Sometimes the inspiration for a novel comes from reading a line in a news article — but with Based on a True Story it partly came from something that required less concentration: curling up on the sofa watching TV.
I’d been a huge fan of HBO’s Succession, and watching the end of the third season in which three siblings finally — and briefly — put aside their rivalry to take on their father struck me as the emotional heart of the show. I’d frequently written about motherhood but never about siblings. Why was that? The “eldest daughter” trope was running on Instagram, and as the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, there was clearly stuff to mine!
I knew I wasn’t interested in creating an overbearing patriarch — Jesse Armstrong had already done that superbly with Logan Roy — but what if I created a strong if narcissistic mother with three daughters? A sort of feminised King Lear? And what if I subverted the daughters so that the youngest might be the adored favourite, but wasn’t the one who was morally righteous? In a book partly about how we curate our stories, what if she was an influencer with something of an agenda?
Books often have multiple sources of inspiration — and I’d long been fascinated by successful children’s authors and the fact their own children sometimes find them tricky. Enid Blyton’s daughters knew a very different woman to the engaging author who delighted young readers over tea, for instance, and Christopher Milne was deeply ambivalent about being the hero of his father A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books, Christopher Robin.
I knew my protagonist, Dame Eleanor Kingman, could be an author like this and that her muse could be her youngest daughter who similarly resents being snared. Now all I needed were plenty of other characters with reasons to kill her; a propulsive subplot with a ticking clock; a secret Eleanor had maintained for half a century; and some red herrings. How hard could it be?
Having written three dark psychological thrillers — Anatomy of a Scandal, Little Disasters and Reputation — I knew I wanted to pivot to something a little lighter with a clear puzzle to resolve: a Christie for the Instagram age. I’d loved the start of each White Lotus, which starts with an unknown body — and then unspools so that we discover whose body this is and why they were killed. As a one-time news reporter, I was used to conveying the who, what, where, and when of a story, but the most interesting question was always why?
Books often have multiple sources of inspiration — and I’d long been fascinated by successful children’s authors and the fact their own children sometimes find them tricky.
And finally, I wanted to pivot to write something a little glossier and more escapist, giving it an exquisite setting filled with danger and suspense. North Cornwall, where I holidayed as a child and from where my mother’s family come, has high cliffs, changeable weather, and erratic phone signals — all great in terms of creating jeopardy — and I even created a wind-lashed heath on which my modern-day Lear could rail. And of course I had the sea, great for washing away evidence, with which Based on a True Story begins.
Researching my previous thrillers involved sitting through murder and rape trials, or interviewing paediatricians and detectives. But for this, I simply needed to walk the cliffs of north Cornwall and do a deep dive on Instagram.
Put simply, it was fun to write — and I hope to read.
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