There is No Dog imagines what would happen if a teenage boy was God. What gave you the idea?
About four or five years ago, my husband was listening to a radio programme about all the people who’d played God in the movies and grumbled about why there was never a teenage God. It was as if a light bulb appeared over my head. I loved the idea from the instant he said it.
How do you get inside the minds of your adolescent characters?
I’m already there. I don’t think that teenagers are that different from the rest of us. And, of course, there’s no such thing as a typical teenager. I never make an effort to think like a 16 -year-old, any more than a good crime writer makes a big effort to think like a detective. Writers are attracted to the genre with which they have a natural affinity.
Are you a social networker or an old-school typewriter-tapper?
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I waste far too much time on Facebook and I’m attached to my MacBook Pro like a limpet. But I don’t have a smartphone because I like to get away from the constant ping of e-mails.
Which current children’s authors do you admire and why?
Margo Lanagan, Mal Peet, Patrick Ness, Ulf Stark, Shaun Tan [whose Tales from out of Suburbia is pictured below], Wolf Erlbruch, Jutta Bauer, Maurice Gleitzman ... I admire writers who break the rules of what people imagine children’s books are capable of doing.
What’s next?
I’m two thirds through a strange little book that doesn’t even have a proper title yet. It’s about a man who disappears — and I discovered only at the end of the first draft why he disappears. There is No Dog is quite a high-concept book, a comedy based on a strong idea. This next one is much more impressionistic — quite drifty and soft. I just plunged in without knowing where I was going, which takes a certain amount of nerve, but I think it’s working out pretty well.
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Where are you going on holiday — and what will you be reading?
We visit various members of my family in the US and then come back and do not very much on the beach in Suffolk. The pile of books by my bed is a good predictor of summer reading: Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, David Almond’s The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Sally Gardner’s The Double Shadow, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song. If there’s any time left over, I’ll finish the new book — and try to think of a title.