The author of A Double Life and The Most Difficult Thing speaks to Popshot editor Matilda Battersby. Illustration by Richard Allen.

Charlotte Philby has the ideal surname for a writer of spy novels. Her grandfather was Kim Philby, a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring which passed information to the Russians during World War Two and the Cold War.

Charlotte worked for many years as a newspaper journalist, features writer for magazines and also founded an online magazine about parenthood, having gone freelance after having her second child.

She has since turned her pen to novels and has partly taken inspiration from her grandfather’s story to look at the impact of lies and espionage on families and relationships, rather than just on the state. Her first novel The Most Difficult Thing was published in hardback last year and is soon to be published in paperback under the alternative title Part of the Family. Her second novel A Double Life, hits book shops this July.

She agreed to be the guest author for The Mystery Issue of Popshot, writing a short story that doubles (appropriately!) as the opening of her forthcoming novel.

1. Did you always want to write novels and how different was it taking the plunge from writing journalism to writing fiction?

I have wanted to write novels for as long as I can remember, and wrote my first (in first-draft form only) nine years ago, whilst on my first maternity leave from my job as a newspaper journalist. The day I went back to work after eight months away, scrawling passages of a detective story while the baby slept, I typed The End and ill-advisedly pinged it off to a few agents in an extremely shoddy form (think six different fonts and scenes that cut off halfway through…) Strangely, each agent refused to take it on. I came close with a couple of them who suggested I have another go and then resubmit but ultimately I really lost my confidence for a while. Then in 2017, when my third baby was one and I’d recently folded the business I was running to go freelance, I decided to do an online creative writing course and the idea for my first published novel – something quite different to the one I’d tried doing before – finally came clear. Writing that was quite different to writing book two as I had no idea it would be published so it was more for my enjoyment rather than the sense that someone would end up reading it.

My old creative writing teacher, the poet Martina Evans, once memorably told me that being a journalist was the worst thing you could do if you want to write fiction because it teaches you to write according to subscribed methods and constraints. She was totally right. That said, my training as a reporter on a national paper where you might be required to churn out 2000 words a day was incredibly useful in terms of my productivity. It also means I’m very used to being edited and rather than being precious about my work, I value the judgement of others. In journalism, it is your duty to tell someone else’s story in a way that is fair and impartial. Ultimately you become the custodian of someone else’s truth, with what and how much is said dictated to a degree by the agenda of the organisation you’re writing for. Often you’re necessarily limited by what is known or what fits your allotted word-count or what, for legal reasons, can be said. I think in some ways I was a terrible reporter because I hate being strictly confined to facts; I’m so much more interested in imagining between the lines, exploring the story that isn’t being told.

2. Can you please describe your writing routine when it comes to approaching a new idea for a novel? Are you a planner or someone who flies by the seat of their pants?

I think I’m both. I struggled with managing the sheer volume of information and words with my first book, and for a while used Scrivener to enable myself to edit more easily. But then I found it a real ball-ache when it came to transferring the manuscript to Word to share edits with my editor (I’m a terrible luddite). So, before embarking on book two I covered one of the walls in my office with cork tiles. When planning that book (and similarly with book three which I’m currently 70k words into), I typed up my synopsis then broke it down into scenes, before writing each of these by hand onto post-it notes (pink and yellow, respectively, for each of my protagonists) and tacking them to the wall. I could then move them around and see what worked, in a more manageable, visual way. Inevitably, both books have morphed into something completely different since those clear and well-intentioned beginnings. At 70k words into my third, I’m now wondering where the hell it is going. It’s part of the excitement and the terror that keeps me going.

3. I read in an interview you did with the Guardian that your grandfather’s disappearance from your father’s life partly inspired your debut. Can you talk about that a little bit and about how it might also have informed A Double Life?

I’m really interested in the way we think about spies and people who dupe or betray the people around them. Historically, when we think about men like my grandfather, Kim, we always couch his betrayal in terms of the country and the men he worked with. No-one gives heed to the fact that he also had five children and a wife at home, who were equally duped. Once I started having children of my own, I thought about what it would take for a woman to leave her family, and what that would look like.

Both my debut, The Most Difficult Thing, and A Double Life open with a woman walking out on her family in a very high-stakes scenario. Although very different stories, both books ultimately pivot around the conflict between a woman’s commitment to a cause/job when in constant opposition to her family commitments, as well as the intense internal struggle and paranoia that must accompany the deceit involved in living such a double life.

4. Women are often merely part of the body count in spy thrillers. How important is it to you to have high flying, powerful female protagonists?

I think it’s really important that women are depicted as equally active players in these stories alongside men, as opposed to being relegated to the passive role of lover or victim, as is traditionally the case in spy thrillers. But equally, while I want to portray complex and strong women, I don’t want to glamourise the world of espionage. I think it’s important that we see regardless of who you are and how important or powerful you believe yourself to be, once you’re sucked into this life it is bigger than you and it is murky and you will always be distrusted, used and, ultimately, be considered dispensable.

It’s also important to point out that my books, while dealing with international crime and aspects of espionage, are very much focused on the people and the lives that are affected in the process, exploring the whys as much as the hows. It’s a delicate balance between domestic noir and spy thriller that (I hope!) has as much heart as it has intense claustrophobia and duplicity. 

5. A Double Life, a short story taken from the beginning of a novel of the same name and printed in Popshot, is brilliantly evocative of the intense stress that carrying secrets must put an individual under, especially when strong emotional ties tear them in two different directions. I’m very excited to read the rest of the novel. Can you tell us (without spoilers) what we might expect?

So, each of these three books (of which A Double Life is the second – the third is out next year) are stand-alone novels, but they all also connect and inform one another. A Double Life moves between the story of Gabriela Shaw, a senior negotiator in the Foreign Office and a mother-of-two, and Isobel Mason, a wayward young local reporter who stumbles upon a terrible crime on Hampstead Heath on the way back from a squat party. Billed as a fast-paced thriller, the book eventually weaves the two women’s lives together through the crime they’re both in different ways connected to, culminating in a dramatic dénouement that links back to my first novel – but there is no need to read the first one in order to read the second!

Charlotte Philby’s novel, A Double Life, will be published in July 2020 by Borough Press, and is available for preorder now.

The Chance Issue of Popshot features a poem written by award-winning author Joe Dunthorne who first made his name with debut novel Submarine and whose first collection of poetry, O Positive, was published this year.

What inspires and drives you to write?

Curiosity, mostly. For me, the biggest joy of writing is in not knowing where I’m going. I love the feeling of following your mind into itself, of seeing what lives inside you.

You write poetry, short stories, novels and screenplays – how do you know (or at what point in the creative process) what format your story or idea is going to take?

Usually each story suggests its ideal form. In my experience, poetry is good at pinning a single moment under a microscope. Short stories tend to suit more experimental structures, weirder voices. Novels are often more about depth of character. Although there are obviously endless exceptions. Sometimes I change a story into a poem then end up hiding it somewhere in a novel. Whatever feels right.

Your poem “The Spins” (featured in the Chance Issue) brilliantly evokes the contradictions of the festive season — wanting to see family and loving them, but the madness and emotion that prolonged proximity and forced jollity can engender. What do you and your family do at Christmas and how do you avoid getting the spins?

We are usually quite a harmonious – or conflict-averse – family. We tend to all get together in Wales or Scotland and go for walks, eat food and play board games. The most notable family Christmas argument was between my older sisters. They fundamentally disagreed about how best to cook the scrambled eggs. It may sound as though the stakes were quite low but it became the prism through which they saw each others souls.

In terms of avoiding the spins, I think that getting out of the house is essential. I would recommend contact with non-humans. Feeding birds. Hugging dogs. Nodding to cows and sheep. And of course the other important rule is: never play Monopoly.

Can you describe your writing process?

I’m a morning writer so I get up as early as I can and try to write something, anything, while my brain is still fuzzy and dreamy. Recently, I’ve gotten into using a typewriter for these early morning poems and flash fictions. There’s magic in the way the typewriter publishes your work as you write it. Every keystroke goes to print. There’s no going back. Plus, it makes a cheerful ding noise when you get to the end of the line. What could be more encouraging than that?

What is the novel or collection of poetry you wish you had written?

Oh, there are so many. Perhaps Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower – surely one of the best short story collections ever written.

What are you writing right now?

I’m writing poems and short stories and just experimenting. I recently started sketching a graphic novel about a man’s co-dependent relationship with his talking verruca.

Joe Dunthorne’s poetry collection O Positive is published by Faber & Faber (£10.99)

Illustration by Wendy Wong

The Fantasy Issue of Popshot includes flash fiction by the author of bestselling novel ‘The Farm’. Illustration by Ewelina Rynkiewicz

Joanne Ramos, whose debut novel The Farm, about a surrogacy service for the super wealthy has been gracing bestseller lists, agreed to be Popshot’s guest author for The Fantasy Issue. She contributed a beautiful flash fiction story in which she imagines the earth’s response to human profligacy and environmental destruction (buy it in WHSmiths, in book shops and online!).

Here she speaks to editor Matilda Battersby about the writing process, her 20 year hiatus from writing and producing a bestselling debut in her forties.

Firstly, thank you for the story you contributed to Popshot. Can you give us some insight into the starting point and your inspiration?

I wrote this piece while on holiday on Fire Island, a barrier island not too far from New York City, where I live. Because there are no curtains on the windows in my room, the sun wakes me early, usually well before six. I like to take our dog for a walk on the beach. It’s a beautiful time to be up—the day pink-gold and new and fragile-seeming, the sand unblemished, the only sound the surf. At this hour, I’m usually alone on the beach, and it can feel like I’m the only person in the world. And then, as my dog and I stroll at the ocean’s edge, we encounter the first empty beer can, then a bunch of deflated helium balloons still bound together with sparkly ribbon, then water-logged plastic bags and water bottles — the junk washed up by the waves overnight; the markers of a high-consumption/high-disposal society. 

I started thinking about the earth, and how too often we take her loveliness and bounty for granted. I wondered what she would do if she got fed up with us. The image that flashed in my head was not fire and brimstone, earthquake and flood — but fruit. Grotesquely enlarged fruit. Because in my mind, the earth would have a sense of humour. From there, I started to write this short piece.

Congratulations on the success of your first novel, The Farm. A lot of Popshot readers are often writers themselves — can you please briefly describe your journey to becoming a published author?

I’ve loved stories and writing since I was a kid. Some of my earliest memories are of copying down, word-for-word, the stories in the board books my parents bought me and stapling these sheets of plagiarised text together into “books”! Life took me in a different direction, and by the time I finally decided to give fiction-writing a real go, I was in my forties. I hadn’t written fiction since college—a twenty-year hiatus.

The ideas behind the book had been stewing in my head for decades, though—ones rooted in my experiences, and the people I’ve gotten to know, as a Filipina immigrant in Wisconsin, a financial-aid student at Princeton, a woman in the male-dominated world of high finance, and a mother of three in the era of helicopter parenting. Finding a compelling story that could hold these ideas was the hard part. It was a process of trial and error and writing in the dark. Saved in my laptop are the many aborted short stories, “first chapters” and flash-fiction pieces that I produced in that year and a half of stumbling and experimenting before I landed on the idea for The Farm.

The idea of a surrogacy facility came to me after reading a very short article in the newspaper about commercial surrogacy in India. From there, the what ifs began bubbling: what if I made the surrogacy facility a luxury one? What if the surrogate mothers were needy and the clients were uber-rich?

From this point, it took me another three and a half years to write and edit the book. I tentatively sent the manuscript to a handful of agents in mid-December of 2017 in hopes of finding someone to represent me. Within a couple of days, I had my first offer; others followed quickly. And things only accelerated from there! The past year and a half has been a whirlwind and, quite literally, a childhood dream come true.

What is your writing routine – do you write every day? For how long? Are you a planner or do you find your way through the narrative over lots of drafts?

I have three children, and they were still very young when I committed myself to writing a book six years ago. This means my writing time was confined to the hours they were at school. I made myself sit down to work—or, at least, stare at the computer screen and think—for two to three hours every weekday morning before attending to my “hausfrau” duties. Some weeks, due to a sickness (mine or one of my kids) or a family holiday or volunteering at school, I couldn’t write as much as I’d like. Even then, I tried very hard to snatch some time, even just half an hour, to write. I somehow felt back then that if I didn’t keep my foot in that door, it would close and I would revert back to wishing I’d written a book rather than doing the hard work of writing one!

As far as my writing process: I’m not an outliner nor a planner. I seem to begin with an image or phrase that resonates with me, or an idea, and the writing unfolds. I love the process of discovery; I’m not sure I ever could outline in detail, because I like not knowing — in writing and in many other aspects of life. I’m not a creature of habit, and I like to be surprised.

I think this is also one reason I wrote the book from four different perspectives. I liked finding out how different characters would see the same experiences—and writing four very different characters, with different backstories and voices, kept me interested and “discovering” as well.

I tend to re-write as I go along, so when I finished the book it was in decent shape. I still went back and edited the book in full three times. In part, this is because I got to know my characters and the plot by writing them—and so the first chapters didn’t always reflect what I’d learned by the end of the book.

Read Joanne Ramos’s story ‘The Earth’ in The Fantasy Issue of Popshot.