Silvia Saunders: 'The human spirit is tough, but it needs light relief too'
BY Maya Fernandes
11th Feb 2025
Silvia Saunders was a student on our six-month London Writing Your Novel course in 2022. We caught up to discuss the release of her debut novel, Homesick – out now from Harper Collins.
We spoke to Silvia about her experience on the course, her process for developing believable characters and the advice she would give to aspiring authors.
Silvia, you studied on our six-month London Writing Your Novel course back in 2022. How did the course shape your writing approach?
I signed up for the CBC course after a long run of feeling dispirited about my writing. Over the course of a decade, I’d written three full-length novels, along with a handful of other aborted attempts, and really didn’t know what to try next. The world was still quite Covid-y at that time, so I was also missing the social aspect of being with other like-minded people and talking about books and writing. When I was accepted onto the course, I’d written a few chapters of a new novel, and suddenly it was as though I’d given myself permission to take it really seriously again. I was determined to get a full draft done in those six months. And I did!
Many of our students end up making lasting connections on the course – are you still in touch with any of your course mates?
Absolutely! We have a very active and supportive WhatsApp group, and try to meet up in person every few months for joyful (often boozy) ‘write-together’s. After the course had finished, there were a handful of us who wanted feedback on whole novels, so we set up a book club, where we exchanged our manuscripts, then fed back to each other over long, rambling Zoom calls. Those women were the first to read Homesick, and they are front and centre on my Acknowledgements page – I genuinely don’t think I’d be in this position without them.
In Homesick, Mara goes through a huge personal transformation. What was your process for developing her character, and what parts of her journey do you think will resonate most with readers?
Mara may not be able to admit this to herself at first, but she’s stagnating. She’s let life carry her along, and doesn’t take the time to stop and wonder whether everything she’s doing and the people she’s surrounding herself with still make sense.
Being in your mid-twenties is fun, but it’s also scary. The decisions you make start to feel as though they might actually end up changing the course of your life. Things stick. People you thought you’d be close to forever drift away and drop off. Homesick documents a quarter-life crisis of sorts, but I also see it as a late coming-of-age story.
She’s purely fictional, but a lot of the things she goes through, I – and most of my friends – have also experienced: living alone for the first time, losing your way, breakups, grief. An early reviewer described Homesick as ‘a slice of life,’ and I really liked that.
Relationships are at the heart of your story – romantic, familial and otherwise. How do you bring these dynamics to life in a way that feels real?
Mara’s immediate family is small: just her and her mum, and she grapples with wanting to retain that symbiosis they’ve always had, while also knowing that the umbilical cord has to stretch and unravel. I temporarily moved back to the Midlands during lockdown, as me and my mum were both living alone at that time. It only took us a few days to get back into a familiar routine, even though I hadn’t lived there for over ten years. When the lockdown lifted, and I was allowed to travel again, I found it really difficult to leave. Subconsciously, that must have been in my mind as I wrote the relationship between Mara and her mum.
Similarly, Mara’s sure she’s found the love of her life in Tom, yet he doesn’t always seem to be convinced of this. We’ve all been there. A relationship where nothing’s gone drastically wrong, yet there’s this low-level niggle that it might be time to call it a day. How do you handle that, when things have reached their natural expiry date, but neither of you are brave enough to say it out loud?
My favourite character is Mara’s best friend, Noor. Though born and bred Londoner Noor does her utmost to not take Mara’s new, privileged, home-owning position to heart, their friendship is tested as a result of Mara not always reading the room. This happens in real life all the time. Someone in the friendship group is pregnant; someone else is struggling to conceive. Somebody just got engaged in Santorini; somebody else is having the worst breakup of their life. How can you share these milestones with your friends, without the inevitable comparison? It’s hard, and it was fun to delve into.
Whilst there is a strong emotional depth to Homesick, it is also humorous. How do you balance diving into those tough emotions with moments of hope or lightness?
The human spirit is tough, but it needs light relief too. Homesick touches on some big issues – depression, financial disparity, the mess that is the modern housing market, loneliness, death – so I felt it was important to balance this out with observational humour. Laughing nearly always helps. I have a vivid childhood memory of watching Blind Date the night my dad died, and thinking, ‘How am I enjoying this?’ But we do. And that’s okay.
Your novel has been compared to writers like Monica Heisey and Dolly Alderton. Are there any authors that you’re particularly enjoying at the moment?
Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss was a huge highlight for me last year. As was Miranda July’s All Fours. If there’s a dysfunctional-women-sexually-obsessed-with-inappropriate-people genre, I think that’s my favourite right now!
For any aspiring authors reading this, what’s one piece of advice you’d give them?
I’ve had more than my fair share of writing disappointments, and – as is probably clear by now – I’m very close to my mum. Any time I’d call her in tears after an agent rejection, she’d say, ‘Would you still write if you knew for sure you’d never be published?’ And my answer was always, ‘Yes.’
So, keep the joy in it. I really believe it should be fun! If you end up being published, amazing, but until then, remember how satisfying it can feel when you write a perfect sentence. Just for you.
And finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I’ve written the next novel and am deep in edits. Keeping my fingers crossed I’ll get the chance to do all of this again!
Get your hands on a copy of Homesick.
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