THERE'S just one word to describe the scene outside author Maggie O'Farrell's London home - "dreich".
But she adds: "I was just talking to my mum on the phone and she says the weather in North Berwick is absolutely beautiful."
There is fondness in her voice as she mentions her home town, but it's a very long way from North Berwick to the Big Smoke in more ways than just miles.
Maggie, once a slightly awkward 12-year-old "outsider" at North Berwick school, is now among Britain's best-selling authors, an award-winning novelist whose three books have all achieved critical acclaim and blockbusting sales.
Her life, which once revolved around, the slightly claustrophobic community of an East Lothian seaside resort and summers spent at the outdoor swimming pool, now takes her to book signings, hob-nobbing - she stresses that it's only very occasionally - with the London glitterati and mingling with fellow household-name writers.
All of that and she's a dab hand at changing nappies, too. Maggie added that particular string to her bow 19 months ago, when son Saul entered the world. She very quickly discovered her newborn had his own agenda - one that doesn't sound conducive to allowing mum time to create best-selling novels.
"He was a horrific sleeper," she confesses. "He's good now - asleep by 7.30pm - but for the first six months he just didn't sleep. I found it really, really hard."
Just as well she'd already finished her third and latest novel, The Distance Between Us. Published last January to the same kind of praise that accompanied her first two works, it provided her growing legion of fans with another tense, slightly dark and highly evocative page-turner set in a small Scottish village.
Like its predecessors, the Betty Trask Award-winning After You'd Gone and her second novel, My Lover's Lover, it delves into the complexities of modern relationships, played out against locations anyone with even a vague knowledge of life in the Lothians would find familiar - such as the quaint Italian cafe Maggie puts at the heart of the novel that could only really have been inspired by Luca's in Musselburgh.
She is clearly keen to put her little corner of Lothian on the literary map. After You'd Gone was partly set in North Berwick and followed the twisting and turning relationships of a middle sister with a literary background who heads to London and falls in love with a Jewish man.
None of which is exactly a million miles away from Maggie's own life. Nor is the experience of another of her characters in The Distance Between Us, who falls into a coma after a mysterious brain virus: Maggie was just eight when she was struck by just such a virus which kept her off school for a year and which, even today, can affect her balance.
Drawing on such familiar territory is only natural, she says, but is quick to point out that her books are not autobiographical. Writing out her own life would, she says, be boring. That said, she admits she can't escape the impact her life and her home have on her writing. "As a teenager we are at our most susceptible to influences, but I couldn't live today in a place like North Berwick," she says.
"Being a teenager in North Berwick was very frustrating.
"At every opportunity I'd be on the train to Waverley. When I was a teenager, everyone knew you, knew what you were doing. You couldn't walk down a street without bumping into someone who knew your mum."
Now 32, she is a self-confessed "city girl" having arrived in London ten years ago via Hong Kong and a series of dead-end jobs with the intention of staying for just a year.
Yet even now, she regards North Berwick as her real home, returning every couple of months to visit her parents and her two sisters.
THERE were other places she could have chosen to regard as "home". Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, her family later moved to Wales before her father Patrick's work as an economics lecturer took the family - mum Susan, Maggie and her sisters, Catherine and Bridget, to North Berwick.
"I was about 12 years old," Maggie recalls. "It wasn't that easy settling in and I had been a bit upset to leave our home just outside Cardiff. In retrospect, it was good we moved - the comprehensive in Wales was terrifying! I'd probably have ended up pregnant at 15 or something."
She describes herself as something of an outsider at school, a fan of indie band The Cure who spent much of her spare time shut in her bedroom reading challenging works by Albert Camus and writing the diaries she started at the age of six and still keeps today.
So perhaps it shouldn't have been too surprising to anyone when she won a place at Cambridge reading English. She says: "I didn't really like it. It was a bit of a shock to the system - going from a small comprehensive school in North Berwick to Cambridge. I messed up my finals and I thought I'd be in big trouble at home."
She was in more trouble with her family when she suddenly decided to travel to Hong Kong to teach English. "My mother was really angry with me - I just got on a plane and went out there. I'd never really been anywhere - my family are not big travellers, they've hardly left Scotland. I thought I'd go to Hong Kong because at least a lot of people there would speak English."
It was there she found inspiration for her first book. "I got the idea for After You'd Gone there. That said, I didn't start writing properly for another two years, until a boyfriend's mother gave me a computer. I'd never used a computer before but as soon as I had it, I was flying away."
The result was her first novel, described by enthusiastic critics as "beautifully constructed, unashamedly passionate" and "a first-class trip across the borders of the mind". Others talk of her special ability to combine emotional, contemporary fiction which is both literary and commercial - several levels above popular "chick lit" - appealing to broad generations of readers.
Not that Maggie tries to pay too much attention to what the critics say.
She says: "I read some reviews after the first book, but now I just put my head in the sand. When I read them then sat down to write, there'd be these little voices in my head saying: 'Maggie O'Farrell writes this' or 'is concerned with that'. I found myself writing to fit what they'd said. "I'm also chicken," she laughs. "My boyfriend reads them and he gives me a rough idea if they are good, bad or really rubbish!"
The good ones have far outweighed the bad. And it's not surprising that Maggie's work, with its focus on tangled relationships, dark plots - the genre is described as domestic gothic - spanning often far flung locations, has attracted the interest of film-makers.
After You'd Gone has just been snapped up by the makers of Calendar Girls, which starred Helen Mirren and Julie Walters.
Maggie has no interest, however, in "doing a JK" and retaining control of her characters. "They could well cast someone I think is wrong for a major part and, yes, you do often see films which bear no similarity to the book, but there's no point beating yourself up about it.
"Sometimes you're asked if you want to write the script but I can't imagine anything worse. I'd cut off my hand before I went back to it."
Instead she prefers to look to the future. Despite sleepless nights thanks to the son she has with fellow author William Sutcliffe - and her thoughts turning to having another - Maggie has still managed to complete her fourth novel.
"The first draft is finished but I have a superstition - I like to put it away for a couple of months and ignore it, forget about it for a bit," she explains. "It helps to give it a bit of distance, then I go back and often just rip it to pieces."
And what can Maggie's fans expect from her fourth novel? Again, it seems there is no escaping her Scottish roots.
"It's set in Edinburgh," she reveals. "And it's partly historical. But that's all I'm saying.
"Let's just say that talking about it too soon is another one of my superstitions."
Edinburgh evening News Feb 2005
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