It was a way of me finding my own voice.’ It’s a book for which I have a great fondness, and which, I think, was the basis of everything else I write.

It’s a book that I think is ultimately a triumphant book because it’s about the self triumphing over all the terrible things that happen to any one individual in life. The men tend to die young or get killed off. So Behind the Scenes at the Museum is, in a way, behind the propaganda, it’s behind the official history, it’s how it felt to be a lower middle class family with all the great events going on around you that don’t impinge on you, unless you happen to be killed by them – which several of the people in this book are.Īnd it’s a book about women. I think what I hadn’t realised until I’d finished the book was I wanted to write about what it was like to be English, and I think it’s not the greatest picture of what it’s like to be English, but it was what English history has meant on a personal note for people. They build up a kind of tapestry of this family’s past. In a way they look random, but they’re not.

Running under this book, I was always keen on the structure that – because there’s always something behind the closed door, because there’s always a secret – each chapter has a footnote, which is a glimpse into the past of this particular family. Ruby is an unhappy girl, she has an unfortunate life, she has secret and buried tragedy in her life that, throughout the book in a way, her task is to discover what happened to her, because all books, ultimately, are about identity. It begins with her conception and I stole very heavily from Tristram Shandy at the beginning of this book. It’s the first person narrative of a girl called Ruby Lennox.

‘Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a book I thought about for five years and then I wrote in about five months.

Kate atkinson museum