Ghosts, gaslighting and transgressive sex: Louise Doughty returns to manipulative relationships in her new novel

“The term chick lit was used to dismiss fiction by women, in a way it would simply not be used about a young male writer. It’s still the case that women writers are more readily pigeonholed. The new Ian McEwan is just that, whereas with women there is a tendency to define you. It’s a hangover from the idea that men are telling the universal story — then women’s interest is separate. Until recently WHSmith still had a ‘Women’s Fiction’ section.”

Doughty was darkly amused when this year’s Booker longlist was described as a female takeover (she was a judge in 2008 and the process took over her year but was largely harmonious). “Eight women out of 13 on the list isn’t dominating,” she says. “Historically, men have read books by men whereas women read books by both sexes. Nothing makes my heart soar more than seeing a man on the Tube reading a book by a woman.” Her partner, Jerome, a radio producer, is “a terrible cliché” in his reading, favouring military history and sport books.

Platform Seven is dedicated to fellow author Andrea Levy, who died in February aged 62 after having breast cancer. “We met at an event,” says Doughty. “I was writing a historical novel based on my family. She rang up later and said, ‘God, that’s what I’m doing too, can we have dinner?’ so we got to know each other. The book she was working on then became Small Island.” They called themselves the Lady Novelists Club and drank cocktails wearing elbow-length gloves.

In April, Doughty went to the premiere of the National Theatre’s production of Small Island with Levy’s widower Bill and “cried buckets”. “We were all there but she wasn’t; it was emotional.” Levy was too ill to read when Doughty was writing Platform Seven but Doughty is glad she was able to tell her it was dedicated to her: “Platform Seven is about what we leave behind when we die and how we survive in the hearts of people who love us, so it seemed appropriate.”

Doughty has a knack for getting inside the mechanics of relationships. But she insists the coercion and gaslighting she describes is all from her imagination — she has been living in north London with Jerome for the past 25 years and they have two daughters, 17 and 22. The 22-year-old is living with them after university and both of them “took the mickey something rotten” when Apple Tree Yard made their mother famous.

“Often I use things I’ve noticed that I have filed away from years ago but there’s never any direct correlation to real life — that would be disastrous,” she says. “One of my favourite phrases is from a filmmaker. No villain thinks he’s the villain, he thinks he’s the hero in a different movie. You want the reader to make up their own mind. Each character, even the ones you don’t like, has to behave with complete sincerity, even when you think what they’re doing is appalling. It’s too simplistic to think there’s good and bad, the vast majority of people exist in a spectrum.”

The fiction trend to explore manipulation and ambiguity in sexual relationship, with CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife and Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian, taps into a similar nuance, “situations where women can deceive themselves or misread signals because of what they have been reared to expect, the ways we can unthinkingly collude”, she says.

Platform Seven came out of her “long and complex relationship with Peterborough station”. She grew up in Rutland and most train journeys home involve changing at Peterborough. “For my whole adult life it was the intersection I went back to. I used to have a joke that if I went to purgatory it would be Peterborough station, because I spent many a winter night there with the cold wind blowing across the Fens. So the idea came to me to write about a ghost who had died there in a way that was unhappy and unresolved — who couldn’t be free of the station until she’d solved the mystery of her death.” Peterborough is “a multicultural city, a cross-section of UK immigration history”. How did it vote in the EU referendum? Doughty looks pained. “For Brexit. I don’t know whether it still would. [Brexit] is going to get worse before it gets better.” That’s why it matters that a range of stories are heard. “It’s so important that we have diversity of storytelling, particularly at this point where so many people are trying to exploit difference. In a way that is what fiction is for, to show people in their complexity.”

To encourage this, three years ago Doughty set up a scholarship for the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia. “A quarter of students who get places on that course can’t afford to take them up, which is heartbreaking because it’s hard to get your place. We need £15,000 a year, which to a lot of corporations or philanthropists is peanuts. If there’s anyone who has £15,000, give it to us, it’s a bargain and we’ll even name the scholarship after you.”

Doughty was 11 when she wrote her first novel, about a group of talking horses. It was influenced by the John Wayne films her father watched and Watership Down. “Talking animals were big,” she smiles. “I’d never sat on a horse or left the East Midlands but I decided to create my own talking animals.” Doughty, her brother and sister were the first in their family to go to university. Her mother was a secretary and her father a self-taught engineer who left school at 13 and went on to do a PhD, “They were passionate about education and self-improvement — they had our graduation pictures in a row in the bungalow where I grew up, which was sweet,” Doughty says. She doesn’t believe in writer’s block: “Shop assistants don’t get to have block, or teachers, they get on with it.”

Having Apple Tree Yard adapted was “a happy, lucky experience that’s opened my work up to new audiences”. She is in the early stages of a new book, her 1998 novel Honeydew is in development and Platform Seven is being optioned. Who’d play Lisa? “Someone up and coming. In Apple Tree Yard they cast a woman who looked exactly how I imagined Rosa, while Gary and Yvonne’s house was exactly as I thought it’d be. I started thinking I’m not a novelist, I’m a magician.”

Louise Doughty is at Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival on October 22.

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