An Interview With Valerie Sinason, Author Of The Orpheus Project

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Valerie Sinason is the accomplished author behind The Orpheus Project. A gripping exploration into love, trauma, abuse, privilege and conspiracy, Valerie taps into forty years’ worth of therapeutic experience to paint a tale that is as gripping as it is potent. What We Reading sat down with Valerie to talk about everything from the motivators and inspiration behind The Orpheus Project to her love for Oliver Twist!

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Thanks for speaking with us, Valerie! First off, tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to the world of writing.

Hello, and thanks for giving me a voice here! I am 76 and I have loved writing stories and poems ever since I first learned to write. My father wrote poems and educational books and his typewriter was the most precious object in our house! I longed for one. My grandmother who lived with us, had a mild intellectual disability and could not read or write but she was so proud of us for being able to. Perhaps that was why we never took writing for granted.

I won literary competitions at school and university and after becoming a child psychotherapist and adult psychoanalyst I wrote lots of work books and chapters. Indeed, following my father I have been an NHS consultant therapist working with people with intellectual disability for forty years.  But this is my very first novel even though I have had 25 books of a work kind published. Unsurprisingly, my heroine is a brave woman with Down’s syndrome. 

Talk to us about The Orpheus Project. What is it about, and how was the process of bringing it to life?

In working with children and adults with disabilities I encountered terrible experiences of stigma and abuse. One of the worst was people who had dissociative identity disorder (what used to be called multiple personality disorder) in which some personalities had been forced to join in with the abuse.

In this work, I then came across organised abuse in which different parts were deliberately created. My husband said I should write about it when I retired. I retired at 70 and my husband asked where the book was so I started. I could not have written it earlier. A young woman with Down’s syndrome says the deputy prime minister and a rock star have abused her. She is an aristocrat and her father is Minister of Health. I wanted the reader to see the problems of VIP abuse disclosures for an ordinary NHS team. The extra fear such situations bring. I also wanted to show the courage people possess even if the high-level abusers, like Savile, are only found after death. 

What is the number one goal you want your work to have with readers?

I want them to be able to care for victims, survivors and those who work with them and accept the levels to which trauma happens. But for all that, it matters that they find it readable. 

What do you think makes you stand out as an author?

That although the characters are from my imagination these situations are real and come from years of work 

What would you say has been your biggest success so far?

That survivors I know who read the book felt it did justice to them 

If you could go back in time to one book you read for the first time, what would it be and why?

I remember reading Oliver Twist at 11 and being taken deeply into the poverty and despair and violence and hope. I was amazed at his depiction of social class and as a child on a council estate, I was deeply nourished by his insight. I loved his humour too and descriptions and of course, it brought me emotional rewards as my father had the complete works and loved all of them. 

What’s one tip you would give your younger self if you had the opportunity?

Stay with it, enjoy it, be grateful for the longing to write. 

And finally, what do you hope the future holds for you and your writing?

I am a third of the way through a more mainstream novel – Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company – about a group of people who go on a disability-access holiday. It has funny and poignant aspects, and I hope it will appeal.

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Follow Valerie and all of her work on her website or Amazon

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