I'm never afraid of shying away from more difficult topics because I think you shouldn't
I think that if you cover fiction as a writer in the modern day, you should address
the tougher subjects. When I wrote it, I had a couple of family situations which meant that
quality of life was very high in my mind. I had two relatives who required 24 hour care just to stay alive.
I think if you deal with that situation on any kind of lengthy basis
you, you can't help but ask yourself questions about
how somebody lives and what kind of quality of life you can offer someone.
It was inspired by real life, which was, which is true of most of my books. I heard a news
story about a young man, a sportsman, who had been left quadriplegic after an accident
and who, several years later, had persuaded his parents to take him to a centre for assisted
suicide and I found this story profoundly shocking. I just, I couldn't understand it
The more I read into the subject, the more I realised that it was, a kind of extraordinary
situation but also one that it was very difficult to judge, because unless you put yourself
in somebody's shoes, I think you shouldn't judge their actions.
I accept that it's a really tough subject and so you're going to attract strong opinions.
But what I would say ultimately is this is a love story, it's about one woman trying
to understand a decision that she finds incomprehensible.
You know, what we have in Will Trainor, is
a man who is rigid and uncompromising and refuses in a way that is completely unusual
to accept his new circumstances. And I wanted to ask the question, what happens
when you are faced with someone who makes a decision that you do not agree with. I mean,
the fact is in the film as in the book, nobody else agrees with what he decides to do. This
is not, by any means, sending out a message, this is saying, what do you do in a particular
human circumstance and it's about autonomy and choice and the fact is, I guess, you know,
not everybody's going to agree with Will's decision.
Everybody is fighting their own particular battle but certainly it has no message beyond
his own particular story.
[Interviewer] There are so few films about these conditions that people then watch
them and think here's one that is about this condition and this man is
is seeking assisted suicide. I mean, can you see that kind of point of view?
I can absolutely see that point of view, all I can say is, um, you know, I set out to write
a book four and a half years ago that was a love story about two people, you know. In
four and a half years of thousands of reader responses, I have never had anybody take that
message from this story and so, all I would hope is that if people get into his head and
get into his shoes perhaps they will understand that it's just about one character it's
nothing more than that. I think it's really important as a writer to just tell the story
that preoccupies you and when I told my then publishers what this story was, it's fair
to say they, they were probably not attracted to this subject matter. And I get that, you
know, it's a tricky subject matter, but for me I just felt that I had a story to tell
about ordinary people in an extraordinary situation. I think it's just a very human story