First Writes: Abigail Abbas
In this Q&A, we throw some questions about ‘firsts’ at debut novelists. This month we feature Abigail Abbas, author of The Driving Seat, in which danger comes calling for a woman fleeing her cheating husband for a new life as live-in driver at a Highland castle
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What’s the first book you remember reading as a child? The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl. It’s delightfully horrible.
What was the book you read that made you decide to be a writer? As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t imagine becoming a writer, but I loved Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems. He made the complex look simple.
What’s your favourite first line in a book? ‘I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.’ From Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.
Which debut publication had the most profound effect on you? Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is so accomplished that it reads like the work of a veteran.
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a writing day? I try to imagine what my characters might be doing: brushing their teeth, spreading Marmite onto toast (some love it, some don’t), plotting outrageous things. Visualising them nudges me into tending to them.
What’s the first thing you do when you’ve stopped writing for the day? If I have time, I’ll try to read. I like books about writing. I’m currently reading The Artful Dickens by John Mullan. It’s brilliant.
In a parallel universe where you’re the tyrant leader of a dystopian civilisation, what’s the first book you’d burn? Literary Theory: An Anthology. I had to read it at university and it still haunts me.
What’s the first piece of advice you’d offer to an aspiring novelist? Take the book one sentence at a time.
The Driving Seat is published by Polygon on Thursday 2 April; picture: Charlotte Knee.