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It was around this time that I abandoned plans to become a vet. Having inherited my mother’s love of theatre, I’d taken to the stage with increasing enthusiasm, landing some plum roles in local am dram and school plays. Epiphany came when I kissed Stephen Johns - the dishiest sixth-former – in a spotlight, onstage, in the name of theatre. I immediately announced that I was going to be an actress. Those science O’ levels that had made my father proud were quickly forgotten as I took a clutch of arty A’ levels. They then led me to read Theatre Studies at university but, after three years being type-cast in plays as mad old women or men, I realised that I would either need a thirty year career break or a sex change to fulfil my dreams. Thankfully, by then I had discovered a student love for clubbing and live gigs – a new passion that distracted me from my acting shortfalls and took me to live in London to party by night and prop up my chin on a desk by day.
Very sadly, the marriage didn’t last. We divorced in 2006, but remain good friends and are grateful for the happy times we had together. Since then life has taken some amazing and unexpected turns straight out of the pages of one of my novels. I now share life with my beloved partner Sam, who is a dressage coach, living in a beautiful corner of Somerset, where we have two daughters, Dora and Winnie, and run a specialist dressage centre, Dovecote Stables, with beautiful Andalucian and Friesian schoolmaster horses. Life - like books - can have more than one hero (in fact in my first book, French Relations, I got the hero wrong and wrote a sequel, Well Groomed, to rectify it). In Sam, I have finally found a true soul-mate with whom I share so much, who is my bedrock, yet who can still make me catch my breath daily in awe, recognising how lucky I am. I would happily hang over the arena rails all day watching Sam ride, share endless family days together playing with our daughters and my stepson, and then sit at the kitchen table all night talking and laughing with Sam, but I know that escaping into my imagination remains my stock in trade. It’s well over a decade since I first scribbled ‘Chapter One’ in a big A4 pad and I have now written eight novels. Writing is my greatest passion, and yet I never planned to do this as a career. I write because I love it, and because people seem to like reading it and because it’s the only proper job I’ve ever really had. I still have to pinch myself to prove I do this strange, wonderful thing for a living. It’s the best career going. |
Being born on Shakespeare’s birthday, I was almost called Mopsa, after a shepherdess in The Winter’s Tale. It was 1969 and my bohemian parents had contemplated many Shakespearean characters – probably including Bottom – before reverting to the original plan of naming me Fiona to please the Celtic-rooted grandparents. Phew. At prep school, we were asked to research the meanings of our names. My elder sister, Sarah Belle, joyfully announced that her name stood for ‘Princess Beauty’. Fiona Mary, it transpired, means ‘Strong Virgin’. While my sister is still a beautiful princess, I only lived up to my name for the first sixteen years of life.
I moved back to London when French Relations was published - to a tiny flat in Hampstead which I called The Handbag because it was cluttered with make-up, receipts and fag packets. There, I could write and party, retreating to the countryside to finish my books, chill out and play with horses. In the midst of this two-tone life I met Jon, later my husband. We lived between city and country for years, but finally settled for the latter at the end of the nineties, basing ourselves in The Cotswolds and quickly accumulating two dogs - Jelly the terrier and Pudding the Weimaraner, an opinionated tortoiseshell cat called Drambuie and five horses. They didn’t all fit in the Handbag flat so it had to be sold, but we still loved the bright lights and sought them out whenever we could.