This is the story behind the novel.

Although the title comes from the opening lines of Dante's Inferno, the compulsion to write Benedick's story springs from two sources. One was noticing, when I read to my own children, how often fairy tales and picture books use the device of the dark wood to suggest an episode of terror and confusion. I am particularly interested in fairy tales, partly as a result of reading Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment at university, and had long wanted to explore these in fiction.

The other was coming across an extraordinary thesis by the leading expert on manic depression, Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched With Fire. In it she traced the family histories of a number of artists, poets and musicians. As I read it I had the uncanny feeling that aspects of my own family history was being mirrored. I myself suffer from depression which is intimately intertwined with my productivity as a writer, but my father's mother and aunt both committed suicide. I know a handful of people whose mothers killed themselves, three of them in Primrose Hill where I spent my childhood. Having addressed different aspects of creativity in each novel, I now wanted to write about creativity and madness, and especially the way that women artists are so often dismissed as insane.

The novel was exceptionally difficult to write. It was foolish of me not to realise that writing about madness is one of the quickest ways to becoming mad yourself - or at least very depressed. Authors, like actors, often identify with their characters to the extent of becoming ill when they do and suffering similar symptoms. Perhaps as a safeguard against this, I did not initially write it in the first person. Benedick is a minor character from 'A Vicious Circle', and in the original version of that novel he was an architect. However, after about a year of researching architects, I discovered that I could not make him work. Architecture is about form, and is too distant from manic depression, the "blessing or the curse" from which both Benedick and his mother suffer. He became an actor, a world I know much more about, and which chimed with his wavering sense of identity.

It was not until my editor at 4th Estate, Christopher Potter, suggested it that Benedick was written in the first person. Potter's suggestion was a brilliant one, for writing as a man is a challenge that most serious novelists wish to face at some point. I have written more about this in the journalism section. Also, according to recent research into poets who have killed themselves, suicidal people tend to use "I" and "me" much more than non-suicidal people. Benedick now came alive for me and I had the strange feeling that the novel wrote itself. At Potter's suggestion also, Laura "disappeared" to become a figure of mystery. Originally, she was an equally strong presence because Benedick found her diary, not her fairy tales. The reader now has to piece her story together.

Benedick is not meant to be a likeable narrator. Some critics found him so obnoxious that they lost patience from the start; others persisted, and saw the comedy and the love with which he was created. I'm afraid that authors do generally love their unpleasant characters more than their pleasant ones. Perhaps we put all the nasty thoughts we suppress into them, then add some. At any rate, Benedick is a soul in torment, and such souls are not usually pretty to look upon. He is also someone in the process of truly becoming an adult. (I was struck by how few men seem to grow up before they are forty.) It is not until he is at the point of death, and learns how much his son loves him, that he is able to choose life. This is a story not about death but about choosing to live, and to be sane. It is a battle I have fought myself, and which many people fight. I believe that one of the reasons why people read fiction at all is to regain strength, and courage, and hope.

There were, once again, problems. As soon as the novel appeared in the 4th Estate catalogue, The Evening Standard ran a story that In a Dark Wood was about Sylvia Plath and her son. An anxious Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter, rang me to check whether this was true. I sent her the novel, which reassured her that it was not. It is hard to write about a woman artist committing suicide and not think of Plath, but I had found that material so specific, and so toxic, that it would have been impossible to use in a work of fiction even though both Plath and Ted Hughes were dead. Suicide is much too serious a subject for real people to be drawn upon. In any case, I had real experiences of my own as to what the suicide of a mother could do to her son. I was, however, most pleased and reassured that Erica Wagner, Literary Editor of the Times who's 'Ariel's Gift' examined the poetry of both Plath and Hughes, and who knew the latter personally, chose In a Dark Wood as her Book of the Year.

In a Dark Wood has been bought by Nan Talese of Doubleday USA, and will be published in the US in January 2002.

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The short stories The Last Straw and Away in a Manger also feature Benedick Hunter.