It’s not easy to write a life-affirming book about a woman dying in a hospice, but The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy was a story I just had to tell
I am beginning to realise that I don’t write the things I intend to write. I was definitely not to going to write another novel about Harold Fry (if anyone asked for a sequel, I said no), and then suddenly there I was. Writing one. So what changed my mind? A sudden thought – and it was no more than that – that I had not finished with the story. I had not given space to Queenie Hennessy. It would have been wrong to include her version in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry because part of the tension for the reader comes from not knowing how she is and whether he can get to her in time. But nevertheless, I felt the gap I had made in not telling her story.
The realisation came fully dressed, as if it had been around a long time. No sooner had I had it, than I also got the book’s title, its form, and sentences, hundreds of them, cramming my head. There was nothing for it but to abandon the piece I was working on and start on Queenie’s story, right from her very beginning.
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