Interview: Helen Smith author of Alison Wonderland!

For my first interview here at For Love and Books, I have the honor of interviewing Helen Smith , author of Alison Wonderland which is set to be released tomorrow (August 16) here in the U.S.!

From Goodreads:

 After her husband leaves her for another woman, twentysomething Londoner Alison Temple impulsively applies for a job at the very P.I. firm she hired to trap her philandering ex. She hopes it will be the change of scene she so desperately needs to move on with her shattered life. At the all-female Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation, she spends her days tracking lost objects and her nights shadowing unfaithful husbands. But no matter what the case, none of her clients can compare to the fascinating characters in her personal life. There’s her boss, the estimable and tidy Mrs. Fitzgerald; Taron, Alison’s eccentric best friend, who claims her mother is a witch; Jeff, her love-struck, poetry-writing neighbor; and—last but not least—her psychic postman. Her relationships with them all become entangled when she joins Taron for a road trip to the seaside and stumbles into a misadventure of epic proportions! Clever, quirky, and infused with just a hint of magic, this humorous literary novel introduces a memorable heroine struggling with the everyday complexities of modern life

Helen, I cannot wait to read your book, and have spent a good part of my afternoon reading reviews in anticipation. I have to say, I'm curious - how much of your personal "Mr. Wonderland" is Alison looking for? (Does Alison's "Mr. Wonderland" hold similarities with your own?)

Thank you! Alison protests that she’s not looking for Mr. Wonderland because she has an interesting job and there’s nothing missing in her life –but I’m not sure we believe her.

At the beginning of the book, we see that her neighbor, Jeff, is in love with Alison but she’s keeping him at arm’s length. Maybe he’s her Mr. Wonderland and she’s refusing to see it? If so, then maybe she’s making a mistake. There’s a lot to love about Jeff – like many characters in my books, he’s on a mission to make life better for other people. Also, he writes poetry and he has strong, muscular arms. But I’m not sure if he’s quite my ideal man as he’s a dreamer. I like storytelling rogues.

We all know that we aren't supposed to have a favorite child, but in many cases as parents we can't help but have some partiality. Who would you say is your favorite character that you've written?

I’m very fond of all my characters, even the “baddies”, but Alison is my favorite. I think partly this is because there is quite a lot of me in her, but mostly because she’s the heroine of the first book I ever had published. It had always been my dream to write and publish a novel and I have Alison to thank for that dream coming true.

What are a few small points that you think would help the American reader familiarize themselves with the setting of this book?

The book is set in Brixton, south London, where I live. It’s an impoverished area with a mix of people of different ethnicities and there were riots there in the 1980s. It was also affected – though not badly – by the recent dreadful riots and looting in London. However, it’s a friendly place where people get along pretty well, and the heart of the place is made up of interesting little alleyways with eccentric shops and a colorful market.  By setting the book there I wanted to show that it was a fun, safe place to live. I liked the idea of having Mrs. Fitzgerald, the boss of the agency where Alison works, presiding over the local area in a strong, intelligent, no-nonsense way, seeming to know all the influential people in London and dealing with them on equal terms.

All the landmarks in the book are real but many would be unfamiliar to English readers. Even someone living in London might not know of the existence of the Battersea Park Peace Pagoda and wouldn’t know whether or not there are monks living underneath it, though they’d suspect they don't. Similarly, most people wouldn’t know about the Cerne Abbas Giant – though, once seen, he is never forgotten, even if you only look him up on Google.

There is some British slang in the book but I think most readers will understand it from the context. Most American readers know that "fags" for us are cigarettes, and also that "snogging" is enthusiastic kissing, but an American friend who read my book recently said it took him a while to work out that a torch is a flashlight, and it made him laugh when he got it. I think there is some fun to be had in learning about another country through its language, even when it’s a supposedly shared language that needs a bit of decoding.  I love reading American literature and I was proud of myself for knowing as a child, for example, what "grits" meant, even though I wasn’t convinced I’d want to taste it.

The London in the book is a personal version of the real London that I hope will have a universal appeal, so that Alison Wonderland can be read and enjoyed even by people who don’t live in the city or have never visited it – whether they’re in Boston, Lincolnshire or Boston, Massachusetts.

When you start a new book; do you start it knowing what will happen? Or do you just get an idea or a character in your head and run with it?
 

I always know the beginning, the middle and the end. I need to know how it will end so I can steer towards my destination. Though I claim to plot – and I will write down plot points and follow them – I find, as I write, that some characters become more important than I had anticipated. That’s the exciting part of writing for me – the discovery of the world and the characters as I go along. That, and sometimes coming up with a clever turn of phrase that encapsulates what I am trying to say but does it in a way I haven’t seen done before. Moments like that are pure joy but they don’t come along very often!

Thanks for inviting me to answer questions about the book on For Love of Books. I enjoyed answering them - I hope you enjoy Alison Wonderland when you get round to reading it.

 Thank you Helen for taking the time to answer my questions! I look forward to reviewing Allison Wonderland as soon as I finish reading it! (Hopefully early this week!)