VAL MCDERMID: HOW I CAME OUT

from We Love This Book:

The crime author on what it was like growing up as a writer and lesbian in 1960s Fife 


As a child I had plenty of friends but I always felt like an outsider. I thought that was because I wanted to be a writer, but it was really more to do with being gay, I suspect.

I grew up in Kirkcaldy on the east coast of Scotland, a small town famous for producing linoleum and for being the birthplace of the economist Adam Smith. It was at the heart of the Fife coalfield, and I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents, who lived nearby in a mining village.

I was an only child so I had plenty of opportunity to lose myself in the worlds of imagination inside books. I must have been about 10 when I had my first crush. It was Dusty Springfield. I cut out a picture of her from a magazine and stuck it on my wardrobe where I could see it from my bed.  


MORE >