A WRITER'S STORY - Rachel Billington

'Fiction is a form of disguise, certainly. But, more important, it is a way of telling your own stories through other peoples' lives.' The author of more than thirty novels, published over fifty years, Rachel Billington is a natural storyteller. Now shifting the focus from her imagined characters to those who have been so vibrant and vital in her own life, Billington casts herself as protagonist in this honest memoir. Born in 1942, a war baby, fifth child of eight turbulent Pakenhams whose parents Frank and Elizabeth Longford left politics to become social reformer and biographer respectively, Billington was recorded by her mother as the 'placid' one. Stories of unexploded bombs, home-made cowboy films in which her role was to throw herself from her pony, merge into London convent, feisty nuns, smogs and friends, escape to an Irish island and an inherited Irish castle. Leaving a television job under a cloud, there come stories about her new life in New York, working on a documentary about drug addiction. After two years she meets her English film director husband, Kevin Billington, and the stories pass back to London, then Hollywood, New Orleans, London and Spain. Four children, the oldest continuously inhabited house in Dorset, and Billington's adventures continue, taking her first into the writers' organisation, PEN, eventually as President, and then into the dark world of British prisons, as she becomes Associate Editor and regular contributor to the national newspaper for prisons, Inside Time. A Writer's Story is a collection of memories, told with wit and understanding, which not only reveals the inspiration behind many of Billington's works of fiction but offers insight into the art and nature of writing.