Novels are like girlfriends: some need working at; some arrive out of
the blue, and some were doomed from the start. And then there are some
which strike you like a bolt of lightning.
The Drink and Dream Teahouse has a very special place for me, just
like my first love. It was my first novel. Writing it was powerful,
heady, compelling. It took me six months from first line to putting
the mss in an envelope, already sold for what was then a record
breaking amount for an unfinished novel – and went on to be picked by
the Washington Post as one of their Books of the Year.
I had already published two books about my experiences in rural China
and Eritrea, East Africa, but I found travel writing a little stilted.
I was dying to break into fiction and sat down as the leaves were
beginning to turn and the novel seemed to almost write itself. I was
smitten! Fiction allowed me a freedom to not have 'me' in the story,
and this was so liberating. I found, oddly, that I could be much more
honest in fiction than in nonfiction. And I could get much closer to
the truth as well.
In some ways I'm glad The Drink and Dream Teahouse only took six
months to write, because like your first love affair it was an
unguarded and complete fall. I would be out in the pub, thinking of
my characters rather than listening to what anyone was saying. The
characters would wake me in the middle of the night. I became a
little obsessed. The lives and challenges and love stories felt real
as the ones about me.
They still feel real.
It's flawed of course. It was my first novel and I had no idea what I
was doing. But there is a freshness and an honesty and a ballsiness
to the writing that now I look back and admire. I wonder if I still
write that confidently, and sometimes I fear that I don't. Much in
the way that after the first cut, you're never quite so open to others
again. I wonder if other writers have the same feeling?
The Drink and Dream Teahouse won prizes I had never heard of, and was
banned by the government in China, which in turns infuriated and
delighted me, but I'm very fond of this book, and am delighted to have
as an ebook for the first time.
I hope you like it just as much. If you do read it, then I'd love to
hear your thoughts.