From her handbag she takes a trowel that looks as though it will be no match for the freezing earth. But she finds a place near the bottom of the gravestone that is already lower than the rest, and she scrapes away until there’s a hole the size of her fist. She reaches in her pocket for the envelope Bea gave her, tips the contents into the hole she has made, covers it, and tamps the dry earth down.

Author’s Note

Author’s Note

The Woman in the Photograph makes me rock back on my heels and laugh because I am so damned proud of it.

This is my fifth published novel, and I am an intelligent, capable, professional woman who knows for a fact that she can write. But there is a part of me that wants to delete that sentence, or make a joke of the fact that I am proud, because—

Because what?

Because even though it’s 2019, and women all around us, all around the world, are kicking all kinds of ass in all kinds of ways, owning our power isn’t easy. There is still a message, under all of the ‘you can be anything’ and ‘women are amazing’ rhetoric, that what women need to do, before anything else, is to be likeable. Likeable is a Trojan horse with flowers woven into her mane; she disguises our fierce and fine capability.

Too often, likeable means: modest, self-effacing, quiet. Expert, yes, but backwards-in-high-heels expert: as though the only way we can display our power, our strength and our cleverness, is by making what we do look easy or pretending our achievements are negligible or answering questions in interviews about juggling work and childcare. Questions that men would never be asked.

Likeable is not okay if it means shucks-it-was-nothing apologetic. Or don’t-be-mean-to-me-on-Twitter apologetic. Or feminist-but-oh-my-god-the-calories-in-that apologetic.

I was born in 1971. At school boys did woodwork and girls did cookery, but still my dad taught me how to develop film in his darkroom, and there was never any suggestion that I wouldn’t go to university.

As I played with Sindy dolls, women were marching to get girls like me the right to be more than a mother. The feminists of the 1960s and early 1970s gave me the life I have now.

And as I started to work on this book, I wondered what those feminists would think of me: a woman who still does not know how to take a compliment about her work, though I am fine if you say nice things about my hair.