For Clare Chambers, the function of her novels is both simple and profound: they are what she calls a “reaching out” to readers, a chance to share “a moment of communion.”
“In my novels I am trying to put into words feelings and insights that readers may not have articulated to themselves but nevertheless recognize as being exactly what they have always thought,” she says via Zoom from her home in London. “This creates a connection between two people—writer and reader—who have never met and may never meet.”
For her latest novel, Shy Creatures (Mariner, Nov.), which features a young unmarried woman in a questionable relationship and a plot inspired by bizarre real-life events, Chambers looked to the past for characters and stories to build those connections. It was while she was researching her previous novel, Small Pleasures (2020), that she stumbled across a decades-old news story about what she calls a “hidden man.”
“I was browsing by key words: mystery, unsolved, scandal,” Chambers says. “I found these clips about a 47-year-old man, Harry Tucker, who in 1952 was discovered in a house in Bristol, England, disheveled, with a long beard, and obviously quite disturbed. He had been living under the radar with an elderly aunt. No one had seen him for 25 years. The neighbors didn’t know there was a man living on the property. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital, and he seemed to be making good progress.”
Intrigued, Chambers dug deeper, but all she could uncover about Tucker was an inquest into his death by drowning one year later. “He’d absconded from the hospital and fallen into a river—such a sad end to his all-too-brief lamentable liberation,” she says. “I thought, I’d love to write him a better ending, something that explains how he got into this situation but also how he got out of it.”
Born in 1966 in East London, Chambers grew up the youngest daughter of a bookish family, a foundation that would serve her well later in life. “My father was an English teacher,” she says. “He would always read to us. My sister would read to me. Even now my husband reads to me every night.”
Chambers attended Oxford University, studied English at Hertford College, and graduated in 1988. She and her future husband spent the next year in New Zealand, where he was teaching. She published her first novel, Uncertain Terms (1992), when she was just 25. “It was good practice,” she says of the book, “and I had confidence and enthusiasm. But if I had known then what I know now, I probably would have put it aside. But when you’re young, you’re impatient, and when someone agrees to publish, you think, yes, great, now, tomorrow!”
After Uncertain Terms, Chambers published seven more novels—all of them romantic comedies—and gathered accolades. Learning to Swim (1998) won the Romantic Novelists Association’s Novel of the Year award, and In a Good Light (2004) was longlisted for a Whitbread Award. Despite her success, with her eighth outing, Burning Secrets (2011), Chambers says she felt her books hadn’t really “done anything.” She was in her 40s, and a long period followed when nothing was working. She finished a novel that was rejected. She couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong and felt like she’d wasted years writing it. “I thought, now I’m 50 years old and I’ve got a bad track record,” she says. “I’m not a celebrity; I’m not a debut author. I felt like I’d never get published again, but my husband encouraged me to just keep writing, to write my way out of it.”
That experience—and her husband’s advice—led Chambers to try something different. In 2020 she published Small Pleasures, based on the true story of a woman who claimed to be a virgin mother. It was the first time she’d used a newspaper article as the basis of a book. “I was listening to a radio show interviewing the journalist who had scooped the story in the 1950s,” she says. “I thought it was a great plot for a novel, but I knew it wasn’t a comedy. I knew there must be a sad story underneath all of this, because a virgin birth obviously wasn’t true.”
Chambers tells an equally sad story in Shy Creatures: a mute, unkempt man named William Tapping is found living in a run-down house in a London suburb, where for decades he has been unseen and unknown, cared for by his now-deceased aunts. After his discovery, William is shipped to the Westbury Park psychiatric hospital, where he meets Helen Hansford, a 30-something art therapist who thinks her new patient has artistic talent. She is also having an affair with a married doctor at the facility.
While William’s real-life counterpart died in the early 1950s, Chambers decided to set Shy Creatures in 1964, which, she says, allowed her to write about an interesting time in the history and evolution of psychiatry, with R.D. Laing’s seminal The Divided Self published in 1960.
“Art therapy was a new discipline in the ’60s, so I thought having a female-male nonromantic relationship between Helen and William would be a good way into the story,” she says. “She would be an interesting foil to him, and we could see the way sexual politics had gotten her into a kind of straight jacket. One of the ways people have conflicts is with flawed relationships. It’s hard to make happiness interesting. If you look at the great memoirs, they usually involve bad parenting and terrible childhoods. Happy and interesting memoirs are rare, and I think the same is true of fiction. The more conflict, or potential for conflict, the more interesting the story.”
Chambers attributes her fascination with mysteries and scandals from the not-too-distant past to getting older. “You’re less interested in the future because there’s less of it for you,” she says. “And it’s a kind of nostalgia. I think nostalgia is a false god and you should be wary of it. I try not to write the past as a kind of rosy glow but as realistically foggy.”
Those efforts to capture the past have, according to Chambers’s U.S. editor, Rachel Kahan, clearly paid off. “I picked up Small Pleasures after it had first hit bestseller lists in the U.K.,” she says. “I was so completely bowled over by Clare’s skill at writing an extraordinary novel about the life of seemingly ordinary people—you think you’ve wandered into the life of a fairly average person, and then suddenly you’re on the edge of your seat.”
For Chambers, those seemingly ordinary people are another invitation to connect. “As a reader, I feel the writer is saying, ‘I know you; you know me,’ and I would love readers to have that feeling when they read something I’ve written,” she says. “That we know each other.”
