David King's Blog: A New Author's Journey - Posts Tagged "daily-mail"
A Mother Like Mine
Today the consequences of becoming an author, and writing a first novel based on the life of my larger than life mother became clearer when I was asked to write an article about Beryl, her influence me as a writer and indeed on my first novel , 'American Bombshell,' for the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Somehow it never occurred to me that anyone would be interested in the backstory to the book itself, but it seems that the tale of a young English girl who escapes an orphanage in the last year of World War Two to marry an American bomber pilot, and then travels from a small bombed out English town to the glamour of New York on board the Queen Mary stirred more attention that I ever dreamed of; from the comissioning of a feature by The Mail, to the book being selected as Book of the Week by WH Smith for the week it first comes out (Last week in March), and a queue of radio interviews ahead.
Writing the newspaper feature proved more emotionally difficult than I imagined too, for, while my mother gifted me an incredible story (or series of stories, for the first book covers only her early life), it came at a high personal cost thanks to her erratic personality and the psychological effects on me as a child in surviving the consequences of her five (known) marriages.
As my father once said a few years after their divorce, had the British dropped my mother on Berlin in 1939 and again on Tokyo in 1941, there would have been no war. Anyone, he said could survive an atom bomb, but no one could survive a Beryl. He may well have been right.
The full story based on a remarkable life lived during a World at War is included in the forthcoming article 'A Mother Like Mine' to be published - so they tell me - in the Mail on Sunday in the first week of April.
Somehow it never occurred to me that anyone would be interested in the backstory to the book itself, but it seems that the tale of a young English girl who escapes an orphanage in the last year of World War Two to marry an American bomber pilot, and then travels from a small bombed out English town to the glamour of New York on board the Queen Mary stirred more attention that I ever dreamed of; from the comissioning of a feature by The Mail, to the book being selected as Book of the Week by WH Smith for the week it first comes out (Last week in March), and a queue of radio interviews ahead.
Writing the newspaper feature proved more emotionally difficult than I imagined too, for, while my mother gifted me an incredible story (or series of stories, for the first book covers only her early life), it came at a high personal cost thanks to her erratic personality and the psychological effects on me as a child in surviving the consequences of her five (known) marriages.
As my father once said a few years after their divorce, had the British dropped my mother on Berlin in 1939 and again on Tokyo in 1941, there would have been no war. Anyone, he said could survive an atom bomb, but no one could survive a Beryl. He may well have been right.
The full story based on a remarkable life lived during a World at War is included in the forthcoming article 'A Mother Like Mine' to be published - so they tell me - in the Mail on Sunday in the first week of April.
A New Author's Journey
How I came to write American Bombshell and the experience of becoming an author
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