Maddie Mortimer interview: 'When I read the final 20 pages to my family, we all cried'

The narrative in Maps… is experimental. Was its unconventional approach a conscious decision at the outset and was the book planned out meticulously? To what extent did it emerge organically?

In the early stages of the process I found it was less a case of deciding and more one of listening. Removing delusions of choice was the only way I could get the thing going. I let the book, the characters and the form gradually reveal itself, for a while, before the wrestling began. I was surprised how ‘plotty’ it turned out to be, by how much rigorous structural planning was actually required. But it suited me well – moving between the various timelines, perspectives, and registers. It meant I was never bored. I think it was the only way I knew how to write.

How long did it take to write Maps…, and what does your writing process look like? Were there multiple drafts, sudden bursts of activity, long pauses? Was there a significant amount of research and plotting before you began writing?

It took me about two years, but I was relatively consistent with it, working on it most days, sometimes for a couple of hours, or for longer bursts when I could. The research I did was quite extensive. I’d sit on my bedroom floor with huge anatomy books open all around me, plotting pathways through systems, drawing literal diagrams and covering my bedroom walls with them. I was never very good at the sciences, but I needed to know exactly where I was in the body at any given time, to make sure the functioning of a particular organ was informing the metaphors or the language I was using. There were many drafts, but I do edit as I go along.

Maps… has been called ‘genre-defying’ with some readers even classifying elements of it as horror, as cancer slowly attacks Lia’s body. Do you agree with this classification and what made you decide to make parts of the book so visceral?

I welcome the horror-genre connections that have been made. For a book so preoccupied with the inner workings of the body and how our biology can turn on itself, there was going to be a bit of ‘gore’. But my imagination has always felt like a very visceral place. It’s something that Lia also shares, and is grappling with throughout the novel; the horrors our minds can conjure, the monsters we make for ourselves, how to live with them and redefine them. I’ve always wanted to believe that shifting one’s perception of a thing literally transforms the thing itself. I think the book is testing this notion constantly in various ways – trying to see how true it is.

The book is laced with playful pop-culture references: Jaws, Sex and the City, Abba, James Bond and E.T. (amongst others), all make guest appearances. Did any of those play an important role in your formative years, and are films, TV and music still a big part of your life?

Absolutely. All of them. I consume as much as I possibly can and have very broad, eclectic tastes. I often write to film scores, I run regularly to ABBA. I am inspired by movies just as much as I am literature – I grew up loving Hitchcock, Kubrick, Spielberg and Bergman (they all feature in the Maps at some point). I even found Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar to be immensely helpful when structuring the second half of the book.

I’ve always been interested in what we perceive in today’s culture to be ‘high-’ or ‘low-brow’, in rethinking these unhelpful categories and drawing surprising connections between seemingly opposed or unrelated things. It comes from a love of surrealism, and collage. It pleases me that Charlotte York and Simone Weil, for example, have ended up in the same book, though I’m not sure they’d have much to say to one another around a dinner table.