Writing The Whitest Woman on the Beach

By Karen Barratt

Writing The Whitest Woman on the Beach took me several years. I had the merest germ of an idea, and a push to write about a certain time in my life. The intense poignancy of thinking about being very young when I was no longer very young drew me; and the difficulty of getting an honest - and I mean, an honest - account of being seventeen down on paper. That, and a desire to overturn the zeitgeist view that youth is carefree, unhampered, fab - and inevitably better than the rest. I couldn’t describe The Whitest Woman on the Beach as an optimistic book; but it does celebrate the joy of having adult choices and at least the hope and chance of getting things to turn out rather better for your children. Hidden somewhere in it is a keen desire to find something out about morality; about how we decide on our own morality - though I’ve been careful to keep this out of the publicity material, in our fantastically frivolous times.

Brighton comes out rather well in the story. Adolescent sex rather less well. Nastiness doesn’t prosper: but then neither does goodness, particularly.

Writing The Whitest Woman on the Beach meant blending many people I’d come across so that although none of the characters actually equated to anybody real, every part of them came out of something real. Events were almost all real, some entirely and some based on stories I had heard. The narrative is only a fantasy in the mixing of all these things together.

I use the computer. If I try pen on paper now, the amateur look of my script throws my concentration: whereas the letters magically popping up ahead of me on the screen gets me to take them seriously - and isn’t it marvellous to be able to eradicate the naff instantly? I write through a version of the plot, leave it for several months, then read it through again, quickly, to catch a fresh response from myself. I obsess over tiny points of language, and have to curb the two, polarised, tendencies towards flippancy and pomposity.

I gauchely avoid any other eyes seeing any of it at all until I feel at least half way happy with it.

Writing the book helped me conclude a time of my life that had too much influence on me. I don’t know why you write; but, for me (thinking aloud), it’s something about packaging up ideas and emotions so they don’t get lost, so they all count, so - I suppose - I can have at least the illusion of meaning.

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