The White Darkness

"I had no idea when I wrote this whether it would work at all because it was the only book really that I’ve ever written about myself. My personal experience of life, I mean. It was what teenage life was like for me. But I didn’t write it until my own daughter was of that kind of age and clearly experiencing teenage years in exactly the same way I did. She didn’t want to join in the dirty talk. She didn’t really see the point of boys. The imagination was, for me, a so much better safer and brighter place to spend time than competing with the loud girls at school. So that was my theme: the interior world. The White Darkness is most appreciated, in my experience, by 14 year old girls who are still at a stage when they have a lively interior world, but their mates are hell-bent on adulthood. I’d been toying with an idea of them walking across the frozen Bering Strait but it wasn’t working. Then I translated it to Antarctica and thought about Scott’s expedition. All of a sudden, I came up with this interior world that the girl had. Sym is in love with Titus Oates, so she takes all her problems to him and talks to him inside her head. He is, of course, lovely and consoling in every way, (though I think that, in real life, he was a rather anti-social, grumpy man who did his shoes up with wire.)"