TALKING GRIEF – Somewhere Beyond the Sea

When I was writing Somewhere Beyond the Sea, my Dad suddenly passed away. How do you write a book with grief as a key theme when you’ve just lost someone you love?

This is an intensely personal vlog, but I wanted to talk about the experience of what I learned about my own grief while putting Seren and Jack’s grief on the page. Also, how hearing my words spoken back to me, in a key scene read by the actor Jonathan Bailey in the audio version of the book, made me realise what I’d written.

This was tough to film and hard to watch back, but I think it’s right to share it. We don’t talk about grief, which is one of the main reasons I wanted to talk about it in Somewhere Beyond the Sea. Often books like mine are dismissed as ‘light’ and wrongly criticised for shying away from the issues that really matter. I hope this demonstrates how wrong that assumption is.

Thanks for watching x