Sarra Manning's latest book, Unsticky, tells the story of twenty-something Londoner Grace Reeves, who faces serious financial debt to the tune of five figures. After an encounter with a wealthy older man named Vaughn, she finds herself catapulted into the role of his mistress (in return for gifts and money), which poses the question: what's the difference between being a trophy girlfriend and selling yourself for money?
Manning speaks to MiNDFOOD about what inspired the book and the difficulty she faced writing with an adult voice.
How long was Unsticky in the making?
About five years from the first germ of an idea to sending off my third and final draft to my editor at Hachette. The actual meat and potatoes of writing it took about a year with a few breaks to proof teen books and do some freelance journalism in between.
Did the plot develop as you wrote, or did you have a clear structure before you began?
I'd been percolating the idea in my head for a couple of years so by the time I came to writing my detailed chapter outline I knew so much about the story and my characters. It seems to be how the book-writing goes for me. I get an idea for a story and have at least two books to write in the meantime so the idea lodges in my head and develops like that.
By the time I come to actually opening up Microsoft Word, I know what my characters keep under their beds, have huge chunks of dialogue already worked out and always have my last line. Things do change and other ideas occur as I'm writing, especially when I finish the first draft and realise I have massive plot holes that seem insurmountable until I have an epiphany usually at four in the morning.
What was your inspiration for the story?
I've worked for enough magazines to have sat in on focus groups with a gaggle of girls in their twenties and been amazed at their champagne lifestyles on lemonade money and how they didn't regard credit card debt as actual debt.
They all seemed to have a rescue fantasy; they'd been bankrolled by their parents and assumed that this would continue when they found a husband or a boyfriend. I've also worked on enough fashion magazines to know that sometimes the fashion assistants are treated like indentured servants. I put the two elements together along with my absolute bullet-proof writing kink, which is two people falling in love who are too broken to even realise that it is love.
How different was it writing for an adult reader when you are used to writing for teenagers?
In my naivety I thought it would be really easy. I've written for glossy magazines for years and I was all, "Oh, finally I can write in my own voice!" Then I realised that the reason why I started out as a teen writer is because my natural voice belongs to a 16 year old.
I found it really hard to get the right tone. My teen writing is about as grown up as it gets before it becomes adult so the change in style had to be subtle and more nuanced, which was part of the problem. I think it would have been easier if it had been a big leap. I rewrote the opening chapters at least five times until I decided to switch from first person to third person and that was the key.
Even so, I really had to be careful about dialling down those extremes of behaviour you can get away with when your heroine is seventeen. It's not quite so convincing when she's 23.
What is the story behind the title?
The title, Unsticky, comes from E M Forster's Where Angels Fear To Tread: " I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it - and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die - I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there."
Those lines have always resonated with me and it seemed such a perfect description of Grace and Vaughn – these two people who seem to drift through life without ever being able to stick to anyone else.
Do you have any plans for a Grace Reeves series?
None at all. I like that Unsticky, like most of my books, has a slightly unresolved, ambiguous ending but I consider Grace's story to be done, though I do like characters from past books to pop up for very brief cameos in my other novels.
Having done two teen series, I realise that I do prefer to write stand alones. With series, you can spend years writing one character, which can feel a lot like being stuck in one place and that doesn't interest me so much. I already have the next two adult novels and one teen novel gestating and I like the idea of always looking forward to what the next books are going to be.
Are you as interested in fashion as the character Grace?
Maybe not quite as obsessed as Grace but I've come close. I've worked on British ELLE and edited two fashion magazines, ELLEgirl and What To Wear so it felt very natural to set Unsticky in the world of fashion as I know it so well.
I hate novels that are set on a fashion magazine and it becomes really obvious that the writer doesn't know their Puccis from their Guccis. I wanted to get the fashion references just right so Grace would wear Miu Miu but not Prada and younger designers like Preen.
It was really lovely to spend hours on style.com looking at the collections and planning Grace's purchases on net-a-porter.com all in the name of the research. Unfortunately, I've had to do some serious belt-tightening with the credit crunch so my days of buying Marc Jacobs handbags are long gone.
When Unsticky becomes a movie, who would you like to see play Grace and Vaughn?
Thank you for saying "when" and not "if"! This is such a hard question to answer because I can see Grace and Vaughn so clearly in my head that I can't imagine anyone playing them. I suppose I would like an actress who can do light and funny but also dark and quirky, maybe someone like Zooey Deschanel or Amanda Seyfried. And for Vaughn, I suppose Mr Clooney would do, as long as I could have long script conferences with him behind closed doors.
Read Donna Duggan's review of Unsticky here.
