The Key of Mind

Some novels begin with a question you cannot put down. The Key of Mind began with mine: how much of a childhood do we quietly rewrite so that the adults we became still make sense? Marianne Ash, a retired archivist who has spent forty years cataloguing other people’s papers, finally turns the practice on herself and finds a room she cannot open.

The book moves between a cold northern coastline and the crowded rooms of the nineteen-sixties, following two sisters who agreed, without ever saying so, on a version of events that let them both keep going. I wrote it slowly, in longhand, because the story kept asking me to slow down and listen rather than explain.

“She had spent a lifetime deciding which papers were worth keeping and which could be let go, and only now, at the end of it, did she understand that she had been doing the same thing to her own past, quietly, every single day, for fifty years.”

Readers often tell me the mystery is not who did what, but whether Marianne truly wants the answer. That is precisely the tension I was after. A locked memory is not always a wound; sometimes it is a kindness we have arranged for ourselves, and prising it open costs more than leaving it shut.

If you finish this one and immediately telephone a sibling, I will consider it a success. Families are archives too, and most of them are badly catalogued.