| TOM ROB SMITH
The Child 44 author talks about his mother's tragic breakdown, which inspired his new novel The Farm
The saying ‘be careful what you wish for’ springs to mind when Tom Rob Smith tells me where the idea for his latest novel, The Farm, came from. Years before Smith was first published, a writer gave the aspiring twentysomething novelist a piece of advice: that you should write fiction based on your life. “At the time I was thinking I really liked thrillers,” Smith says. “Nothing had happened to me that I could imagine writing about.” Then, four years ago, something happened to Smith’s family which placed them directly into the pages of a real-life thriller.
His parents had retired and moved to a picturesque farm in Sweden (his mother is Swedish), and Smith stayed in London. He received a call from his father, and was in no way prepared for what he was about to hear – that his mother had had a psychotic breakdown, had been committed to a Swedish mental institute, and had somehow talked her way out of there. His father didn’t know where she was.
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