When I ran out of material from my diaries and memories, I realized my daughter and son were teenagers, and started eavesdropping on them. About a year after that, Diving In was accepted for publication. I forgot to eat (unthinkable for me) and I nearly forgot to collect the kids from school. I remember the first day I started to write - it took me over. So I got bitten by the ‘I can do better than this’ bug, and started writing. By chance I got given some teenage books to edit, and I hated the way they treated sexual relationships: they were either full of gloom and doom, or were gushy, unrealistic candyfloss. When my two kids came along, I set up as a freelance copy-editor and worked from home.

Then I'd fall asleep over my desk in the afternoon. I used to go to the huge YMCA on Tottenham Court Road at lunchtime and do aerobics classes (very big in the 1980s and yes - I wore legwarmers). My first proper job was in a publishing house, Time Life Books, as a copy-editor. He's still the person I most want to spend time with. We had loads of fights and adventures, but we kept coming back together. At Kent, I fell dramatically in love with the man I'm still married to. At school, I was rubbish at just about everything but English, so I went on to Kent University where I did two degrees in English and American Literature. I never thought ‘I want to be a writer’, but I loved books and writing. I used my later diaries for the Diving In trilogy.

Then, when I turned thirteen, I began keeping a lurid diary, full of adoration or loathing, depending on who I was writing about. My first foray into writing was a series of nasty spells full of rats’ tails and bats’ wings. When I was a child, I wanted to be a witch.

Possessed by Kate Cann