Top 25 Emma Healey Quotes

If you work hard at something, you can forget everything else.

Writing is the thing that pervades my whole day – I’m always wondering how I might describe something or improve my understanding. I’m constantly trying to remember an eavesdropped conversation or an idea for a story.

I really admire Ana Mendieta. She was a Cuban American artist who died the year I was born and whose work examines violence, feminism, and belonging. Her art is always brave and visually arresting and vibrates with meaning.

There are lots of things going on for teenagers, with exam stress, changing friendship groups, becoming independent, and all those hormone changes affecting you.

I’m not a writer who thinks about writing only for themselves; I do always have a reader in mind.

Like most new writers, I could only hope that one day one publisher might agree to publish one of my books; I couldn’t imagine several publishers all wanting to buy the first book I’d written.

I loved ‘A Lion in the Meadow’ by Margaret Mahy.

I think I’m too scatty.

I feel like Mills and Boon saved my life. It was a way of not living. I read a lot of other books as well, but they were definitely the best for just switching my brain off, not having to deal with reality.

I tried to help a shirtless man who was being arrested in Starbucks. He obviously wasn’t right in the head, but the police thought I was trying to make things worse.

Reading about what a digital native thinks of the Internet is like reading about what it’s like to blink: it’s kind of boring.

I was very worried about whether I could do it or not. I mean, how arrogant – here I am in my 20s trying to write from the point of view of a woman in her 80s.

I was a 20-something woman living in London and didn’t want to write about a 20-something woman living in London! It’s an area well covered already, and people would probably have thought it was about me. I decided that if I wrote about an 82-year-old dementia sufferer, then no one could mistake it as a memoir.

Although my father’s mother, Nancy, has dementia, and her experiences gave me ideas for some of the scenes in the book, it was my mother’s mother, Vera, who most influenced the character of Maud. Vera died in 2008, before I’d gotten very far into writing ‘Elizabeth Is Missing,’ but her voice is very like Maud’s.

I used to go to the gym with one of my best friends, and we seemed to have the same conversation over and over again. I was always saying, ‘I’m still not pregnant, and I still haven’t worked out what I’m writing,’ and her answer to both was always, ‘Just relax!’

Ann Radcliffe was an early influence; I devoured her books while I should have been studying for my GCSEs.

Several members of my family have, or have had, one form of dementia or another. I really wanted to explore what it might like in fiction, but I didn’t know how to start.

I love writing dialogue – it’s when I really lose myself in my work. I love reading it, too, when it’s good and rings true.

I had so many people in my family with dementia that it felt like it belonged to me in a way. I feel like the same with teenage depression because I went through it. I feel like I’m allowed to write about it; it’s mine.

The characters in a novel are made up, figments of the writer’s imagination. I’m sure this won’t come as a surprise to anyone, and it’s not surprising to me either, but knowing this, feeling this, definitely made writing my second book harder.

I spent a lot of time researching dementia, read papers on the subject, and also found a lot of dementia diaries on the Internet which were a great help in getting an insight into the disease.

I’ve been surprised that ‘Elizabeth is Missing’ has been so well received as a crime book. I love mystery stories, and that is what I decided to write.

When I was very small, I loved ‘Meg And Mog’ by Helen Nicoll and Jan Pienkowski. I had all the books and remember going to see the theatre production.

I had tried to write about young women in London who had jobs and boyfriends, and it was so tedious.

With novels, you’re representing things. You’re not explaining.