Emma Healey’s debut novel, Elizabeth is Missing, won the Costa First Novel Award in 2014, was a Sunday Times bestseller and was made into a BBC film starring Glenda Jackson. Fast forward to today, and her third novel, Sweat, has just been published, garnering glowing reviews. Emma’s novels are powerful, compelling reads, and deeply rooted in the author’s own experiences, not least, in Sweat, her very real struggles with diet and fitness. 

And they had to be personal. Because, despite her urge to write, Emma felt she needed ‘permission’ and to ‘be allowed’ to do so; writing in part about her own experiences gave her the authority she sought to be able to tell these stories.

‘I don’t remember not wanting to [write],’ Emma tells me. ‘It’s something that I always wanted to do. I remember writing in an exercise book what do I want to be when I grow up and that was what I told my teacher pretty much every year, so it was never really a question. I didn’t necessarily think I could do it.

‘I had a little wobble when I left school early – I had some mental health issues after my GCSEs. I really felt like I’d failed at anything academic or academic adjacent so I was like writing can’t be for me. So, I went to art college and then I ended up doing book art where you make books. One of the modules was creative writing and I absolutely refused to do it, I felt like I wasn’t allowed anymore and then when I got my first kind of proper, full-time, permanent job, I was like ‘I hate this’. It’s that moment when you realise that actually there is something you’re burning to do, and you’ve been ignoring it.’

Emma enrolled on a correspondence course and ‘just loved it immediately’, then started doing short courses and workshops. Soon, she was writing what would become her debut novel, Elizabeth is Missing, written from the point of view of a dementia sufferer and inspired in part by her paternal grandmother. Emma took 500 words to read at a workshop where participants gave written feedback. 

‘I thought I’m not going to look and of course as soon as I was on the tube I was like scrolling through them and the comments were so unbelievably positive and that made me want to keep going. I think if those initial comments had been ‘this isn’t right’, I think I’d have just given up. I was so fragile about it. That made me feel like ok, I’m on the right track.’ 

Emma applied for the renowned MA in Creative Writing at UEA. ‘I thought I wasn’t going to get in, but I thought I’d try it and then I was amazed I got in that year, and it just changed my life. I left everyone, broke up with my boyfriend and yeah, it was the best thing I ever did. I moved to Norwich in July 2010 and never left.’

Emma worked on Elizabeth is Missing during her course and was signed within a week of sending the finished manuscript to her now agent. Her debut novel’s great success was she says ‘very unexpected. It was partly that it was quite zeitgeisty, it was just at the time when there were lots of campaigns to try and promote ways to help people with dementia. I do feel for me a lot of it was to do with timing.’

Writing her second novel – Whistle in the Dark – was not easy. ‘Maud [Elizabeth is Missing’s heroine] had been such a real character for me that I was finding it difficult to write someone else. In fact, I wrote a short story where I killed her off just to try and feel like right you’re gone now, get out of my head! That kind of half worked.

‘But I was really worried about it and also, I didn’t really know what kind of writer I was supposed to be; because I was kind of lucky that I was allowed to write anything I wanted, it wasn’t such a definite genre. I am not very good at sticking to a genre it turns out.’

Although very different in its subject matter, Whistle in the Dark similarly explores experiences from Emma’s life, from a different point of view. ‘With Whistle, I had some mental health issues when I was a teenager so I wanted to sort of explore what it would be like to be on the other side of that.

‘Normally what I do is that I think of the plot, I think of some characters or I think of the situation, then I’m like but what’s my, not unique take on it, but my kind of authority; why am I allowed to write this book or what can I bring to this book that maybe other people don’t know. It’s not that it’s entirely unique, there’s loads of people that have relatives with dementia for instance, but if I hadn’t had my relative with dementia, I would not have started the book. It may be permission slightly, that as long as this has affected you, you’re allowed. That’s not to say I think that about anyone else, I think writers who just pick a subject and write it are perfectly entitled to and that’s fantastic if you can do it, but I just seem to need personally this weird kind of permission.’

Which brings us to Emma’s latest novel, Sweat, arguably her most powerful and personal to date, and based on an idea she’d had for a while. Set in a gym, it’s about Cassie, a personal trainer, who has been in a coercively controlling relationship. One day, her ex turns up for a training session. ‘He is in a more vulnerable position than he was before and so she realises she has a chance of revenge,’ Emma says. ‘The rest of the book is about what she does, how far she takes things, whether she can get away with it and also about taking behaviours to extremes, especially around diet and fitness.’

Emma struggled with the concept initially as she had no experience of being stalked or in a coercive relationship, ‘but I have had a really tricky relationship with fitness and dieting for a long time so when I started to think actually it can be about that, it sort of fell into place,’ she says.

 ‘I have struggled with exercise addiction and also a kind of addiction to fasting and after my daughter was born in 2017, I got very obsessed with both. I just felt kind of disgusted with my body. It was a very bad labour. You know how you can kind of feel let down by yourself and that really triggered this absolute obsession. I can’t tell you how completely obsessed I was.

‘Like all writers, half my brain was dealing with the actual situation, and the other half was like this could be useful later. At first, I was not sure how to write Liam [Cassie’s ex]. Then I thought if I create this role where everything that Liam does to Cassie he does because he can justify that it’s for her own good. I realised while I was writing it that actually everything he says to Cassie and all the extremes that he puts her through was kind of like the voice in my head when I was most obsessed with cutting down on what I was eating and exercising all the time. So, he ends up being my inner voice writ large and suddenly I had him and I knew what to do with him.