'The Bad Mother's Handbook', tells the story of a year in the life of one family. There's 17 year-old Charlotte, who's bright and ambitious; her thirtysomething mother Karen, a bitter divorcee; and Nan, a woman who slips between the past and the present and whose 80-year history holds secrets that have the potential to unravel the whole household.There were several reasons for writing this novel. Firstly I wanted to look at the way families can repeat mistakes instead of learning from them. Karen is desperate for her daughter not to get herself pregnant and throw away her educational opportunities, as she herself did at 16. Charlotte knows this ?has had the message drummed into her since childhood ?and believes she is too clever to get caught that way. But sometimes you can's cheat Fate, and Charlotte soon finds she's caught up in events that seem beyond her control.Which brings me to the second theme of the novel; to what extent has life changed for ordinary women over the last fifty years? In TBMH there are three women who, in different decades, find themselves pregnant out of wedlock. How does society treat their dilemma? Were the good old days really so good? Finally there's the class angle; I wanted to write a novel about what it's like being an ordinary working mum, about a character whose background lies in that grey area between the working class and the lower middle class. This is not a glamorous or in any way fashionable stratum of society?I should know? but I thought we folks who belonged to it deserved a shout.

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