If you want to write domestic fiction I cannot recommend reading Tessa Hadley, or indeed listening to her here, enough. 

Tessa, who has been long-listed twice for what is now the Women’s Prize and whom the Washington Post called “one of the greatest stylists alive”, wrote four failed novels throughout her thirties and was finally published aged 46, with Accidents in the Home. She has now written eight novels and is one of the modern masters of domestic fiction, burrowing into the complex inner lives of middle aged women and the clashes between them, their feelings and the outer world. 

They are books of enormous sensitviy but also, as Tessa says here, born of a lot of control and labour, and while Tessa is clear about how compelled she is to write she is also keen to dispel the idea that it is in any way easy. “I’m a slow and painful writer.. writing in a knot of constipation” she says,. 

I find her story as riveting as her writing. She worked away for years on what she later realised were all the wrong sorts off things - books about big political events when really she was interested in things closer to home. I found her fascinating on how she kept going (even when someone told her nobody wanted to read stories about people in their forties) and how writing is learning to hear what you sound like in readers minds.

Do come find me on Twitter - @francescasteele - or Instagram - @francescasteelewrites - I'd love to hear your stories about self-doubt, rejection and – of course – success!

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