In the novelist’s Love Forms, a 58-year-old Londoner sets out to find the daughter she gave up for adoption as a teen in the Caribbean.
Dawn Bishop, your protagonist, is grappling with a painful part of her life. What made this reckoning come about after so many decades?
She’s an introspective, reluctant narrator. Many things have happened in her life—growing up in Trinidad, falling pregnant at the age of 16, being sent away to have the baby in Venezuela, having to give up the child, then moving to England—but she struggles to talk about them. The whole issue of falling pregnant at such a young age is very shameful for her. Luckily things are changing now but it was a different time and a different place. This mother and child have been separated, and there are consequences for Dawn, but she is also aware that somewhere there are consequences for the child. Maybe everything has gone wonderfully—or maybe not. She doesn’t feel she deserves to be the center of the story; she feels so conscious of what her daughter has lost, and the harm that might have come to her. It’s so long ago, and it’s traumatic. With traumatic experiences, things get blocked out. Part of her journey in the present is trying to find the baby, but she’s also trying to return to the past.
So much of Love Forms is about loss. Not just of Dawn’s child but of her life in Trinidad.
There’s a fork in the road. Dawn separates from the baby, and her life goes off on this path to England, so she is looking back trying to understand what happened. There’s a yearning to reconnect with the child, but it’s mixed with her longing for home. This is partly my story, because I left Trinidad and settled in England, and when you move, there’s loss. She’s aware that back in Trinidad, people are partying, getting together with family, going to the beach. And London can be a tough place—Lonely Londoners, right? Going back can also be difficult. The Trinidad of Dawn’s childhood is different from the Trinidad after the oil crisis of the 1970s, when drug trafficking became an issue and crime increased. One of the things that makes her return difficult is how much Trinidad has changed.
The book switches between moments of drama in Trinidad and quieter scenes in London. How did you manage this contrast?
The London scenes were difficult because she spends so much time alone so it’s not very dramatic. She’s divorced and her sons are grown up. But we follow her over the course of 40 years, and those bits in London, which are so quiet, reveal the consequences of all the choices she’s made.
