Interviews

Tabitha Suzuma talks to Rowena Seabrook about the themes of music and mental health in her novel, A Note of Madness.

Tabitha Suzuma was born in 1975 and lives in London. She has always loved writing and would regularly get into trouble at the French Lycee for writing stories instead of listening in class. She used to work as a primary school teacher and now divides her time between writing and tutoring. A Note of Madness is her first novel. The story was inspired by her seventeen-year-old brother Tiggy, a fan-tastic pianist (and talented beat-boxer), and her sister Thalia. She has just started on her third novel and is planning to write many more.

Could we talk a bit about how drawing on your personal experience impacts on the process of writing? For example, how it balances with doing research and how you generate characters?

This is obviously my first book, and so it is close to my own personal experiences. I suffered from depression quite badly for a number of years and in the end I got so desperate that I started doing research on the internet. I also did a course in abnormal psychology, and a certificate in psychology. At the same time, I was reading a lot of books like Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel and An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, and being very inspired by their stories. I thought I would like to write a novel about a character who suffers from a mental illness. I started with the character and was very interested in the link between the artistic temperament and mental illness. Again, Kay Redfield Jamison inspired me a lot with her book Touched with Fire which is basically a study of that connection. It uses examples of well known composers, artists, poets and so on, and I thought it would make an interesting subject for a novel.

One Christmas I took myself off to Scandinavia and that’s when the character came very strongly to me. I was traipsing around in the snow and the dark feeling at the lowest of the low. I was in Helsinki when I first thought of the book, which is why Flynn is Finnish. The artistic temperament was based very much on my brotherwho is 17, at music school and is a very talented pianist. I thought that was something fantastic and I’m very proud of him, so all those things came together.

And did you have in mind that it would be for a young audience?

That’s an interesting point. I actually started it as a book for adults. I wanted it to be set at the Royal College of Music, which is a very high pressure environment. Then it became more of a teen novel but it sort of ended up that way. A lot of my adult friends have read it and enjoyed it as well, so I think it could have been a book for adults. The problem is that as a book for teens it gets lumped in with children’s fiction; you are sort of saying this is a book for children, but its not really, it’s for teenagers - not that there is anything terrible in it that would shock children too much but they wouldn’t get that much out of it.

The music is a strong theme but I also wondered if it had an impact on the writing? For example, the pace of the novel changes with Flynn’s varying mood swings. Were you listening to music as you wrote?

When I first thought of the idea for the book, I was traipsing around Helsinki in the snow and the dark, listening to Rachmaninov’s third. That was a piece of music that hugely inspired me but classical music in general has always been a huge part of my life. I come from a musical family and I started playing the violin when I was very young. There were periods when I was writing at home and I could hear my brother in the room above me practising or playing pieces of music. Sometimes it was just so beautiful that I would sit and write down what I felt and then that would turn into one of the more manic parts of Flynn’s experience.

The reader gets a personal insight into Flynn’s anxiety, emotions and the complete disconnection between how other people see him and how he sees himself. However, the third person narrative means you get to see the extent of his family’s and friends’ distress. How difficult was it writing the traumatic individual perspective?

 When I was writing what was going through Flynn’s thoughts and his feelings, the euphoria and the depression, I was drawing on my memories of feeling euphoric and depressed. What I also did, which I don’t normally do when I write, is write a piece that was not in chronological order in the book. At one point I was feeling extremely low, extremely depressed and I just thought right I am going to sit down and write this, I’m going to write exactly how I feel right now. That happened on several occasions and then I incorporated that into the book. Similarly with the euphoria – it was something I was experiencing at that time and I wrote it as I felt it. So that, to me, made it a little bit more alive.

Was that cathartic?

It was very cathartic. Before I started writing with the intention of getting published, I would often write my feelings down because I think with any kind of mental illness there is this whole cloak of secrecy. It is very difficult to talk about it, even with your close friends, and you don’t want to burden them. Writing it down is a way of expressing it and letting it out.

And yet it is such an optimistic novel - Flynn finally gets confronted with how other people see him and his own negative thoughts get challenged by his brother and by Jennah. How important was it to you to give it that optimistic ending and to show someone living with their mental illness?

That was very important. It’s rare to have a serious mental illness and recover completely; it’s usually something that you learn to live with. I do feel very strongly from my experience that you can live a really very happy life while still having this condition, which you might be treating medically through drugs or therapy. It was important to me to feel that there wasn’t going to be any magic solution but that at the same time there was a feeling of hope.

I re-read the prologue it seems to me that it does something quite ambiguous to the whole narrative. It reinforces this idea that mental illness is something that needs to be lived with and worked at. Was the prologue something that you returned to after writing the book? Did you know from the beginning that your character was looking back?

 It was something that I returned to. I originally wrote the prologue first but I didn’t specify when it happened in time, so it was just left very loose. After writing the book I felt that I needed to show that things weren’t going to just be easy from then on. I wanted to make it as realistic as possible so I decided to return to it and set it 10 years ahead, looking back, in order to show that it was an issue he was going to have to continue dealing with and something he was going to have to live with and learn to cope with.

I guess with something that is so personal, and also with a first novel, the process of sending it off and the involvement of editors and even of designers must be quite interesting - writing has been so solitary and suddenly all these people are involved. Was anyone reading it as you were writing it?

I never let people read as I am writing. I write the whole thing, edit it and make it as good as I can. Then I usually show it to my family to get their responses. I have siblings of various ages and my parents as well so I will get a mixture of feedback and then I will send it to the publisher.

The editorial relationship is fascinating and thrilling and a real buzz. The first time it hit me was when I went into the offices of Random House and by then I was in communication with my editor Charlie, That was already exciting because there was this lady who I was meeting for the first time who’d read my book and knew it as well as I did and seemed to care about it as much as I did. That creates an incredible closeness and you feel very flattered and it’s a lovely, lovely feeling. Then it really hit me because I went into the offices of Random House and she introduced me to a few of her colleagues and they said ‘Oh you’re Tabitha Suzuma, you’re the one who wrote A Note of Madness’. There was this com-plete stranger who was looking at me with a big smile and saying, ‘Oh I loved your book’. It was just an incredible buzz. I’ve written about my own experiences of depression and you know about that, yet you’ve never seen me and you’ve never spoken to me before. That was a very powerful and wonderful feeling.

I wonder, especially as you have started to get some responses even before the book is published, whether choosing the character of Flynn and also choosing Bipolar meant that you were able to write about your own experience but in a safe way. When I read very personal accounts I feel that there’s this sense of vulnerability, and even with writing in general, because your imagination is suddenly exposed when you are published.

I think the vulnerability is there whether you are writing from your very personal expe-riences or not, because at the end of the day even if it is entirely fictional – well this is entirely fictional really – it’s still your words, your effort. In choosing Bipolar Disorder, there had been a tentative diagnosis with me of Bipolar Disorder and in the end that was rejected, I was able to step back even though I knew a lot about the condition from my research. Writing it from a male viewpoint also gave me that distance. Obviously the episodes of depression are written almost first hand but that character is entirely fictional. He is a pianist but he is nothing like my brother. My brother is very confident, very outgoing, as sane as they come. So writing Flynn did give me that distance

There was an article about you in the Evening Standard and people have been responding to you even before the book has been published. What sort of responses have you had?

They haven’t read the book they have just read the article where I talk about my experiences of depression. There have been emails saying ‘ I’ve experienced something similar’, telling me a little about their story and saying that it was really nice to read, in print, someone being honest about it and not trying to hide it in anyway. It makes you feel good because you feel that you’ve reached out to someone you don’t know who has maybe had a rough time. It’s such an isolating illness a book is a way of breaking that isolation.

The statistics are always so disturbing, was there a sense of consciously wanting to raise awareness and did you then put that desire aside while you were actually writing or did you have in mind who might be reading it and what effect it might have?

Obviously with a first book there was no guarantee at all that it was going to get into print; I was writing it from the point of view that it probably wouldn’t get published. I don’t think it was as altruistic as say-ing ‘I want to raise awareness’, I think it was very much ‘I want people to know what its like’ and if other people have been through that then possibly to help them to realise that they’re not alone. At the same time I wanted to write a story and to escape into another world.

So what’s next? I’ve got one book under contract with Random House for next year and I’ve written a third which is based around a custody battle, so that’s different again, a little bit more of an adventure story. Then the latest book that I have written is actually a sequel to A Note of Madness called A Song for Jennah. It’s two years later and written in alternating chapters from Flynn and Jennah’s points of view. It is written in the first person so you really get both sides.

Was it exciting to be able to return to those characters?

It was fantastic. I fell in love with those characters; they were my first characters so they are very special to me.

In writing your second and third novels has anything changed in the process of your writing?

 It’s different with each. With the second novel I wanted to write something quite different. It still has the psychological slant and it is about a disturbed teenager, so I suppose in that respect it’s similar, but it isn’t from personal experience. It’s a whodunit with more action, and written for a slightly younger age group. In a way it was much more difficult because I had to plan it whereas A Note of Madness just flowed. Also, when I wrote the second one I already had the contract for the first so I was pretty confident that it was going to be read.

You said that you had always done some writing in terms of putting your feelings down on paper, has writing been a lifelong ambition?

Yes. I think I was about six when I told my mum I wanted to be an author. I grew up in a house full of books and read avidly as a child. Reading for me was an escape into another world and I wanted to be able to create my own world to escape into. I wrote a lot from a very early age and especially in my teens because that was probably when I was going through the most difficult time from a mental health point of view. I became very isolated, I felt so alienated from other people and everybody else seemed to be so “normal”. I found it very difficult to talk to other people, to express myself, to form any kind of meaningful friendship, so writing became my world. It was reading and writing that kept me going.

What are your thoughts for young writers?

I would say write as much as you can - even if it’s not read, even if it’s not published straight away, it is practice. Writing improves with time. Read a lot and read a variety of books. With the process remember different people have different ways of doing it. You might want to plan it out very carefully but if you do write a detailed plan don’t ever feel that you have to stick to it. Whether you plan or not, be very flexible and a bit intuitive about it. The wonderful thing about writing is that you can go back and you can re-write it, you can change things. One of my books has got four different versions and several different endings. Obviously it is more work but then at the end you can choose the one that you feel is the right one.

The most important thing is to write, not necessarily about what you know, but what you’re passionate about. Writing a book is a long process and quite a few people, including me, start writing a book and then lose interest half way. You’ve got to get to the point where you’ve got this thing that you absolutely have to write about, something that really means an awful lot to you. Don’t worry too much about what others will think. When I first started writing A Note of Madness some people were sceptical that anyone would want to read about ateenager with Bipolar Disorder. I don’t think that’s true, and your writing will be all the better if you are passionate about the subject and about your characters.