I decided to give Claire dissociative amnesia because I’ve always been fascinated by abnormal psychology and because I think our subconscious can have a powerful influence on our mind and body. We can say ‘I’m not scared’ but our hands will still shake or we’ll rush to the toilet. We can lie but our deceit can be read in micro expressions. Claire doesn’t believe that her family is responsible for Billy’s disappearance but her subconscious believes otherwise and, as a result of the stress of the situation, she suffers from fugues. I did a lot of research into dissociative amnesia before I started writing The Missing and Dr Jez Phillips was particularly helpful in answering my questions. I tried to be as faithful as I could to the information I unearthed but I did have to make a few tweaks to make the story more intense and unnerving. Firstly, people suffering from dissociative amnesia normally flee from a situation they find stressful. I had Claire escape to Weston for her first fugue but then, instead of her subconscious forcing her to run from her fears, it makes her confront them. That’s why she then follows various members of her family. The second aspect of the condition that I wasn’t faithful to was the frequency with which the fugues occur. They normally occur just once. On the rare occasion that someone suffers more than one fugue it won’t happen until months, or years, have passed. I didn’t want the pace of the story to flag so Claire’s fugues happen more frequently.

I do hope you enjoyed reading The Missing. I’d love to hear from you if so. You can write to me via my agent Madeleine Milburn or you can contact me on social media or via the form on my website.

About the Author

C.L. Taylor lives in Bristol with her partner and son. She started writing fiction in 2005 and her short stories have won several awards and have been published by a variety of literary and women’s magazines. C.L. Taylor was voted as one of the Bestselling Adult Fiction Debut Authors of 2014 in The Bookseller.

Also by C.L. Taylor

The Accident

The Lie

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