Dear Nobody
Hamish Hamilton London, 1991. HarperCollins, Puffin paperbacks. ISBN 014 1311 762
Click here to buy Dear Nobody from Amazon UK. Dear Nobody is also available on Kindle. Click here to buy the Kindle edition from Amazon UK
Also available as a Collins playscript – see my Plays page. It has been performed at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield; the New Vic Theatre, Stoke; and at many arts venues, schools and universities in Britain, Europe, Japan, Australia and America, on BBC radio 4 and on BBC television. Also available as a video. BBC Schools TV production.
The prose is honest and lovely and loving
English Journal (USA)
Once she and I were the most important people in our world. Is this what I’d become to her? Nobody?
“Pregnant, pregnant, What if I’m pregnant?”
I set myself quite a challenge in writing Dear Nobody. It is about a human dilemma. Essentially it’s a story about love. That doesn’t mean that it is a ‘love story’ in the romantic sense. It is about two young people who love each other, but it’s also about family love, the ways in which love can go wrong, how sometimes it makes us do things that aren’t sensible or that hurt people, how sometimes it turns to hate and drives people and families apart.
Foreign editions
Click here for details of foreign editions of Dear Nobody.
In the story, when Helen finds out that she has become pregnant, she feels she has no one to turn to. She daren’t tell her mother. She daren’t tell Chris, because parenthood is not something they have ever contemplated – they’re too young for that. She feels utterly alone, and gives voice to the fear inside herself by writing letters to her unborn child, Nobody. But it isn’t just Helen’s story. Chris finds he is to become a father long before he is ready for it. If anything his sense of shock and fear is greater than Helen’s, because he's powerless to make any choices about it.
See also The Snake-stone, which is a novel about teenage pregnancy and adoption.
And then they have to face their families. Even though they feel terribly alone with their dilemma, they can’t keep it from their families forever. Everything we do affects somebody else, often in a surprising way. Dear Nobody is not just about the journey that Helen and Chris make away from their childhood, but about the journey they make towards knowing their own parents properly.
I talked to lots of young people in schools when I wrote the novel. I didn’t want to write about their experiences, because I had the story and characters in my head by then. But I did want to know how people feel about love and friendship, relationships with parents, responsibility and loyalty. Since I wrote the novel it has gone into many different languages all round the world, and into several different forms, (plays for the theatre, radio and television, playscripts for schools). I think maybe the reason why it has had such wide appeal is because the subject that it deals with – love, and all its complications, is something that affects us all in one way and another, and that really matters to us. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to talk about love, whether it’s physical or emotional, and a play or a story can help us to understand things that are difficult to handle.
Awards and shortlists
Winner of Carnegie Medal 1991
Shortlisted Writers Guild Of Great Britain Award
Shortlisted Society of Authors Book of the Year
Shortlisted Sheffield Award
Shortlisted Federation of Children’s Book Groups Award
Winner of Sankei Award (Japan)
Stage version: Winner of the Writers Guild of Great Britain award 1992
Novels take us on a journey, they take us out of ourselves into the world of strangers, but sometimes the journey also takes us into our own emotions. Teenagers, of all people, need to find themselves in the literature that they read, and in the plays and films that they see.
I knew that in Dear Nobody I was handling a difficult situation. Chris writes the story, and through it explores not only his own emotions but also those of their two families. This was important for me, even though it’s obviously more difficult for a woman writer to write in the first person of a male. Why did I choose to write it in this way? I want it to work for boys as well as for girls, because they are an equal part of the equation when it comes to making a baby. I wanted to imagine the sort of emotional upheaval that a situation like this might make in the life of a young man still at school. But, having decided that I was going to write the story from Chris’s point of view, I was setting myself a major problem. It is Helen who is pregnant. How was I going to explore the emotional and physical turmoil that she was going through? Who would she turn to? Then I had the idea of having her pour out all her feelings of fear and loneliness and wonder in a series of letters to her unborn child. At first she is not even sure that she is pregnant, it’s just a nightmare feeling that won’t go away. So she writes to nobody – and when I wrote down those first two words, Dear Nobody, I knew that I had the title of my book. That is one title that has never been changed in any of the translations – sometimes it’s even published with the English words Dear Nobody.
Some of the questions people ask me
Q What inspired you to write Dear Nobody?
A I knew a young girl who had been through a similar situation, and I felt then how deeply all the members of her family had been affected. But mainly I wanted to write about love, and how it would survive under very difficult circumstances. It helped a lot to talk to young people about love and friendship, loyalty and responsibility.
Q Would you write a sequel?
A People often ask me this. I don’t think a writer should tell the reader what happens next. I think a book should leave the reader wondering. But one of my other books, The Snake-stone, looks at another side of a similar situation. In this book, a teenage mother finds a place to leave her baby boy and hopes someone will look after him. When he is fifteen he goes in search of her. It’s not a sequel but it looks at a similar situation from a different angle.
Nicole Katzenstein, Anna Neuhaus, Lena Donnermann, Miriam Kroining, Ina Tessel and Karoline Streck of Verl in Germany suggested a sequel to Dear Nobody could be about Helen’s life, Chris reappearing six years later, Chris abandoning his university place, Amy at the age of seventeen, etc. These are really interesting ideas but look how different they are!
Q Why is Helen’s mum so mean?
A If Helen’s mother had been more supportive Helen would not have found herself in such a lonely situation and she wouldn’t have needed to write the Dear Nobody letters. Alice doesn’t represent all mothers but I certainly know some who would react in just the same way as she did. Also, her real reason for distress is shown later in the book.
Q Did this really happen to you?
A No, nor to my daughters, or my son.
Q What were your intentions when you wrote Dear Nobody?
A I simply wanted to write a book which would be interesting to teenagers. I never want to write a message or a moral in my books – I don’t think that’s a novelist’s job. If I can write a strong story that moves my readers, then that is as much as I want to do.
Q What do you think of the ending?
A All the time I was writing the book I had no idea how it was going to end. It wasn’t until I got to the last few pages that I knew that for Chris and Helen this was the only possible solution.
Q How long did it take to write?
A About ten months. I wrote each chapter during the months that they are named after in the book!
Q What is your opinion on abortion?
A It is such a deeply personal matter that one cannot say simply that abortion is right or wrong, whatever the circumstances. What I do feel, very keenly, is that abortion is a very serious matter indeed and that anyone who finds themselves in the situation that Helen is in should be helped to be made absolutely aware of all the physical, moral and emotional aspects of it before attempting to make a choice.
Q Is there a play of Dear Nobody?
A Yes. It has been a BBC Radio 4 play, a theatre play and a television play. CollinsEducation have published the playscript in their Playsplus series and it has been performed in schools and theatres round the world.
Q Was it difficult to make the film?
A The film script was written by Richard Cameron and I think he did it very well. Of course he made some changes but that’s necessary when you change from one medium to another. On the whole his changes pleased me. I’m in the film, by the way, in one of the café scenes! You can just see me behind Chris’s head!
Q Do you think the characters in the film represented the characters in the book well?
A As well as being on television, Dear Nobody has been two radio plays, two major theatre productions in England and one in Japan, and several school plays round the world! I have seen so many interpretations of Chris and Helen and the other actors that I almost can’t remember how I imagined my originals to be! I am just endlessly fascinated by the different ways of representing them, and always impressed by the actors’ ability to bring the characters to life.
Q (from Andrew Papamichael) What do you think of Helen, and how do you think she deals with her situation?
A I think she is very strong-minded. She makes unilateral decisions which are sometimes quite selfish, such as her decision to break with Chris, and her decision to keep her baby. However, she is quite clear in her mind that she is making the right decisions, and I admire her for facing up to the emotional challenge that both these decisions entail. I don’t think her future will be at all easy.
Q (from Andrew Papamichael) Do you think that this book could have been written prior to the onset of social realism in the 1970s, in fact could you see Helen being placed within a different time frame altogether?
A Definitely. Helen’s dilemma is universal and timeless.
