I worked for several years as a civil servant in Whitehall until I became ill in the summer of 2005. Now I live in Hampshire with my husband. It took me years to work out that I could write in my blacked-out room – I started what became Girl in the Dark in August 2010 and it was published by Bloomsbury in 2015.
I still remember the first words I wrote: “The girl in the dark is just like you or me, except she has to wear a house.” I was writing primarily to distract myself from despair and stop my head exploding from boredom, but looking back, I think I was also trying to humanise people with chronic illnesses, especially those which are so easily dismissed because they seem extreme or impossible, and because, in our current state of knowledge, they are not yet fully understood.
Praise for Girl in the Dark
