Emma Bamford – Memoirist discusses switching between real life and imagined stories

Emma Bamford is a journalist and memoirist whose debut novel, ‘Deep Water’ is out right now. About a decade ago, Emma quit her job and escaped to Borneo with a complete stranger. She told this story in her memoirs, ‘Casting Off’ and ‘Untie the Lines’. We talk about writing memoir: why other people want to read about your life, and how you keep records of adventures to write them later on.

‘Deep Water’ tells the story of Jake and Virginie, who after a traumatising experience at sea, find sanctuary in a remote island… until the island starts to reveal more secrets than they know. We talk about the exact moment she had the idea for the story, how she reverse-engineered her scene breakdown, and how much the story changed whilst she was writing it.

You can hear why she’s moving house with a new office in mind, how challenging she found moving from writing memoirs to fiction, and what she does when the words aren’t coming out.

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