A story of separation and return: Clare Adam on crafting ‘Love Forms’

Accompanying the Booker Prize long-listed novels of this year, Clare Adam's Love Forms (Faber, 2025) offers an enthralling tale of Dawn, the protagonist of the novel, who is in a lifelong search for her long-lost illegitimate daughter. Although Dawn continues her strides in life from getting education, marriage, kids and divorce, her unyielding quest searching for her daughter remains undying. With Dawn's travels, the story also keeps moving to different counties from Trinidad and Tobago to Venezuela and later to England.

Clare Adam has rare prowess of delineating these different geographies, where the novel is set, in a compelling manner. On behalf of The Daily Star, I spoke to the author about the varied stands of the novel and her journey of becoming a novelist.

I particularly love Wiliam Trevor, John McGahern, and Claire Keegan. Americans: there are many, but I like to mention Arthur Miller and Marilynne Robinson. The next category I'm going to call the Nobels, since that's what they have in common.

What was the igniting spark that inspired you to write Love Forms?

It's not easy to pinpoint exactly what it was—it all starts as a bit of a primordial soup, to be honest. But somewhere along the line I began to have an image or an idea about a mother and daughter who'd been separated, and were trying to find their way back to each other. I didn't know who they were or what their circumstances were, or why they'd been separated; I had to discover all that through the process of writing.

It was only through multiple drafts, working through the story from all possible angles, that I figured out who Dawn was—a woman from a middle-class Trinidadian family who became pregnant at 16. The circumstances of the separation emerged gradually: being sent away to Venezuela to have the baby in secret, the adoption, Dawn's move to England. These weren't things I knew at the beginning. The writing process itself revealed the story to me.

It wasn't until I wrote the last line of the last draft that I fully understood what the book was about.

Does the protagonist, Dawn, carry any resemblance to your own life?

Dawn's story is not my story, but there are elements I drew from my own experience. Like Dawn, I left Trinidad and settled in England, and when you move like that, there's loss. The Trinidad of my childhood is different from Trinidad today—things have changed. Going back can be difficult when the place has changed so much.

But Dawn's specific trauma—becoming pregnant at 16, being sent away, losing her child—that's not drawn from personal experience.

Do you think deserting the illegitimate child was the only choice that Dawn's parents had because of social unacceptance?  Or was it their love for Dawn that they wanted a good unstained prosperous future for her?

I think it was both, really—and that's what makes it complicated and painful. I think Dawn's parents genuinely loved her and wanted to protect her future. In their minds, if word got out that she'd had a baby at 16, she would be sort of "ruined"—no respectable man would marry her and her prospects would be destroyed. They were acting out of love, trying to save her from shame and social rejection. But at the same time, they were also protecting themselves, their own reputation, their standing in the community. What's tragic is that in trying to protect Dawn, they inadvertently may have caused a different kind of harm: the lifelong trauma of separation, felt by both mother and child.

The narrator in the novel most often keeps unrolling her memories and her past. As a novelist, how do you look at the idea of "memories and the past" for fiction writing?

Memory is fascinating for fiction because it's not a simple record of what happened; it's part of the character's story of themselves and it's susceptible to change over time. In Dawn's case, there are gaps. Trauma is part of the reason for that, perhaps, but I didn't think of it in that way when I was writing, and I don't think that's how she would think about it. Dawn is always conscious of the fact that her daughter may be out there in the world somewhere, and that she (her daughter) may not have had a good life. Dawn is a very reluctant narrator for that reason. She doesn't want to make herself the centre of the story, or to talk about her own pain, or use words like 'trauma'. And yet she has to try to put her fragments of memory together—because she's trying to find her daughter, firstly because she's sort of preparing to give an account of herself to the daughter she may one day meet, and also, just for herself, as a way of understanding her life.

Do you miss your homeland Trinidad and Tobago where Love Forms begins? Does it reflect your own longing to return to your homeland?

I left Trinidad at 18 and I've been living in the UK for over 20 years now. For most of my life, I went back to Trinidad regularly—every year, at least. But a few years ago my parents left Trinidad and moved to London, and mentally, for me, it feels like a big shift.

It's a strange position to be in—having a "home" which is far away and kind of belongs to the past, one that becomes less and less accessible as each year passes—and yet not feeling that the place where you currently live is fully "home" either. But this is a common experience now. There are so many of us who live far from where we grew up. And it helps that I'm not alone in this—many people understand this feeling.

Your depiction of the places is so exquisitely compelling that the reader may witness everything happening so realistically before one's eyes. I would like to know from you the importance of this craft of novel writing.

Thank you. On craft, I offer you this, from Flannery O'Connor: the meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning. Give your reader an experience, in other words.

Who are some of the authors or what are some books that have influenced your writing?

Everyone I read is an influence, but I do find myself drawn to Indian or Indian-diaspora authors: V. S. Naipaul, Rohinton Mistry, Akhil Sharma; and I love Vivek Shanbhag, who's also published by Faber in the UK. As for Irish authors, I particularly love Wiliam Trevor, John McGahern, and Claire Keegan. Americans: there are many, but I like to mention Arthur Miller and Marilynne Robinson. The next category I'm going to call the Nobels, since that's what they have in common, but I assure you that I was reading them before they won their prizes: Kazuo Ishiguro, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Doris Lessing, and JM Coetzee. Naipaul belongs in the Nobel category too, of course: I always find myself mentioning his name multiple times when I talk about my writing.

Mohd. Farhan teaches English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He often writes on books, and interviews authors for various reputed English dailies including The Hindu, Hindustan Times, and Hindu Business Line, among others.