorial for him, but she could never decide where to put it, not least because my dad never sat down anywhere, but she said after reading the book, “You know, I don’t think I need to get him a memorial bench any more.” That was nice.

Were you surprised by how popular the book became?

I was genuinely hugely surprised. I tried not to think about it too much and I still try not to think about it. I find it a bit unsettling. I think it quite suits me to work in a quiet, off-the-radar kind of way, and in radio nobody ever really knows who you are. … Harold Fry was much more public. I suddenly felt there was a lot more light on me than I was comfortable with.

Suddenly you were nominated for the Man Booker prize alongside Hilary Mantel and Michael Frayn…

Yes, and of course it was an amazing thing to happen, but if I’m honest I felt like the junior girl who’d suddenly been put into the sixth form. And I always had – still have – this feeling that somebody’s going to go: “She shouldn’t be up there!”

You had a thriving career as a stage actress after graduating from university. What made you swap acting for writing?

Becoming a mother. After I had my first child I started to feel I didn’t want to go away to work in a theatre far from home any more. Then around that time I met a radio producer and told him about an idea I had for a radio play and he said, “Well, go away and write it.” And that’s what I did.

What drew you to writing for radio?

There’s something rather magical for me about radio. I think it’s the fact that you can’t see the actors, which means there’s something hidden and as a listener you have to make a really big imaginative leap. It’s a very creative process, but also a very down-to-earth process. You don’t ever feel you are dealing with much ego. And if you’re interested in words, which I am, radio is a fantastic celebration of words.

Do you think it has influenced the way you write fiction?

It really has, yes. Radio writing is such a discipline. Because it is so easy for people to switch it off, you have to really think about how your play is moving, and, indeed, keep it moving. I think there’s a place in radio for the poetry of the ordinary and that is something I try to find in my fiction too – without wanting to sound as if I take myself terribly seriously, which I don’t.

Who’s your favourite novelist of all time and who’s your favourite novelist writing today?

I’ve read everything Penelope Fitzgerald has ever written several times over. I always go back to her. And I’m now doing the same with Graham Greene, which I am really enjoying. Among living authors, I get so much from reading Colm Tóibín. Also Marilynne Robinson.

At heart your books are all love stories. What’s the best love story you’ve ever read?

Anna Karenina.

What kind of a reader were you as a child?

I read a lot for escape. I was quite a troubled child, very anxious and extremely shy and I found it very difficult to deal with real life. I had such an awful time at school. I think I was probably quite depressed, even though you don’t think of children being depressed. My way of dealing with it was to have lots of bad stomach aches, which meant I could stay home from school in bed and read books such as Heidi and Pyewacket by Rosemary Weir, about the one-eyed cat. I can vividly remember how safe that made me feel and how comforting it was.

You sound a bit like Byron, the troubled main character in your novel Perfect…

There is definitely some of me in Byron. I think I always start with a bit of myself because I am not imaginative enough to get completely away. Also, I wrote Perfect at quite an unsettling time for me, in the wake of the success of …Harold Fry. So with hindsight it makes perfect sense that I wrote a book about the world being tipped upside down.

What books are on your bedside table?

Let’s see. There’s The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, the new novel by Haruki Murakami, who I love, and a book called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery. I also have The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, which I’ve been meaning to read for ever. Perhaps if I put it right beside the bed then I actually will.

What’s your next novel about?

It’s about a music shop, and the main character is an expert in music, so also beside my bed are piles of books about music.

Are you musical?

No. Which is why I’m having to read a lot of books about it. I keep saying to my husband, “What am I doing? I know nothing about music.” But then he says, you knew nothing about walking the length of England either but you still wrote a book about it. I don’t know when it will be finished. I’m going to let this one come, as opposed to bashing it on the head.

The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy is published by Doubleday (£14.99). Click here to order it for £11.99