Ideas Behind the Book, Interviews & More

The Secret Keeper

INTERVIEW: Kate Morton in conversation with Culture Street

Kate Morton spoke with Sophia Whitfield from Culture Street upon publication of The Secret Keeper in November 2012. The wide-ranging conversation covered writing, research, Tamborine Mountain, different jackets around the world, and letting go of one book to begin another.

IDEAS: Three Central Threads

At the top of a tree

Ideas for The Secret Keeper began to percolate years ago, and a half-finished version of Chapter One sat in an old notebook for ages before I finally started work on the book officially. I’d long carried the stubborn image in my mind of a teenage girl at the top of a tree – it was a warm, summer afternoon, the scene infused with the potency of its adolescent narrator – and I knew that the idyllic picture would be shattered by something shocking–

I just wasn’t sure what that something would be. I tried to force that girl into other books, but she was uncooperative and it seems that she knew better than I that she did not belong in them.

Bringing the Blitz to life

In 2008, my family and I went to live in London for three months. London is a special city for me: there, more than anywhere else, I feel conscious of the past brushing against me. I’ve always been fascinated by the Second World War, in particular life on the Home Front, and I arranged to meet a guide who walked me around central London on a bitter cold November day and brought the Blitz to life. Once I discovered my wartime character, Dorothy, I finally knew what it was that her daughter would witness on that summer’s day, twenty years later.

Past and Present

Blending past and present storylines in order to tell a complete narrative is one of my favourite ways to write. I don’t see time in a linear fashion. I believe that the past is always with us — as memories, but also as influences that inform our behavior in the present and the decisions that we make with respect to the future. Making sure various storylines and character points-of-view weave together in a logical and interesting way can be mind-bending; but, when it works, it’s very satisfying and, I think, an organic way to tell a story, like that in The Secret Keeper, which belongs to an entire family.

INTERVIEW: Kate Morton in conversation with Waterstones

In October 2012, Kate Morton sat down with Waterstones (in a specialty cheese shop in London) to talk about The Secret Keeper. The conversation also covered writing about the UK, her favourite bookshop as a child, and her father’s ghostly visions.