A new Sonya Hartnett novel is always a treat in our house, as it is one of the few novels that my wife, my teenage daughter and I will all be guaranteed to read. Her latest, Butterfly, is out and about in the bookshops and she is interviewed by Christopher Bantick in "The Courier Mail".
Hartnett makes tea and with Shiloh at her feet reflects on her own teenage years."I can't remember particularly having an extremely difficult teenage-hood," she says. "I had an older sister who did the extreme things on behalf of all of us. I used to watch her and her behaviour and say that it was really stupid and embarrassing. I wanted to keep a lid on it as a teenager.
"I certainly had my moments. I had feelings of such frustration and rage and self-hatred; all the kinds of things that you go through. I was not a wild kind of kid. If anything, I just became more withdrawn and sullen. I guess I came through my teenage years relatively unscathed."
Even with Hartnett as an emerging writer as a teenager, it comes as a surprise when she says being an author was not an aim.
"I never knew when I was an adolescent that I was going to be a writer, I still don't. Adolescence was when I started to write. Back then was when I was really absolutely in love with doing it.
"It was a feeling that was to last until I got to my early 30s. That sustained me for a long time. But back in those days, this was the time when I really used to fall in love with my characters. That's long in the past."
