'I’ve been working on it a long time so it’s gone through many different versions. It feels like I’ve written three books about the same story in very different styles. But I think it takes time to find your pace with something that’s quite new.
It’s a love story. It’s loosely based on my parents and I wanted to explore this idea of what it means to pick up your life and go somewhere just because you fall in love. (Tishani's father is Gujarati and her mother is from North Wales) The story of my parents is quite remarkable. It wasn’t that long ago but we don’t live in that time anymore. To have a long distance love-affair or relationship now is quite easy: you have skype, email, texts, you can call each other easily. At that time, they wrote to each other every day for six months when they couldn’t see each other. And I thought that was such a sweet testament.
And some of those letters are still there and so I discovered the letters and I got to know my parents as different people through those letters. I had thought of them as my parents and then suddenly to try and imagine them before I existed was such a fun thing.
Somebody was talking about the tradition of story telling in our part of the world and I thought: ‘nobody told me many stories and I wanted to know those stories!’ I had no grandparents who sat me on their lap, I had no aunt. My parents never spoke that much: they’d tell me the same two or three stories over and over again. And I thought: give me some juice! They were very reluctant so finally what I did was to take the bare-boned story of it and create my own thing. So it’s entirely fictionalised by I guess the root of it is loosely based on them, and then it goes back and forwards in generation.
It’s called THE PLEASURE SEEKERS and it’s a quest novel. The characters are chasing what I call pleasure. Not in a purely hedonistic sense. They’re going against the grain: not saying ‘I’m going to do this because it is what’s expected of me’ but ‘I’m going to do that because it’s what gives me joy’.'
It’s a love story. It’s loosely based on my parents and I wanted to explore this idea of what it means to pick up your life and go somewhere just because you fall in love. (Tishani's father is Gujarati and her mother is from North Wales) The story of my parents is quite remarkable. It wasn’t that long ago but we don’t live in that time anymore. To have a long distance love-affair or relationship now is quite easy: you have skype, email, texts, you can call each other easily. At that time, they wrote to each other every day for six months when they couldn’t see each other. And I thought that was such a sweet testament.
And some of those letters are still there and so I discovered the letters and I got to know my parents as different people through those letters. I had thought of them as my parents and then suddenly to try and imagine them before I existed was such a fun thing.
Somebody was talking about the tradition of story telling in our part of the world and I thought: ‘nobody told me many stories and I wanted to know those stories!’ I had no grandparents who sat me on their lap, I had no aunt. My parents never spoke that much: they’d tell me the same two or three stories over and over again. And I thought: give me some juice! They were very reluctant so finally what I did was to take the bare-boned story of it and create my own thing. So it’s entirely fictionalised by I guess the root of it is loosely based on them, and then it goes back and forwards in generation.
It’s called THE PLEASURE SEEKERS and it’s a quest novel. The characters are chasing what I call pleasure. Not in a purely hedonistic sense. They’re going against the grain: not saying ‘I’m going to do this because it is what’s expected of me’ but ‘I’m going to do that because it’s what gives me joy’.'
