I mean, it's completely different type of writing to the reported pieces that I've done over the last several years. "Meredith" (ph) was the one that stuck and the one I finished, finally. May I ask, is something you learned in your journalism, something you wrote - did all of that put Meredith in your mind?ĪLEXANDER: I've actually - I've been starting novels for a long time - probably 20 years - but never finishing them. SIMON: You are also an accomplished freelance journalist, and you have written about mental health and sobriety for The Independent, for Glamour and other publications. And we just have to figure out how to lift it a little. It certainly is something that I've experienced myself. And I think anyone who's gone through a trauma or has lived with mental health issues, that heaviness, that weight, I think that idea will be familiar to them. But she also experienced something very traumatic that led to her isolation. What puts that weight there?ĪLEXANDER: Well, Meredith, she has mental health issues. She tells Tom, the visitor from Holding Hands, that what she's feeling feels like a constant weight. SIMON: She takes all of that up while she is in her self-imposed isolation. So neither of those things were very useful to me. I think it helped me a little because if I was having a bad day or I was particularly stressed or worried about the pandemic and how it affected my family, I would think, well, what would Meredith do in this situation? Although I do have to say that I don't share her aptitude for jigsaws or for baking. So by the time I was in a very similar position to her, I felt like I had kind of done the whole jigsaw thing and the baking and the online connections and the Zoom calls. I was writing about a character who was effectively self-isolating.
And I still find that quite surreal, actually, that six months before we first went into lockdown here in the U.K.
SIMON: I gather this premise was on your mind long before the pandemic made us all feel a little bit like Meredith.ĪLEXANDER: Yeah. SIMON: Claire Alexander joins us now from Scotland. My name is Meredith Maggs, and I haven't left my home for 1,214 days. But let's ask Claire Alexander to read the entire of her novel.ĬLAIRE ALEXANDER: (Reading) Wednesday, Nov.
She has an online friend named Celeste and in-person visits from Tom, who's with a group in Glasgow called Holding Hands. Sadie, her friend, visits with her children. Meredith is not alone although she is the character at the center of Claire Alexander's novel, "Meredith, Alone." She's got a job writing website copy remotely.
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