Ed asked Harry Bingham:

The response of people around Fiona--parents, sisters, fellow officers--was spot on and helps create our attitude toward her. The "reality" of a situation is whatever the the author decides it is but your description of the affect of Fiona's delusions on those around her is extraordinary. Is this something you researched--there is a LOT of literature out there? Or were you writing what made sense for these characters?

Harry Bingham what a great question! And a new one on me, too.

So. The literature that does exist is pretty dry and hard to read. It's also *external*. That is: it's written by clinical psychologists and the like looking from the outside in at people like Fiona. For obvious reasons, there aren't many memoirs by people with Fiona's kind of history.

So that's my excuse, but the truth is I write best from the imagination anyway. When I just get properly inside Fiona's head, I just know how she's being and how other people would react. In a way, I think we all get that understanding just from being emotionally competent humans - we know how these things work - but it's the novelist's trick to yank that knowledge up from whichever depths it normally lurks in. Thanks for the nice comments too!

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