It’s publication day for my third psychological thriller, The Good Patient.
This is a book that is very close to my heart as one of the characters, and indeed one of the storylines was inspired by a real person and real events from my own life. Fortunately, the psychological thriller elements of the novel are fiction. But the inspiration for Dr Abhilash Menon came from a previous boyfriend, who I’m lucky enough to still be able to consider a good friend.
The real version of Dr Abhilash has always been a huge supporter of my writing and has always said ours was a story I should tell one day. It took a few years before I was ready to do so, but finally I have.
Our relationship taught me many things not just about myself, but about life and how to focus on making the most of it. And whilst I’ve taken a bit of artistic licence with the exact wording, the sentiment of his words of wisdom remains part of Lauren and Dr Abhilash’s story.
‘If you dwell on regrets about the past and worry about the future, you’re missing out on the present. The now. And that’s the only thing we really have any control over. So live in the present.’
I wanted to share some of our experiences and the lessons I learned from them, and so these are the lessons that Lauren gets to learn in the novel too. Though admittedly she learns them faster (but more dramatically) than I did.
The good patient is very much a story of inner strength and growth, which was the same for my own experience. Because without that relationship and all its complexities, I might not have had the courage to stand on my own, completely uproot my life, take an unpaid career break, move to Bournemouth where I didn’t know a sole, and chase this seemingly impossible dream of becoming a published author.
But of course, I write psychological thrillers rather than romance novels, so this relationship is just one thread of the novel. As with my previous novels, The Good Patient is a story full of complex characters and relationships, an unreliable narrator, traumas from the past, and dramatic Dorset settings.
The real version of Dr Abhilash and I met on holiday and had a long-distance relationship. However, as my novels are all set in Dorset, I needed to relocate his character. When I asked him what job he would have liked to do in a different life, he replied; a doctor. And so, the character of Dr Abhilash was born.
This one decision set the tone for the entire novel. From there I considered several different scenarios, before settling on the idea of a complex doctor/patient relationship. I needed Lauren to be an unreliable narrator, which in turn led her to be an unreliable patient. Questions about why she was in hospital, and why the doctors would doubt her started to whirl in my mind, and the idea of her being a victim of FII (formerly Munchausen by proxy) gradually formed.
The more research I did, the more I discovered just how complex the aftermath of it could be for the victims. Leaving aside the physical implications, the mental and emotional trauma experienced was potentially devastating. I soon realised that this was something I wanted to explore and shed more light on, in the same way that my previous novels have tried to help overcome the stigma of mental health issues and misunderstandings on emotional abuse and agoraphobia. The end result, according to early readers, is an even darker and more twisty tale than my previous novels.
And in case you were wondering… The real version of Dr Abhilash loves that he was the inspiration for this novel! I did offer him the chance to read an early draft of The Good Patient, but he declined, saying that he wanted to wait and read the published paperback. So now I’m waiting to see what he thinks of his character and my interpretation of him. This could be interesting…