So although I knew the landscape of Trick of the Light I would get out books
“So, although I knew the landscape of Trick of the Light, I would get out books and maps, go back to diaries and photographs.” Sometimes she will drop in an original item – a love letter, a trial report. Despite heavy snow and the fact she was almost nine months pregnant, they drove the huge distance through the North Cascade Mountains. “I was already well past the point at which you should fly.” The cabin was a wreck with no glass in the windows. Visiting her then partner’s family, Dawson saw an advert for a cabin with seven acres of land. That seemed to me like an accomplishment.” In her mid-twenties she decamped temporarily to Okanogan National Park, in Washington State. Thank you, Jeanette!”Writing poems and short stories, Dawson survived “on thin air” and was “very glad not to have a proper day job. She then wrote me a very cursory note saying, ‘This is dreadful Why would anyone want to read it?’” Dawson is laughing “She was right I’m thankful that novel isn’t out there to haunt me.
When told that it read like a school essay, she had promptly rewritten it. “The amount of times people tell me they’ve had something rejected but never think of rewriting,” says Dawson “It’s such a fundamental rule, and I learnt it early I actually like rewriting.”It didn’t always work out She sent a debut novel to Pandora Press. Jeanette Winterson, then an editor there, wrote an encouraging rejection letter suggesting she have another go. “So I rewrote it, and in the interim Jeanette’s own novel was published and she was ballistically successful. “Her mother is more worried about her father, and her father is off shagging other people She is left to do her own thing. There are heaps of girls like that.”Dawson started to write for a living the minute she left home, having her first piece accepted by Honey. But this emphasis on being “buff” fits awkwardly with our current “stranger danger” obsession.
Dawson refers to a tabloid she noticed carrying news about Jessica and Holly slap-bang above an item on “Natasha, Britain’s sexiest teacher”.”What clearer example can you have?” she asks. Vulnerable, confused, flirtatious, Tina tumbles into a sexual liaison before she’s fully pubescent “Tina is abandoned,” says Dawson. “My mum gave me a whole box of them, and something which struck me was how limited my world was I wasn’t looking outward at all. I found that quite disturbing, and that fed into the novel – the idea of the girls’ immediate surroundings being their only terrain.”By the 1970s, it seemed that “above all else, girls had to be sexy and hot”, reflects Dawson And so it remains. Aged 10, she had kept a scrapbook in which personal details (hair, weight, favourite things) were carefully noted. She had also put together magazines like those Tina and Mandy write. She says that “It’s not ‘What do we think about this particular wild boy?’ but ‘Why do wild boys fascinate us? Why are we obsessed with missing girls?’”Dawson revisited her own childhood to conjure the intense girls’ world of bossy best friends and Sindy dolls, Zoom lollies and Donny Osmond stickers.