Days You Were Mine: A Guest Post by Clare Leslie Hall
This touching novel dissects the complex emotional bond between a parent and child. Searching for a sense of belonging, new father Luke sets out to find his birth mother, but their painful first meeting leaves him with more questions than answers. Read on for an exclusive essay from Clare Leslie Hall on writing Days You Were Mine.
Paperback $19.00
Days You Were Mine: A Novel
Days You Were Mine: A Novel
In Stock Online
Paperback $19.00
From the author of Broken Country, a captivating drama about how one man’s quest to uncover the truth about his adoption changes everything he knows about love, loss, and the unbreakable bonds of family.
From the author of Broken Country, a captivating drama about how one man’s quest to uncover the truth about his adoption changes everything he knows about love, loss, and the unbreakable bonds of family.
In some ways Days You Were Mine is the most personal of my three novels because it was triggered by an actual life event.
It tells the story of Luke, an adopted man, who is so moved by the arrival of his newborn son, he decides to trace his birth mother. When I became pregnant with our first child, my husband John began a ten-year search to find his birth mother, Frances. After so many decades apart, their reunion was very emotional and healing, but it raised questions about John’s beginning. It also set my writer’s brain whirring!
So, that was my starting point: a young man who reconnects with the mother who gave him away but finds the events which led to his adoption are shrouded in mystery.
The rest of the story is fiction, and it is probably the novel I have most loved researching. I set the love story between Alice, a young art student, and Jacob, a musician, in the early 1970s, an era so rich and colourful in my mind. Young Mick Jagger was my muse for Jacob, the beautiful and charismatic singer of a rock band tipped for stardom. His passionate affair with Alice, a young art student, takes in London, Italy and Southwold, a small seaside town that is close to my heart. For a while these two lovers seem to have it all, thriving in a heady joss-stick scented world where art, music and youthful freedom combine.
Luke’s story is set in London during the early Noughties, but there are parallels with the earlier timeline. He works in the music industry as an A&R man and his girlfriend Hannah is arts correspondent on a national newspaper. They become friends with Alice and her best friend Rick, a famous artist, and the four of them are united by their mutual love of art and music. It is when Luke invites Alice to become nanny to their baby Samuel, things start to take a darker turn.
The psychotherapist Paul Sunderland had a huge influence on this novel. Over several decades he has carried out groundbreaking research into why babies adopted at birth can sometimes carry a relinquishment trauma into adult life. As part of his practice, Paul specialises in equine therapy, and he invited me to spend an unforgettable weekend with a group of adult adoptees. It was a privilege seeing how the horses could forge a deep and healing connection with their human, helping them to release long-buried trauma from their subconscious. And afterwards I understood my story was not about nature versus nurture, but the quest for identity and an innate longing for something unknown.
Days You Were Mine combines a mystery with the dark turns of a thriller, but at its heart is the tender love story between a young artist and a musician who are destined to be together.
I hope you enjoy spending time with Jacob and Alice, Luke, Hannah and baby Samuel, as I much as I loved writing them.