Night and day Like a spouse and a lover, medicine and writing occupy separate parts of my life, and I do everything in my power to prevent them meeting. My novels have never dealt directly with the stuff of my day job. Fiction sustains a side of me that would suffocate in medicine. I thrive on research, inhabiting areas of life I would never otherwise experience.
In 1995, I chanced on an article about a solar eclipse in India, which was seen as a major proselytizing opportunity on either side. I was an aspiring writer in search of a subject. As a GP I spend much of my time arbitrating between rational medicine and obdurate human nature. No matter that I knew next to nothing of India, the research would be a challenge. My first novel, Eclipse of the Sun (1997), was born.
Writing has always been a nocturnal activity. I do my best work in the early hours, ear phones filling my head with music to create the right mood. I hate the first draft: months spent discarding and revising, despairing of ever getting the right tone and voice. Once I’ve carved out 100 decent pages the book begins to take on a life of its own, and the exhilaration mounts in the closing stages. While working on Eclipse, I heard a radio interview with one of the last forensic artists working in Britain. There was something about conjuring faces from the memories of victims that lodged in my imagination.
I tried to use it, but the novel I tentatively titled The Face never materialised. A few years later I started in forensic medicine, and shortly afterwards my first child was born. Frequently my work involved crimes against children: examining victims and offenders, confronted by the base corruption of innocence. Cases over, I would return home to my family, where images from victims’s tories would repeatedly intrude. Such intense emotions for my child: dreams for her future, fears for her safety, my own hopes and anxieties as to what, one day, I would mea to her as her father. Somewhere in all of that a spark ignited.
The Essay on Domestic Violence 2 Children Abuse Victims
The affects of domestic violence do not stop when the cuts and bruises heal. The psychological affects of domestic violence can be seen long after the violence has stopped. Many of the criminals that are locked up institutions blame their violent acts on the violence that they were victims of when they were young. It is devastating for a child to witness its mother, or father, getting beat. ...
The Face came to life. For many years – with my wife’s support – I have managed to continue the love affair with fiction while remaining married to medicine. Now there are children involved, too. While I dream constantly of eloping with my mistress, I don’t know if I ever shall. Nor do I know what it might do to our affair if ever I could.
