Kim Edwards's best-selling first novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, tells the story of twins separated at birth, she tells Arminta Wallace
How about this as a plot for a novel? Creative-writing teacher beavers away for years at a backwater university, urging generations of reluctant students to form proper sentences and hone their plot-building skills. Secretly, of course, she has been honing her own. And then one day - bada bing! - she produces a book that storms the bestseller list and propels her to literary superstardom.
Oh, for goodness' sake, you're probably thinking. Don't be ridiculous: such sticky-sweet, fairy-tale schmaltz doesn't happen outside of the last act of a Disney movie. But that's exactly what happened to Kim Edwards with The Memory Keeper's Daughter. Well, maybe not exactly. The University of Kentucky, where Edwards is an assistant professor of English, probably wouldn't take too kindly to being described as a backwater. Nor did she spring, fully formed, from the writing closet with her first novel.
She had already published a fistful of short stories, many of which won prizes and some of which were anthologised in The Best American Short Stories. Her collection The Secrets of the Fire King won two awards in the US and was shortlisted for the 1998 Hemingway Foundation/ PEN award.
The bit about The Memory Keeper's Daughter is true, though. In hardback it was just another debut novel that got good reviews, was promoted as a particularly good read by a large chain of bookshops and then dropped out of sight. When it came out in paperback, however, sales went through the roof. It has now sold more than one and a half million copies Stateside, having topped the New York Times bestseller list for more than 30 weeks. It is currently at or near the top of the bestseller lists in Australia, Taiwan, Italy and Brazil.
"It's astonishing to me to have this happen," Edwards says. "It's something writers always dream of, but it too rarely happens - that people have this deep response to a book. It has just struck an enormous chord. For me that's a wonderful thing - and a humbling thing, too. To see something that I did quietly, in the privacy of my own imagination, have this journey in the world."
That Edwards came up with a cracker of a plot helped, of course. The novel opens with a woman giving birth in a Kentucky hospital on a wild, snowy night in the mid-1960s. Her gynaecologist gets stuck in a snowdrift, so her doctor husband, who's a bone specialist, is forced to deliver the baby. It all seems to go well; his son is perfect.
Then his wife has another contraction, and all hell breaks loose. A second baby - nobody had even suspected she was carrying twins. When the little girl is born, however, it is immediately obvious to her father that she has Down syndrome. He asks the nurse who helped him deliver the baby to bring her to an institution. Instead she keeps the child and raises her as her own.
The book follows the progress of the two "families" and examines the way in which secrets and lies eat away at people as surely as some kind of corrosive psychological acid. A real page-turner, it slides down easier than a plateful of apple pie with cinnamon ice cream - though I'm surprised to hear Edwards categorise it as literary fiction, for it has the ease and lightness of first-class pop fiction.
Asked about the influences on her writing, Edwards cites Alice Munro and, above all, William Trevor. "I think he's very wise," she says. "He has a very deep insight into character and the nuances between characters. I love the way he uses language. I teach his stories sometimes, and just to look at the way the syntax of some of the sentences is reflective of or engaged with the meaning - for instance, there's a passage in Felicia's Journey where Felicia is trapped in a situation. Some of the sentences have very simple subject-verb clauses, and then other clauses piled on top, giving a sort of claustrophobic feeling."
Reading literary fiction - or even studying it for tips and hints - she adds, doesn't mean you have to seek to emulate its style.
"I think it was TS Eliot who said, 'For us there is only the trying,' " says Edwards. "He meant that there's no use in trying to be Dante. All we can do is express, in the fullest way possible, our own vision of the world. It's important to keep in mind that writing isn't a competition. It's an attempt to express one's own deeply-held belief and perspectives."
Inevitably, the success of her book has changed Edwards's life. She's currently working on her second novel - no easy task in the midst of a punishing schedule of international travel, interviews and speaking engagements.
But the aspects of the book's success that please her most, she says, is when people come up to her at readings and say they have a daughter or son, or aunt, or friend, with Down syndrome - and they thank her for the way she has depicted the condition in her book, with honesty, sensitivity and humour.
So, no losers in this story, then? Heck, yes. Spare a thought for Edwards's hapless creative-writing class. Just as they're about to learn the biggest lesson of all - how to hit the literary jackpot - their teacher disappears on two years' leave of absence. But maybe, in the world of 21st-century fiction, that's a lesson in itself.
The Memory Keeper's Daughter is published by Penguin, €9.99