![]() ![]() It also provided McAweaney with a writing group, comprised of course mates who have all stayed in contact. We shouldn’t need these external things to legitimise our pursuits, but the course really did for me – it gave me a lot of confidence.’ Just being surrounded by people who love writing as much as I do and sharing our work with one another – it was the first time ever that I began to take writing seriously. I had a really supportive group and really interesting tutors. ![]() ![]() But then I did the course and it was fantastic. I’d always been a bit embarrassed – worrying that what I was writing was probably shit but I was also worried that studying might take away the love I had for my ideas. When I ask how she found the experience of the Curtis Brown Creative Course, she tells me that applying was a spur-of-the-moment decision: “I never ever thought I would be accepted and when I was, I freaked out a bit. It seems characteristic of McAweaney that her successes initially inspire a mild level of panic. “The last two months were a bit tricky,” she admits, “I experienced my first creative block and I think I just put too much pressure on myself… I was freaked out because I was worrying too much about the future.” She tells me the writing is going well, which seems like a relief. But if it’s an influencer it’s 25 a day.” As McAweaney says, “it’s bad enough that we get five updates a year on an ex and it’s crap. Take the influencer character, Candy Cane, for example. It was just how it unraveled as I wrote.” McAweaney throws out a disclaimer: “I never thought that I was going to write a commentary on social media. I thought it must suck if your partner dumped you and started going out with someone famous.” “I was probably thinking about it for about a year before I finally put pen to paper… It was a really simple idea. She’s feeling it too much.”Īs McAweaney and I sat down to discuss her novel, the CBC course, and modern love, I asked her where the idea for Salted Caramel had come from. As McAweaney tells me, her protagonist’s problem is: “she just feels everything. Yet empathy never quite becomes psychopathy. The novel tips its world out of balance: love becomes obsession, following becomes stalking, and self-control escalates into self-sabotage. It is ‘your usual, run of the mill, socially accepted insanity.’ The protagonist is insane, yes, but in the ‘hopelessly romantic’ way that allows love to “dissolve the line between madness and lucidity”. Salted Caramel is both a thriller and a comedy. What I'm trying to tell you here, is that I was hiding in a bush.” Turns out, these wide sweeping generalisations aren’t so far from the truth. One imagines someone hiding in the bushes. "When one pictures a stalker, one imagines a trench coat. Salted Caramel follows the downward spiral of a woman as she becomes increasingly obsessed with her ex-boyfriend and his new influencer girlfriend, Candy Cane. ![]()
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