Six years ago, Clare Chambers had more or less given up on her career as an author. “I had been writing a book for five years, but it just wasn’t working,” she says. “I had written it and rewritten it, but my agent still couldn’t sell it. I was pretty depressed; I couldn’t read. When I went to a bookshop, I would stand there and see all these people writing while I couldn’t.”
It was no consolation that she had already published eight novels. Some of her early works had received positive reviews, but none of them had sold particularly well. Her friends would say things like, “It sucks that none of your books make a difference, doesn’t it?” By the time she published her ninth book, she felt as though she had run out of steam.
“I had just turned 50 when it all went wrong, which is a pretty ugly milestone in a woman’s life,” she says. “All the kids are out of the house, the nest is empty and you’re no longer needed as a mother. Then my career as a writer seemed to be coming to an end, it was as if two pillars of my house had collapsed.”
She doesn’t know exactly what prompted her to raise the funds to try her luck again. She just knew she couldn’t keep being “forever disappointed” in herself. She eventually abandoned the book that didn’t work and started writing something new; something completely different from the romantic comedies she had published up to that point. “I said to myself, I’ll just write another book and if that one is crap, that’s it.”
It was far from being “it.” After writing the new novel alongside her part-time job as an administrator at a school in Bromley, south London, where she lives with her husband, Chambers found a new agent and saw it published in 2020. That novel was Little joys – and it became the word-of-mouth hit of the year.
Little joys is a delightful suburban story about a local newspaper reporter investigating a virgin birth case in 1950s south London. Readers were drawn in by the orange cover, loved the quiet drama – and were then devastated by the ending. The novel was adapted for the BBC Two broadcast Between the book covers as Pick of the Week, a Sunday News The bestseller was translated into 13 languages and released for television, with Anna Maxwell Martin set to play the lead role.
According to Chambers, it completely changed her life.
Four years later, the author is back with Shy creaturesan equally gripping story set in Croydon in the 1960s, where our protagonist Helen works as an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital. Following the tried and tested recipe for success, there is both family drama (Helen is having an affair with her older, married colleague) and a slowly developing mystery: a 37-year-old with a long beard is discovered in a nearby house where he has been locked up for almost a decade. His name is William Tapping, he is practically mute, has an extraordinary talent for art – and Helen is determined to uncover his story.
When we meet for coffee in a quiet London cafe to talk about the novel, Chambers is visibly excited about its publication. “Even though it’s my tenth book, I feel like it has the energy of a second album,” she says.
“One of the great things about being a failed author, and I’ve had a lot of experience with this, is that there are no expectations. Once you lose your obscurity, you no longer have the benefit of that goodwill – people aren’t exactly tolerant of success. So they’re going to be harder on that book if they don’t like it, which is understandable.”
Shy creatures should inspire both new and old readers of Chambers’ work. Similar to Little joysmuch of the pleasure lies in the way it delves into what’s bubbling beneath the shimmering surface of suburbia.
“I wanted to write about people who were not part of any (Swinging 60s) movement at all; who instead led ordinary but equally interesting lives and viewed the mysterious world with a certain trepidation,” she says. “Actually, I wanted to write the 60s for the people who weren’t having fun.”
Similar to its predecessor, which used the Lewisham rail crash in 1957 as a central plot point, Shy creatures is inspired by true events. Chambers was combing through an online archive of local newspapers – she searches for words like “scandal,” “mystery” and “unsolved” to find interesting anecdotes – when she came across the story of the real William Tapping, who was discovered in a Bristol house in the late 1950s.
Finding fascinating real-life stories is a great source of inspiration, but writing about them is not always easy. “I would prefer that the events were even further back in time so that no one who is still alive would be disturbed by them,” she says. She has experience of this. “After Little joys, “A lot of people have gotten in touch and said they either remember the Lewisham accident, or that a family member almost made the train but didn’t make it, or they made the train but survived,” she says. “But I’ve had another letter from someone who was really horrified that I’d used that event for the book and that it had revived a trauma.”
That must have been difficult. “Of course I don’t want to upset anyone,” she nods. “But you can’t really stop people from writing about events that are public knowledge. That would mean we couldn’t write about the Second World War because millions of people would be traumatized. I know that these historical events cannot be taboo for writers, and that is a comfort to me.”
Still, she is “torn” by the debate over the extent to which publishers should protect their readers’ sensibilities, if at all. “As a writer, I believe that writers must have the freedom to write as offensively as they want, and that people must have the freedom to feel offended,” she says.
“But then again, I don’t like it when people offend for no reason. I don’t like the word ‘woke’, but if you replace it with consideration and good manners, I think there’s a way to overcome all that.” She takes a sip of coffee and thinks. “Still, writers have to be brave and take the risk of causing offense.”
In 2020, Chambers told the Evening Standard that before her late success she felt “too old” to ever get a contract again. Does she think the publishing industry favors young debut writers? “I felt more like I was on the wrong side of a shift in popularity,” she says. “White, middle-class female novelists had probably done it their way for too long, and now other voices were more popular, and rightly so. But that didn’t bother me – I couldn’t expect to have that advantage forever.”
Chambers published her first novel, Unsafe conditionsin 1992, when she was in her twenties. Chambers had grown up in a house full of books in south-east London, where she had always wanted to be a writer. As a child, she wrote stories and bound them into little books.
After being accepted to Oxford, she travelled with her then-boyfriend (now husband) Peter to New Zealand, where he was working as a teacher. Without a work visa of her own, she had the time and space to write, something she would later miss. When they returned to the UK, Chambers wrote the following seven romantic comedies alongside a job in publishing (from which she was made redundant while pregnant) and her job in school administration.
Now she has the means to quit her secretarial job and finally write full-time. However, she points out that this term is a stretch. “We should say ‘full-time non-working,'” she says with a wry smile.
“I much prefer reading to writing. I have to force myself to put down my reading material in order to carry on writing. My life is actually very limited – I can completely relate to Emily Dickinson, who never seemed to want to come down.”
So she is not working on her next novel – or even thinking about it. “It all depends on whether something catches my eye. I am so slow at writing that something has to really, really interest me,” she says. “So maybe I will never write another book because the right idea never comes to me.” And that wouldn’t matter, she assures me. “The world will not run out of reading material,” she laughs.
“Hopefully it will happen. You know, you get an idea, you start keeping it in your head, and eventually you have a book.” But is there one thing in life that Chambers is sure of? “There are no guarantees.”
“Shy Creatures” is out on August 29th from W&N for £20
