This image will make perfect sense once you listen. There. Now you have to listen.

… and listen to this. The BBC commissioned me a while back to write a short story for radio about Twitter. I said yes – (I am a freelance; I say yes to almost anything as long as it doesn’t involve pain or pasties) – and then discovered that writing about 140 character dollops of conversation is actually far harder than you might think.

Anyway. I got there in the end; the lovely Claire White read it, and the even lovelier producer Kirsteen Cameron produced it. The title, Between The Tweets, was thought up by one of my twitter followers (she won one of my books! Hurrah!).

Like a smart alec, I assured my friends on Twitter that should they want to sit down and listen with a cup of tea it would be “better than a biscuit”. Cue infinte discussion on which particular biscuit (twitter is like that). Anyway – we came to the conclusion that it is better than a digestive, possibly better than a Custard Creme and on a good day, just as good as a Wagon Wheel. Not bad, eh? I bet Martin Amis would be happy to reach such a literary benchmark.

Click on the link below: it’s up on BBC’s iplayer for another seven days. Joanne Harris’s Twitter short story is on Thursday.

Oh. And I am doing something VERY EXCITING on Thursday. I can’t tell you about it until afterwards though because I am a superstitious soul and if I tell you it will obviously all fall apart.

bbc.in/n8K0dQ 

"What? You want me to show you everything?"

What would you tell a stranger about yourself? Would you reveal a secret obsessive compulsive disorder, or a long-held resentment against a member of your family? Could you tell them about cruel things you did in your childhood? Or how your husband fails to satisfy you in bed?
I wondered about this yesterday after reading an excellent piece about being an only child by The Times’s Janice Turner. I was one of many people to congratulate her on twitter afterwards, where she admitted that she felt peculiar about having been so honest. Writing something so personal, she said, left her feeling exposed.
Some of the best writing I’ve read of late has been of the self-exposing kind. I became friends with Twitter’s @belgianwaffling as a result of reading her astonishingly honest blog about marital breakdown. I admired the work of @52betty, whose blog about resurrecting a long-dead marital sex life was forensically, toe-curlingly real. I can quote whole phrases from Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, with its achingly beautiful chapters on adolescence, birth and abortion. And like many UK readers, I am mildly obsessed with the Mail’s columnist Liz Jones, and her inability to see how her habit of putting every bit of her life up for public scrutiny might contribute to her self-sabotaging of her own happiness.

It’s a curious thing to put yourself out there in print. It’s easy to forget that what can feel like a confidence between you and the keyboard may be read by a million people, many of whom may choose to judge you on the basis of it. But in the age of exposure, there are few writers who can avoid it.

At publication time, it is common to have a meeting with your publishers’ publicity dept, where they will ask you ‘if there is anything you can write about?’ What this really means, is ‘what can you tell us about your private life that may get us a slot in a national publication?”

I have played this game. I have written – albeit jokingly, and with my husband’s clearance – about marriage. I have written about secret crushes, disastrous family holidays, and the difficulties of good parenting. I recently wrote a piece about the underreporting of breast pain. I am, in percentage terms, perhaps 30 per cent out there. My own weapon against feelings of genuine exposure is humour – I find myself adopting a faux jokey style, telling the story against myself. You cannot judge me – haha! – it says – because I have already judged myself.

Both @Belgianwaffling and @52betty got around this by writing anonymously. I’m sure it contributed to the recklessly liberating tone of their writing. But autobiography removes that option. When @52betty went public after getting a book deal, part of me applauded but the other half curled up with vicarious anxiety. How do you talk to your neighbours after they might have read about your anal sex experiment? How do you chat to the man in the shop when he might have been reading about your weirdest fantasies? I couldn’t do it. I don’t know if it’s fearlessness, or a requisite layer of skin I’m missing, but I couldn’t.

Every time I mention my own life in print, I find I’m running through a mental checklist. Who could be hurt by this? How might it be misread? Could this ever be used against me? (I’m doing it now) What remains is generally slim pickings; what a former colleague used to call “trite shite”. So no, I do not write about the real stuff. I do not write about my children in any but the most general terms, especially not now they are old enough to be embarrassed by my words. I wrote about my youngest son’s cochlear implant because it was an impossible decision and we wanted to help other families of deaf children. And that, my husband and I agreed, was it. I shuddered at Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child and its exposure of her son during his difficult teenage years. Yes, her writing was beautiful but I couldn’t see past the sense of maternal betrayal to enjoy it. I don’t believe truth is everything if the writer is the one who holds all the weapons.

Some years ago I realised that my childhood was not ordinary (not many children kept a horse behind Hackney Town Hall, or had David Hockney draw them pictures). The writer part of me often plays with the material, knows I could make it compelling. But I also remember my mother telling me once how uncomfortable it made her when I wrote about our family; it removes from other parties a say in their own history. It leaves them both exposed and powerless.

So those words exist only in my head. Because, for now at least, the warning voice is louder. I don’t think my need to tell that story outweighs her need for peace of mind. Philip Roth may have been right when he said that when a writer is born “a family dies” – I suspect you can’t write honestly about life without hurting people. Possibly even yourself: I’m guessing that it would be possible to get so caught up in the writing of it, that you might lose track of how much of yourself you were laying bare.

It was telling that I recently had a pitch turned down by a magazine with the words: “It was interesting, but we really wanted something intensely personal”. My overwhelming feeling was not disappointment at the lost pitch, but relief. Better, safer, to slip the experiences into fiction. Or just keep them to myself.
Until I have another book to promote, obviously. In which case you can expect my “My Bullied Child Deviant Sex Horror” all over page three.

Dominic West as Fred West. There are no jokes in this post.

When I heard that a drama was being made from the story of Fred West, probably one of the most grotesque murderers of recent history, I felt the kind of instinctive revulsion that I suspect most people felt. Why would you resurrect such a story? Why would an actor of Dominic West‘s calibre choose to sully his career with such sensationalist horror?

I worked in the newsroom of The Independent at the time of the West trial. Half of what happened could not be reported because it was simply too grim. My abiding memory is of my news editor at the time listening to one of the newspaper’s most robust reporters break down in tears on the other end of a telephone at the end of a particularly gruelling day in court. He stood there, as we stood mutely around him,  asking quietly if he wanted to come off the story. Most news reporters would famously sell their grandmothers to be part of the big news story of the age. I don’t remember anyone being desperate to take his place. It remains the bleakest, grisliest of news events. Some of those who suffered most – namely West’s children, and the families of the other victims – are still alive.

So what is the point of forcing it back into the spotlight? Mae West, daughter of Fred West, cooperated with the writing of the film – a process that has been both lengthily and sensitively done. “In recent years I have become a bit of a campaigner for the truth,” she told The Times. “As much as it’s horrible, life and death, murder … It goes on every day all over the world. We talk about wars, they show documentaries about cancer on television. We have to accept that good and bad happens.”

And it is the banality of evil that Appropriate Adult evokes so well. We see it through the eyes of West’s legally appointed ‘appropriate adult’ (It is important that he should not be the centre of the drama) and we are with her as she hears Fred West’s strangely matter of fact recitation of his crimes. It makes clear, through Dominic West’s astonishing  - and repulsive – performance, that Fred West was both manipulative and perversely charismatic. It demonstrates how he managed to maintain power over his children, even as he abused them. And it shows the how the effect of those crimes rippled outwards, blighting the lives of everyone who came into contact with them.

I, like most people, had found the West crimes incomprehensible. When we see incomprehensible horror, we turn away. It is easier to tell ourselves that these are extraordinary people, lives unlike ours. Well, Appropriate Adult shows us that grubby and mundane as it was, Fred West’s life was not so far removed from ours. It shows how, for some people, acts of evil are steps that it becomes increasingly easy to take. And once the line is transgressed, how easily they can be contained within an apparently ordinary existence – amid the home repairs and the cement and the stairs that need recarpeting, and their perpetrator’s own peculiar logic.

What does this drama add to the sum of human existence? Well, certainly no less than the fictional horrors that characters on screen choose to inflict upon each other. I’ve seen grislier and more upsetting scenes in Luther, or Waking The Dead. It is the banality of both West and his particular brand of evil that sticks in the mind. He is not a towering figure of evil, but a disgusting, aberrant man whose children were let down by a system who couldn’t see past his domineering personality. We see a man whose power crumbles when he is removed from his perverted little fiefdom, leaving him a weak and pleading wreck. This is what evil really is, the drama tells us. Not the all-powerful bogeyman of our imaginations.

This is why I can’t join the chorus of condemnation that I witnessed on various social networks this evening, as Appropriate Adult began. Because that is the sum of it: some stories are unpalatable, and upsetting, but sometimes it is necessary to keep watching. Ultimately we tell ourselves stories in order to understand.