Louise Candlish tells us about the experience of returning to an old haunt...
This month my second book I'll Be There for You is reissued (look out for a fabulous new pink and smoky-grey cover) and since it's set in the Northcote Road area [of Battersea] it's been absolute torture to resist rewriting it completely. When I was working on the novel in 2004, this was Nappy Valley proper - that is to say it was noticeably well stocked with babies' bottoms. The queue for the baby-changing in Starbucks was almost as long as the one for butterscotch lattes and Marshmallow Twizzles (OK, so maybe that was just my order...) But now all the kids I see around the place are in school uniform. They're getting so tall! Their voices are breaking! They definitely know that a rice cake the size of a 10p is not a treat.
Of course some parts of the updating process are easier than others. Take property prices. As my heroine house hunts Between the Commons she is shocked by the asking prices, and yet within a year of the novel's original publication the figures quoted already sounded laughably low (half a million for a whole house, with stairs and front door and everything, you must be having a laugh!). But, red pen hovering, I wasn't sure quite how silly I should go - one million? One and a half? Two and a half? Mindful of the intervening apocalypse I decided to err on the side of modesty.
Then my friend told me what she'd just sold her one-bedroom flat on Nightingale Lane for and I reached for the pen again. Who am I kidding, it's way too hard to predict property prices (and if it were as easy as we like to think then the 'writer's room' I now sit in would be a glorious Farrow and Ball-ed summer house festooned with roses and jasmine as opposed to the flaking former loo that it is). So, publish and be damned - let the crazy house prices stay in print for all eternity. At least I'll be popular with the estate agents.
First published in South West magazine, February 2009
Posted 11/02/2009 16:46:17 by Darren Turpin with 0 comments.
Paperback: £6.99