Jenny Downham and Louis Hill: Let the Light In

Jenny Downham and Louis Hill are the mother and son writing partners of the YA novel Let the Light In. In this interview, they talk with Nikki Gamble about the discoveries made when writing together. They reflect on the complexities of their book's characters, themes and social context.

Transcript

Nikki Gamble:

 n the reading corner today, it's my absolute pleasure to welcome Jenny Downham and Louis Hill, mother and son, who've written the book Let the Light In together. I spoke to Jenny almost twenty years ago about the publication of her debut young adult book Before I Die. I can scarcely believe it's been that long. I'm so pleased to be welcoming you back, Jenny.

Jenny Downham:

Thank you. It's lovely to be back.

Nikki Gamble:

And Louis for the first time.

Louis Hill:

Happy to be here.

Nikki Gamble:

So, there is an obvious question; maybe that is where I will start. And that is why you decided to write a book together.

Jenny Downham:

We had written something together before we wrote this book.

I write novels, and Louis has experience writing plays and short stories. About four and a half years ago, we decided to write a TV series together. So, we wrote a pilot for that, and we had such fun. It wasn't something either of us had done before, and we sent it to various people. It garnered some interest.

But when COVID hit, Louis bubbled back at home, and it struck us as a good idea to do something creative together. This book started out really as a series of writing challenges. We would set each other tasks every day, and we just kept going.

Nikki Gamble:

 Louis, tell us something about the kind of challenges that you set.

Louis Hill:

Well, they'd be anything and everything we could think of—something as simple as ‘write a page about this thing’—anything. Interestingly, the same characters started to crop up over and over again, and that's where Leah and Charlie, the protagonists from Let the Light In, came from.

As the weeks and months passed, it started to feel like something was happening. A project was beginning to emerge. And that was the genesis when we asked, ‘Is this a book?’ And we went from there.

Nikki Gamble:

Let the Light In. It's a story about a family in trouble. It's told from two points of view, the girl Leah and the boy Charlie, brother and sister. It sounds like one of you wrote the Leah's and the other wrote Charlie's Is that right?

Jenny Downham:

That's correct.

Another thing that became very obvious was that Louis writes very differently from me. He's much quicker, for a start. He suggested that we write a chapter a day and pass it on to each other. So, I would write a chapter one day, pass it to him, and he would respond. And my instinct was, well, I take about six months to write a chapter. That's absolutely not going to happen.  But it was Easter, and the weather was nice. And I just thought, oh, all right, let's see. What was amazing was that because I had to stop caring about every single word and the fact that somebody would read it when it was so fresh, we ended up with something very alive and responsive to what had gone the day before, and that was our very first draft.

Louis Hill:

Yeah, it was such a good way, I think, of removing any discomfort about sending one another early work because when you're writing with another person, it's just part of the job. You have to send them work that is inevitably raw or in the early stages. And that can make you feel so nervous as a writer. It's so revealing. We threw all caution to the wind and went, look, there you go. Here are some ideas. We got good at looking past what was early work and just at the kernels of ideas embedded in it.

Nikki Gamble:

So it sounds, Jenny, as though despite all your experience as a writer, you learned something from this process. Has that in any way impacted How you will write going forward?

Jenny Downham:

I really wish I could say yes, and it has made me much quicker. I'm not sure it has.

I have to think about every single word to the point that I don't know how to make it any better before I pass it to somebody else, whether it's my writing group, an editor, or the publisher. And that means I don't send work; I fiddle with it. Sometimes, it's not a good idea. Sometimes, it's finished, and it's ready to go. It's harder to dismantle work if you need to in the editorial process if you have spent so much time deliberating over every word.

What Louis has taught me, and what I hope to take on going forward, is that those quick vignettes are a very useful way to discover whether you're on the right path.

Given that we wrote about seven drafts in the end, which took us three years, I worry that I've given Louis some of my plodding editorial slowness, but he'll have to answer that.

Nikki Gamble:

That is my obvious next question: Louis, has your writing process adapted or changed due to working with Jenny?

Louis Hill:

Inevitably, definitely, yes. Mum has an incredible capacity to excavate depth when it comes to character, I think. She is like a dog with a bone in that if you think you know a character's motivations, she is so good at going; let's go a level deeper than that.  She might say, ‘Okay. A character wants money, so why do they want money? Oh, it's because they want independence and responsibility. Well, why do they want that? It makes you go a level deeper, so it was enlightening to have somebody constantly push you to ensure that your character is as clear, human, and real as possible.And I think that speaks to what she might call ‘plodding’, and I call discipline and thoroughness and patience with the process.

Nikki Gamble:

Sounds like a partnership made in heaven.

I did want to make an observation that I couldn't tell as a reader who'd written what. It melded together beautifully. I have a question about whether you had to work at smoothing it out so that it sounded like one author writing the book.

Jenny Downham:

Calibration was really, really important to us. For about a year, we didn't edit. Then, there came a point when we decided to send each other's chapters back with some notes.

And that's a tough thing to do because, you know, you love this person you're writing with. It kept striking me that as a mother, if your kid brings back a picture of a rainbow from the nursery, it's the best rainbow ever. It's amazing. But this was my career, and we had to be as professional as possible. And I worried about not getting my parental and professional heads muddled. I was possibly more ruthless than I needed to be with the red pen. But what also amused me was that Louis got very confident with his red pen after about a year, sending me back edits. And I think because we edited each other's chapters, that calibration was slicker than it might have been if we hadn't done that.

Louis Hill:

I can definitely confirm that none of my early work was put on the fridge with a large smile. I think we did quite a good job of ensuring we were as honest with each other as possible.

And I think that to that calibration point, partly because we are mum and son, there is some connection already that meant that we could quite quickly slip into ensuring that these voices sounded and remained consistent. We always wanted them to sound like two characters, but not as though two people wrote it.

Nikki Gamble:

 I know you both have a background in theatre, drama, and acting, and I wonder whether that influences the kind of writers you are.

Louis Hill:

 Yes, definitely.

It ended up being a more significant part of our writing process than we anticipated. Our shared background in acting meant that we had this shared vocabulary on top of the vocabulary of writing. So, we could discuss things like you might discuss theatre or performing on camera. We could talk about characterisation or motivations in a way that felt easy.

 I think I write and think quite visually. I often think about where the camera lens will be, and discussing that fluidly with the person you're writing with made the process a lot easier for me.

Finally, I don't think we were that worried about looking silly in front of each other. We have both separately been in rehearsal rooms, that first stage of rehearsing a play, where you're with a group of people you don't know. You have to look silly, take some big swings, and give stuff a go. I felt that carried over to this process. We just went straight for it and didn't worry about whether things were right or wrong or whether they were interesting.

Nikki Gamble:

 Let's dive into the book. Jenny, could you lead us into the book by reading a bit of Leah’s story?

Jenny Downham:

Sure, I'll read a little bit from Leah's first chapter.

JENNY READS FROM CHAPTER 1

Nikki Gamble:

Leah is 17, going on 18 very shortly. She's looking after the family because her mother is suffering from profound grief and is unable to do the mothering that she would. Leah has aspirations to go to the University. She’s on the cusp of adulthood, and fifty years ago, she would have possibly been considered an adult.

So, I'm interested in our perceptions of her as a character. Reading her as an adult is very different from someone of her own age reading the story. I was very aware while reading of trying to remember my 17-year-old self. I wondered whether all that complexity around Leah and her character was part of your thinking, too.

Jenny Downham:

It was very important to us to write these characters as complex. Louis talked about the strata of motivation earlier. But it's also important to us that every character, even the baddies, are fully motivated in the things they do.

Leah, as you say, is a carer. The family isn't provoking attention because she and her brother are managing their little sister, which, in many ways, isn't uncommon, but because the kids are not regularly absent from school and because Leah is very academic and doing well, they are passing below a radar.

I was keen to explore her relationship with an older man from lots of different angles. She is demanding happiness. It's the one thing she has when the rest of her life is very challenging. And I think society is often quick to judge young women and their sexuality, especially if they're demanding happiness in the way that she is in this book.

There's another lens to look through, which is that she's vulnerable and, therefore, susceptible. And possibly, the older man should have withheld his gaze, but he doesn't. Looking at something as complex as that in a safe space felt important to us to offer young readers.

When the relationship becomes public in the book, there are many other viewpoints about this. Other characters have very strong and varied opinions, and we hope that will promote discussion. 

Something that we kept saying to each other is that this does happen in real life. We know lots of people to whom this has happened. We can't ignore it away and pretend it doesn't happen for young people. But we can offer an honest and hopefully sensitive engagement with it.

Nikki Gamble:

Alex, the older man, is 29 and has a wife and child; I did wonder if readers might have felt differently if they weren’t on the scene.

Jenny Downham:

Oh, well, there's the beginning of the debate. Would we have done? I think possibly yes.  But the baby and the wife were always there from the beginning. We toyed with some of these questions. We thought we'd make her 18. But every time we tried to mix the levels, it eliminated much of the drama. So, we made life challenging for ourselves because she is still considered not an adult to some degree. And giving her such complex challenges just meant it became a much more interesting story. Hopefully, the discussions around it will be more interesting as well.

Nikki Gamble:

Louis, you wrote the part of Charlie and I think you're going to read a little bit of his story to us as well.

Louis Hill:

LOUIS READS CHARLIE’S FIRST CHAPTER

Nikki Gamble:

He's such a lovely character. Leah wants him to start stepping up and taking a little bit more of the responsibility from her, but he struggles. Tell us a little bit about his struggles.

Louis Hill:

So many of Charlie's struggles are internal. He has a great deal of difficulty in his life around him, but how he struggles with his mental health permeates that.

I wanted that to be a core part of his journey. It's only as I've moved through my twenties that I've started to talk more about my mental health with friends or family or in a more public way. I saw the value in writing a character that people might read who shows the benefit of engaging with that side of ourselves more.

Charlie and his Mum are both struggling with the same grief. His mum is very still with it. She is stuck in time. Charlie's grief is more kinetic. He is almost running away from his feelings, trying to cover it up. Without spoiling it too much, there are definitely buds of positive ways of handling how he feels. There are the shoots of good coping mechanisms.

And I think there are themes of masculinity, too. What is it to be a young man? What is it to be a young man in London? What is it to be in a world where there is a pervasive toxic masculinity, for want of a better phrase? What is it like when all the talk is about earning money, grinding, or being a provider in a traditional sense? Charlie is in an environment where he doesn't have to do all those things but sometimes feels pressure to do them. You mentioned that Leah wants him to take on more responsibility, and she does in a loving way, but I think he interprets that often as a need to put himself under a great deal of pressure.

So, I wanted to show how he handles that and how he can handle it positively and negatively.

Nikki Gamble:

There is a third sibling in this story, a younger sibling. She doesn’t have her own narration, but she is important for the story.

Jenny Downham:

Yes. So Abby is seven. When tragedy struck this family, she was under four years old, and therefore, her memory of it is very different from that of her older siblings. She is the book's optimist, the truth-sayer. She asks questions that perhaps make the other characters question themselves. In terms of the book's title, she does bring a lot of light to the book. Leah and Charlie both adore her.

There's a lot of love in this family. And it was very important to us that despite the difficulties, Mum is not a parent who doesn't want to parent. She isn't a mum who doesn't love her kids.

She's really trying to parent, and Abby is very well-loved. I guess that a lot of her energy and light comes from the fact that despite the tragedy in her family, she is buoyed up by the rest of them. We loved writing her. She also brings a lot of comedy.

Nikki Gamble:

Was she there right from the beginning as well?

Jenny Downham:

She was. Once upon a time, she had a voice. She was a point-of-view character in the very, very early stages, but that didn't last very long.

Nikki Gamble:

This family has been stuck in this situation for three years, so Leah would have been around 14 when she took on those responsibilities. I did want to think a bit about this issue of young people as carers forced into taking those adult roles. You say she doesn't provoke attention. Can you tell us a little bit more about your thoughts about that?

Jenny Downham:

Yeah, so she provides practical support - Charlie does as well—housework, cooking, shopping, and managing the family budget. But she also emotionally cares for her siblings and her mother. There are thousands of young carers, many of whom are not even on any radar because they don't even know they're carers. I'm sure if you asked Leah if she was a carer, she'd probably say she wasn't. As we said earlier, school resources are limited, and if a child isn't provoking attention, they probably won't receive it. Families like Leah and Charlie’s can easily fall into debt and spiral downwards, as this family does.

One of the impulses for me to make her a carer was I have a friend who was a learning mentor, and her job was to support the kids in a school environment. She used to tell me a lot of stories about kids who, it was discovered much later, had fallen below the radar on the amount of things that they were doing. It was almost as if there was a shame attached to it. There's a lot of secrecy, which has to do with the shame and people withholding and masking their own needs to help others.

One of the things that was important to us was that we highlighted community in the book. There are neighbours, friends, and teachers. By the end of the book, there are the beginnings of communication, an opening up to trusting other people to support you, and the beginnings of asking for help.

Nikki Gamble:

It’s also about making choices about who to talk to and who to turn to for help. Charlie turns for help to people who will further complicate his situation. Sometimes, we feel we have no choice, which forces us into circumstances we might want to avoid.

Can you tell us a little bit more about Charlie and his approach to dealing with their challenging circumstances?

Louis Hill:

We wanted to show his choices as ones that could reasonably happen to different people. We tried to show that he's also a real human character. Some of his choices are made for good reasons but also have foundations in some selfishness.

He's a 15-year-old boy. I was a 15-year-old boy. 15-year-old boys can think about themselves an awful lot, and it was important to show that Charlie has all of these facets to him. I hope he's likable, and I think he's a good person, but that doesn't mean that he can't stray from that path.

As an adult, I've started to realise more clearly how much everyone is on balance, trying their best in life. We are all just trying to make the most of our messy, wonderful, terrible, excellent lives. And casting aspersions or judgment on others is often not the best thing.

So, for Charlie to go from a loving household to one that has its problems to find himself in a position where he is surrounded by people who offer him some independence, some power, and some money, hopefully, creates an obstacle within him that anyone can relate to a version of. We wanted to show that some of his choices are morally grey. Some are made for good reasons and some for bad, but ultimately it's about how he handles the outcome of those choices that defines him.

Nikki Gamble:

One important thing to me was the theme of art, music, and literature. Society has many perceptions about who art is for. In your book, you have a scene quite early on with Leah in the art gallery, helping to host the opening of the first show [of that gallery, listening to the conversations around art and why people want it in their lives. And there's a contrast between some of those motivations and the authenticity of a feeling response.

The theme is threaded through in so many different ways, explicitly and in how the characters perceive their lives. Charlie, for instance, thinks a lot in colour.

Jenny Downham:

From the very beginning, Leah was academic and loved literature.

My parents left school at 14 and were both from very working-class backgrounds, but I grew up with an expectation that I would do well. I would go to university because my father's ambition was for his kids to do better than he did. At school, there were free music lessons, theatre companies visiting, a well-stocked local library, free education at the university level, and parental encouragement.

When my kids were growing up, some of their friends had similar backgrounds, and you can see that a lot of the stuff I had at school is not there anymore. The barriers faced by working-class people when trying to access the arts are wide and varied, but that doesn't mean that people from those backgrounds are not hugely interested in it or are not creative.

It felt very important to us that these people were authentically working-class and creative. Leah's dad took her to libraries and taught her to read, which is in the book.

And you're right. Charlie's particular view of the world is very visual. He feels and sees things that are not about learning how you're supposed to look at art but are very sensory. So, yeah, it just felt that humans are unique in their drive to creativity. It's about paying attention to the world, and it was that that we wanted to give them.

Nikki Gamble:

I think it's particularly important, in a climate where we're talking about meeting people's basic needs, food and shelter, that their right to access art is not forgotten. That's a different kind of nourishment.

Louis Hill:

I completely agree with everything that's been said. The inclusion of art as a central theme within this book felt natural because, as you say, it is such a basic need. If we look at during the pandemic when everyone was locked down, what did everyone spend all their time doing? Watching films, watching theatre online, playing games, absorbing art in various ways, and learning new skills. People learnt how to play instruments and how to draw.

But we wanted to show that these characters' artistic instincts are inherent to who they are. Art threads itself throughout the book in all kinds of ways, not just one way, as a way of making money or as a way of expressing emotions. And I think we also wanted to show that it's not just the people who do the art that it's important for. Charlie draws and paints. He engages with the people creating things. Leah is able to stand and look at a piece of art, have feelings about it, absorb it and interpret it without being somebody who draws herself.

Nikki Gamble:

The title is Let the Light In, so no matter how difficult things get in the story, the title gives us hope that we will get to a lighter place. When did the title come to you? Was it at the end of the process?

Jenny Downham:

Yes, it was. I’m always convinced that a title is in the book, and it doesn't matter if you don't find it until the end, all you have to do is look in the book, and your title will be there. We came up with so many titles in the book. And we eventually decided on one that had more light in it. As you say, it gives us a clue that despite the fact this is a book that, if you read the blurb on the back, might seem as though it's about a family struggling, it does have a lot of joy. There are a lot of laughs and ultimately a lot of light that was important.

Nikki Gamble:

Well, we've covered a lot of ground in our conversation, is there anything else you wanted to share with listeners.

Louis Hill:

No, you’ve comprehensively covered so many of the important themes. I feel like our book is very well seen.

Jenny Downham:

Yes, I agree. Your questioning was a delight.

Nikki Gamble

Well, the book is also a delight. It does let the light in. It's very readable. And I really cared about the characters in this story, and that's the most important thing. Thank you so much for joining me in the Reading Corner today.

Jenny Downham:

Thank you for having us. It's been a pleasure.

Louis Hill:

Thank you so much.