The Interview - Alice McVeigh

You thought right!

But all my life my first love - writing - has fought against my second love - professional cello playing. So mine has been a very strange career. I finished my first novel aged 12 and almost immediately lost interest, as I finally had the chance to learn to play cello. (There were no cello teachers in Myanmar in the seventies!) I became a pro cellist, in London, got bored - did I mention I am 100% ADHD?!? - and wrote a novel about the "backstage life of a symphony orchestra". To my amazement, it was picked up by one of London's leading agents, and sold within two weeks to Orion/Hachette. (And no, you couldn't make it up...)

My first novel (While the Music Lasts) sold brilliantly but the sequel - Ghost Music - sold only OK. Which was why my starry-but-ruthless agent dumped me, as did Orion. I was in a very bad place already, due to having six failed IVFs. But... the seventh worked, and I decided to stay at home for a few years with the baby and work as ghostwriter, thanks to While the Music Lasts and Ghost Music.

Yes. I think this was because I'd lived till then in countries - Bangkok, Singapore, Myanmar - that had, at the time, NO ENGLISH-SPEAKING TV. All my younger sister Kathy and I could do was read - and, in my case, write. I wrote terrible poetry at four (I'm still very bad at it), stories for Kathy from five on, and my first full-length novel as a pre-teen.

I've been asked this a lot, especially on podcasts, and I never know quite what to say.

ADHD is awful - wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. And, in many ways, it's wrecked my life. I was misdiagnosed over and over: in my twenties and forties with depression, in the my thirties with anxiety. I spent decades on THE WRONG PILLS - pills that squashed my creativity, in the cause of calming me down. My volatility cost me both close friends and also orchestra work. My inattention/lateness/attitude annoyed people, even including my immediate family. At times, my undiagnosed ADHD has brought me close to suicide.

However, unlike most mental disorders, ADHD has a couple of minor plusses, which I feel I must honestly admit to:

1. We can hyperfocus. Which is both helpful AND unhelpful. This is the ADHD-trick where you can get so in the zone that you just write, only stopping to eat and to go the bathroom, for 48 hours at stretch. And no, I never once feel tired. I just BUZZ, instead.
2. We are perilously easily bored. The advantage here is that ADHD writers are HIGHLY unlikely to bore our readers. If it's good enough to engage us, as ADHDers, we can take it for granted that it has "grip".

My daughter. I can't have ever been a very good mother, and I know that I often failed her. But I can't have entirely failed her, because she knows how much we both love her, which is the main thing! But we unconsciously pressurised her to excel (well hey, my husband got a First at Oxford aged only nineteen!)

We always swore we wouldn't, but we still did, and she has admitted - she's now 25 - that she felt pressured. I feel terrible about that. But proud? Don't get me started!

Easy. I'd have just one of the many good-natured but hugely mistaken psychotherapists, Jungian/Freudian analysts, CBT specialists SPOT THAT I HAD ADHD before I was blinking 55. That would have changed the entire course of my life.