The idea for The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up came to me gradually, a bit like Shelley’s memories in the novel. At first, I just knew it was going to take place in a hospital and involve a friendship between a patient and a volunteer. I worked the plot out bit by bit, until I thought I had a great idea on my hands, but also quite a daunting one. I needed to know a bit about amnesia to pull it off. Sadly, I have family experience of Intensive Care units and brain injury, which was helpful, but it wasn’t enough.
I have a writer friend, Dr Stephanie Carty, who is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist. She explained to me about retrograde and anterograde amnesia in a way that was simple enough for me to understand. Retrograde amnesia is when a person cannot remember things from before the amnesia but can retain new memories. Anterograde amnesia is the reverse, when a person can remember things from the past (before the amnesia) but cannot retain new memories. This understanding opened doors for me, because Shelley suffers from both at different times.
Years ago, I read Before I Go To Sleep by SJ Watson. The central character forgets everything every time she sleeps, so has to build up her knowledge from scratch each day. To remind myself of it, I watched the film of the same name. I also watched the 2012 film The Vow, in which a woman cannot remember her husband following a car accident. I was interested to learn that it was loosely based on a true story. Finally, I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks. Sacks is a neurologist and the book is an interesting look at some of his case histories.
At some point, you have to stop researching and start writing, and I hope I chose the right time to do that. It was important to me to understand what was happening with Shelley’s brain, but at the same time I knew I wasn’t going to get too technical in my descriptions of her injury. My novels are chiefly about people and their connections to one another, and this one is no exception.