When did you know you had a story in you that you wanted to share?
Many years ago, when my baby boy became ill, and the word SCID entered my life, I thought, one day, I would write about it to increase awareness about this rare and fatal condition. I was however conscious that I needed to write it with a lot of care and integrity. It couldn’t be a hasty Facebook post or similar! Over the years, so much happened, which I won’t tell you here because it will give away the story but I remember, when my son was born in London, one friend said, ‘This story has all the trappings of a bestseller! You should write it.’
Even then, I hadn’t planned on writing a memoir because I’m a fiction writer and there are so many imaginary characters who want to be written about. It was only years later, as part of my course work for my Masters in Creative Writing, I wrote a short piece of life writing. I intended to send it to a journal, so was struggling to keep it within a word limit. But when we workshopped it, my tutor and classmates were insistent about me writing a full length memoir. ‘But why would anyone want to read a book about me?’ I remember asking. It was my friend, Alan Devey, another author, who replied, ‘Mona, let us be the judge of what we want to read.’ That was the point when I felt convinced that I had a story to share, and a book to write.
Read the full interview in The Asian Writer.