Faber & Faber

Two police officers knock on Laura’s door. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed ...

So begins Whatever You Love, the new novel by Louise Doughty (and her first with Faber). Louise is the author five previous novels and one book of non-fiction. She has sat on numerous awards judging panels, and is an in-demand teacher of creative writing.

Whatever You Love is a compelling read - moving and topical, full of grief, lust and retribution - a potent mix. Here's Louise explaining more to Faber Editor, Sarah Savitt:

'Whatever You Love' is set in a small, seaside town with an immigrant population and ethnic tensions - how much of a challenge was it to take on that setting and that social background?

My proudest boast as a novelist is a quote from a review in the Independent, which said of one of my books, 'Louise Doughty writes about people who don't normally get written about.' The town Laura lives in is an out-of-the-way, run-down sort of place with a large community of economic migrants. The man who kills her daughter comes from that community and the battle between them is symptomatic of the ethnic tensions in the town. I was really interested in conjuring a small town torn apart by dramatic events, in the way that a lot of American novelists do really well, when you feel the town is almost like a character in the book. And although a lot has been written about the immigrant experience by writers like Monica Ali or Marina Lewycka, relatively little has been written about the social interaction between migrants and the settled communities they live in. That said, the background to this book is incidental in that this is very much Laura's story. It's really about what one rather ordinary woman finds herself capable of when tragedy is visited upon her.

Laura and David's relationship is intensely passionate, and your female characters are often frank and liberated about sex and sexuality, in a way that feels modern and even quietly daring. Is this something you're aware of, or particularly interested in?

Absolutely! It floors me that in this day and age it is still considered controversial or noteworthy when a woman writes frankly about sex. I've been getting in trouble for it since my first novel was published in 1995 and suspect that with this book I will be in trouble again. 

It was important to me that the flashbacks to when David and Laura first meet were very passionate and very sexual. That was partly because I felt I needed to counterbalance the tragedy of their daughter's death - you can't make a book too grim, after all - but also because I was really interested in exploring that strange compulsion you feel for someone when you first fall for them. It's a form of madness, really. I do think that what we call 'falling in love' is often obsessive lust, which then, if you're lucky, mutates into something calmer and saner and more settled. 

I'm very interested in how we all balance the different sorts of love in our lives; sexual passion, married love, the love we feel for our children. Sometimes those sorts of love compete, sometimes they compliment each other. It's so difficult to write about a couple meeting and falling in love without resorting to cliché - I found putting some interesting and slightly ambiguous sex in really helped ...

You have two daughters. Did you find it difficult to imagine and write about the death of a child?

I'm afraid to say that aspect of writing this book was horribly easy, albeit traumatic. All parents live with the constant terror that something will happen to one of their children - you live with it every waking minute. If my daughter is even ten minutes late home from school I start imagining the worse - so the scenario in Whatever You Love is something I've been imagining for years. 

The difficult bit came in describing what it was like to lose a child but in still keeping it readable and, for want of a better word, 'entertaining'. That was where the revenge plot came in. Once I got that going, the novelist in me took over and I got over the maternal horror of the subject matter. That said, my partner found this book almost impossible to read. Laura's daughter Betty inevitably has elements of our own daughters' characteristics and he found that almost unbearable. He doesn't like this one at all.

One of the most interesting relationships in the book is between Laura and Toni, the policewoman who initially comes to Laura's door after the accident and then becomes her Family Liaison Officer. Did you speak to any police officers while writing the novel?

Yes, that was great fun. I interviewed three police officers, one of them an Inspector in charge of training Family Liaison Officers who deal with the relatives of traffic accident victims. The stories he told me made my hair curl. I really enjoyed finding out about police procedure but also developing a character  who is an officer with a human touch.

There was a lot I found out about policing, and what it does to the people who get involved with it, that I couldn't squeeze into this book, so I am considering developing some of that material in another novel. One of the aspects of my research that was very funny was how sweet and helpful these senior officers were. I had a coffee in the Scotland Yard canteen with one of them and he was waving his fellow officers over and bragging about how he was talking to a novelist, and I was looking at him and thinking, 'But you catch major criminals and terrorists for a living - and you think what I do is impressive?'

'Whatever You Love' is partly an exploration of how the desire for revenge pushes Laura to extreme emotions and actions. How did you imagine your way into her feelings? Have you ever been surprised by your behaviour in an extreme situation? 

You know what, I've never belted anyone but there have a been a couple of situations when I've been really, really close. I think few people are willing to admit to their own capacity for violence, even to themselves. Most parents know though, in their heart of hearts. When another child picks on yours in the playground, you do the sensible and mature thing and talk to your child about coping strategies or go to the school - but the truth is, what you really want to do is storm in there and rip the little s**t's head off. I have no doubt that, in Laura's position, I would be capable of behaving how she does. 

A lot of my fiction has been about how so-called ordinary people behave in extremis - it's just that in this novel, it's really close to home.

This seems like the most plot-driven novel you have written. Was that a deliberate decision?

Yes. I think all my novels are quite plot driven but this is the one where it is the most obvious. I was very interested in starting with a bang, a dramatic event - and you can't get more dramatic than the police turning up on the main character's doorstep in the first paragraph. It's always a risky strategy, creating a high-octane story, because you have to work very hard on the structure and progress of the book to make sure you keep the tension up without becoming melodramatic - but I had great fun with that, and particularly with the twists at the end. I love revelations in a novel myself. I'm really hoping I pulled that one off.

Since publishing your last novel, you've judged several prizes - the Booker, the Orange New Writers and the John Llewellyn Rhys. Has the judging process - or simply the sheer amount of reading you had to do - affected your own writing?

I think all novelists should be avid readers of their contemporaries' work so it's been a great privilege to be paid and acknowledged for what I should be doing anyway. The Man Booker was a huge amount of work but throughout that year, I made sure that I set aside at least one day a week to work on Whatever You Love. I knew that if I didn't keep up my own writing, I would go mad. 

It's a great honour to be asked to pass judgement on other people's work and I think I've learned an enormous amount by doing it. Fiction in English is in such rude health in this country - there's an amazing amount of wonderful books out there. We are so lucky.

You also teach creative writing and wrote a Telegraph column called 'A Novel in a Year' in 2006. Do you feel that you learn from teaching? Did you apply anything from your teaching to the writing of this novel?

I always tell my students that their craft is as important as their art. We all like to think we have the capacity for being 'great writers', whatever that means, but we also have to been down-to-earth about the basics like plot progression and sentence structure. Other than that, emotional stamina is enormously important because writing novels takes so long and the rewards are so uncertain. And you have to have the hide of a rhinocerous when you invite public exposure of any sort for your work. 

Nobody can teach talent, of course, but it's wonderful to meet a student with lots of raw ability and know that you kick them round the room a bit and knock them into shape. I love it.

Who are your major influences - or just your favourite writers?

Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Kate Atkinson, Ian McEwan (the substantial novels, not the short ones), William Boyd - and from the younger generation, Jill Dawson, Julie Myerson, Naomi Alderman.

I suppose the writers I like best are the ones I aspire to be, writers who understand that there's no conflict to writing a strong story and also having wonderful prose and a high degree of psychological insight - in an ideal world, you achieve all three.