Claire Lynch: 'The key is to simply tell your story in your own way'
BY Maya Fernandes
13th Aug 2026
In this interview, award-winning author and tutor of our Writing Your Memoir – Three Months course, shares her advice for budding writers.
'The book and the process of becoming a mother are entangled for me but I was very careful to draw a protective line around my family too. It’s a useful cliché that the universal is often found in the particular.'
We spoke to Claire about the inspiration behind her critically acclaimed memoir, her research process and what she enjoys most about working with aspiring authors.
Can you remember the book that first made you fall in love with reading?
Perhaps not the exact book, but definitely the place. If I could bottle the smell of my local library from childhood I would waft around in a cloud of it even now. I can still remember the heady feeling of graduating from a child to a teen ticket and working my way from top to bottom of the shelves. Then, the power of the adult library card, the whole world there for the borrowing!
Your critically acclaimed memoir Small: On Motherhoods explores the fertility-related and queer experiences of becoming a mother. Could you share a little bit about what inspired this book and how you approached finding the balance between telling your own story and looking at wider themes of family and identity?
I think a lot of memoir grows out of the instinct to make sense of an experience by putting it down on paper. Some of the early drafts of Small happened in real time, sitting between our twins’ incubators in the hospital. The book and the process of becoming a mother are entangled for me but I was very careful to draw a protective line around my family too, deciding what would and would not belong in the memoir. It’s a useful cliché that the universal is often found in the particular. The key is to simply tell your story in your own way.
Small challenges some of the assumptions we often make about what motherhood looks like. What conversations did you hope the book would open up, and were there particular stigmas that you felt it was important to confront?
A lot of those assumptions are really limitations, aren’t they? A list of things a mother should and shouldn’t be? Certainly, I’ve had lots of conversations about the book in which people are drawn to the idea of shaking off gendered ideas of parenting, and becoming instead a sort of ‘whole’ parent rather than playing a role.
I was, I think, quite conscious of a tradition of family memoirs which focused on how tough parenthood is. I’m in no way arguing it’s not tough, but I did want to give space to the joy of it too, the endless surprises that come with living with people who are new to the world.
Your debut novel A Family Matter won the Nero Gold Prize in 2025. While the novel is, at its heart, an intimate family story, it is also shaped by extensive research, including real-life court transcripts from the 1980s. What was your research process like, and why was it important to bring elements of real-world experience into the novel?
The researched elements of the novel were like the bridge between non-fiction and fiction for me, easing me out of my comfort zone with some good old-fashioned facts! Although the characters in A Family Matter are fictional, I wanted to place some real-life custody cases at the centre to explore a particular moment in our recent history.
Researchers sometimes call the two elements of working in an archive the ‘magical’ and ‘meaningful’. The meaningful part is the information we find in archives, what people wore, the dates and facts of history. But there’s also something magical about touching a piece of paper that hasn’t been seen for decades or reading a small ad that would have been a lifeline to someone in real distress. Rather than thinking of research as homework, I think writers of all genres can find inspiration in the documents or objects which connect them to their project.
Have any writers or books in particular helped to inspire you on your writing journey?
The list is endless. When it comes to memoir, I love an essay collection. I could re-read Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self, Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am, and Sinead Gleeson’s Constellations endlessly. I love Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’ series beginning with Things I Don’t Want to Know and, of course, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
We’re so excited to have you on board as the tutor of our Writing Your Memoir – Three Months course. What do you find most rewarding about working with budding writers?
Anything is possible, the form, the tone, it’s all up for grabs. It’s so exciting to work with writers who are experimenting until they finally reveal what it is they actually want, and need,to write.
It’s a great privilege to watch a group getting to know one another, discussing new work, and learning to trust each other’s feedback. It is, after all, a brave thing to show other people your writing and I am always impressed by the way new writers build each other up.
Finally, what advice would you give to budding memoir writers who are trying to tell a personal story but aren’t sure where or how to begin?
Begin with a different beginning. It’s always useful to think about where the story really starts and bring the reader in then. Maybe it’s an event which changed you at fourteen, perhaps it’s that endlessly repeated family anecdote, a chance encounter which changed the course of everything. Jump in there and see where the story takes you next.
Claire Lynch's memoir, Small: On Motherhoods was published by Brazen in 2019. She is also the author of several academic books, chapters and journal articles. Claire holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and is an honorary Professor of English and Creative Writing at Brunel, University of London. Claire’s debut novel A Family Matter was published in 2025 by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Scribner in the US. The novel won the Nero Book Awards Gold Prize Book of the Year 2025 and was a Read With Jenna bookclub pick.
We're delighted to welcome Claire as the tutor of our Writing Your Memoir – Three Months course.
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