Clare Mackintosh, the author of The Last Party which I will be discussing in another post, was born in 1976 near Oxford, England. She went to Royal Holloway University in Surrey for a degree in French and Management and spent a year in Paris as part of the course, working as a bilingual secretary. After graduation she joined the police, and was soon promoted to Chipping Norton as town sergeant before becoming Thames Valley Police's operations inspector for Oxfordshire. She married Rob Mackintosh in 2004, and in 2006 she gave birth to identical twin boys, Josh and Alex, three months prematurely. While in neonatal intensive care, Alex contracted bacterial meningitis and suffered significant brain damage.
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| Clare Mackintosh |
In a 2019 article for The Guardian she wrote: “Alex had suffered a hemorrhage so extensive that no part of his brain was untouched. In time, the doctor said, he might be able to breathe independently, but it was doubtful he would ever walk or talk. ‘He’s unlikely to be able to swallow,’ she said. Strangely, of all the terrible news delivered in the quiet room, it was this that had the biggest impact on me.”
The couple was told they needed to make a decision about Alex’s future. Mackintosh felt she and her husband were good at talking things through and at finding compromises when they disagreed. But in this case, there could be no compromise. She asked the doctor, “What if we don’t agree?”
“The doctor replied: ‘You have to, because the alternative is unthinkable.’” She could visualize two paths: “One: a life without Alex. Our future on this path was unarguably clear, and unarguably painful. When I tried to visualize it, I was overwhelmed by the pain in my heart, so intense I could hardly breathe. The second road was less certain, but no less painful.”
Ultimately, they made the very difficult decision to allow Alex to die naturally. Weeks afterward, they brought their surviving son home. Then, just 15 months after giving birth to identical twins, Mackintosh gave birth to a set of fraternal twins, Evie and George.
In all, Mackintosh spent 12 years in the police force. In 2011, she was about to be promoted to Chief Inspector when she decided to leave and become a full-time writer and social media consultant. She says her police background was extremely helpful as she began her writing career. “What I learned was storytelling. As a police officer you’re dealing with unreliable narrators or talking to crime victims and trying to find out what happened. It was a good training ground for a writer.”
Mackintosh sees writing as a way to make sense of the world and of the painful choices she faced with Alex. “I found I had a burning need to write about what had happened. What if we’d made a different choice? What if Rob and I had disagreed? What if the doctors had been wrong? What if, what if, what if . . .”
Her 2014 debut novel, I Let You Go, was a bestseller and the year’s fastest selling title by a new crime writer. Today, the Mackintosh family lives in Bala, in north Wales, the setting an inspiration for The Last Party and two more mysteries featuring DC Ffion Morgan.
Sources: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/20/my-new-novel-allowed-me-to-grieve-years-after-losing-my-baby-boy; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Mackintosh; https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/clare-mackintosh/
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