The Memory Game

about The Memory Game

This was your first book as a team. Why did you decide to write together?

Nicci: It’s hard to say now (hard to remember) how something that for a long time had been a vague and slightly mad idea became a reality. Because when we met we were already writers – and obsessive readers – we had talked about what made a ‘voice’ in a book, and wondered whether it would be possible for two people to create one, seamless voice. We used to say that one day, when we had time, we would try to write a book together, to see if it was possible. And then one day – when we had no time, no money, four tiny children, a life of clutter and chaos – we came across this idea for a book that seemed new and exciting. And we just thought that if we were ever going to do it, now was the time. It began almost like a literary experiment, and then quite soon it took us over.

So how did you actually go about it?

Sean: We spent weeks and months around the kitchen table with glasses of wine and gin and tonics sketching out the story and even, in the case of The Memory Game, drawing a detailed map of the Martello property. But when it came to writing the book, we wrote separately. One of us would write a section, then hand it to the other who was permitted – in theory, at least – to cut, add, rewrite without fear of retribution.

Nicci: It sounds simpler than it is, less messy and quarrelsome. We’re often asked if we argue and the answer is that of course we do. We argue quite a lot (actually, I argue and Sean doesn’t, which is extremely irritating). But it’s not over the things you’d expect – not over large ideas, or over the changing of words. It’s more like a version of marital bickering: couples rarely argue over big issues, but over things like who does the washing up. More than arguing, however, we struggle and disagree with each other, and I’ve come to think that our novels are born out of those disagreements: we often want to write about the things we can’t quite settle on, the things that bother and disquiet us and we can’t let go of, but come back to over and again.

We thought, after The Memory Game, that we’d found a way of doing it, but that turned out to be nonsense. Maybe writing can never be easy and maybe it never should be. There are days when things go right, and then there’s a kind of magic about the way that writing leads you, and you follow it in order to find out what you are thinking – and then there are days when it’s painful and slow and your head feels like glue. We have very few rules together. One is that we never tell anyone – not even our family, not our children who are always asking, who wrote which bit (people try and guess and they’re right about fifty per cent of the time). The other is that we’ll change each other’s words privately, not face to face, otherwise it’s brutal.

Did you decide in advance who would write which bit – for instance, who would write about recovered memory and the therapy sessions?

Nicci: Absolutely not. We both do all the research (in this novel, and in all the subsequent ones), and then whoever’s turn it is to write will do so. It’s imperative that we each own every bit of the book – every piece of research, every word that’s written.

Why did you choose the name Nicci French?

Sean: We were always felt the book should be published under a single name. We felt that two names on the cover are a distraction – when you read fiction, you want to hear a single voice talking to you. The Memory Game had a female narrator, so it seemed natural to choose a female name. We played around with lots of possibilities but in the end we just gave up and contributed a name each. The only other name I remember, which we quite liked and everybody else hated, was ‘Alice London’. As a private joke, we reversed one of the ‘n’s and made Alice Loudon the heroine of our third book, Killing Me Softly.

There’s a lot in The Memory Game about families – is any of that autobiographical?

Sean: Since this is a family history featuring crimes varying from murder to incest and culminating in two prison sentences, we were rather alarmed that our families claimed to recognize themselves in the book.

Nicci: When our families first read it, Sean’s thought it was based on them and on his crowded summers in Sweden with all his cousins, and my family thought it was based on them. Both of them, for instance, recognised the mushroom hunt at the start of the novel – because both Sean and I had experienced that. Part of the impulse behind the novel was our shared sense that every close, happy family is also unhappy and full of secrets, and that memory is unreliable, slippery and seductive. The past is a shadowy country; you can get lost there.