Patrick Gale pauses to reflect on his trade, then announces: “Most novelists are mentally ill.” The 46-year-old, whose Notes From An Exhibition is sailing high in the sales charts, laughs as he says this, but he is mortally serious. “Writing is a form of willed mental illness, a willed psychosis,” he explains. “Each novel gets harder because you know what you are going to go through again.”

This is no luvvie-diva self-dramatisation: Gale, who lives near Land's End with his farmer boyfriend, Aidan, saw his early life scarred by accident, psychological breakdown and death. Such experiences are central to his latest novel, a work that has helped to take the subject of bipolar disorder into the mainstream. It is shortlisted for the Richard & Judy Book Club's “best read of the year award”, which is announced on Wednesday.

The novel relates the life of Rachel, an artist with bipolar disorder (or “manic depression” in old currency), who is both wonderful and terrible to her gentle husband Antony and her four children. As a young English postgrad, Antony rescues her in Oxford when she is pregnant and suicidal. His calm Quakerism makes marriage her haven and her abstract painting wins acclaim. But after Rachel's death, Antony discovers the traumas of her upbringing.

“The strange thing about odd childhoods is that they seem perfectly normal to the child at the time,” says Gale. And he should know. “When I was 10 years old, it was an annnus horribilis. My mother should have died in a car crash we had. It was the point at which emotionally I became a writer. We were driving along a country road in an old Morris 1000 when two teenagers came the other way too fast around a bend and we collided head-on. My mother, by that evening, was paralysed down one side. She lost the power of speech. She had a brain-stem injury and was hospitalised for a year.”

In line with the well-meaning conventions of the time, Gale's family tried to protect the boy by returning him to “normalcy” as quickly as possible. In his case, this meant being hustled back to boarding school. Thanks to his precocious musicality, Gale had won a scholarship at the age of 8 to Winchester College's cathedral choir school, Pilgrim's. “I got an extraordinary postcard at school, which I assumed was from an infant. But it was from my mother; her attempt to write. It was quite traumatic. I got a very strong sense of how frail we are.”

“I erected a glass wall around myself”

Gale's world was also sundered by the fact that one of his older siblings, whom he adored, quite separately had a nervous breakdown. “The two things completely destabilised my sense of family as a stable unit. I suppose the initial revelation, though, was being left at boarding school in the first place. That was the point at which I noticed my parents were able to fail. I stopped expecting anything of them at all.” Instead, he says: “I discovered the joys of fiction, I erected a kind of glass shell around myself as a coping mechanism, standing back from the chaos around me and narrating it.”

His family were hardly disappointing under-achievers, though. Gale was born the youngest of four on the Isle of Wight, where his father was prison governor at Camp Hill. His grand-father had been the governor at nearby Parkhurst. The family moved to London, where his father ran Wandsworth Prison, then to Winchester. But there was more family pain to come when Gale was in his last year at Oxford University: his older brother Matthew was killed in a car crash.

It is typical, perhaps, of his survivor's instincts that Gale speaks only of the positive elements of this resounding trauma. “It was a chance to take on elements of the dead person's personality, as a living memorial to them. My brother was very practical, good at stuff, where I wasn't. I made myself stop being lily-livered. I got myself a power drill and learnt how to use it.” More profoundly, he adds: “It just made me step out of all that twentysomething foolishness. It's what made me get on and write. Otherwise I may have just wasted the first five years of my twenties.”

Gale could indeed have become just a dilettantish victim of his own varied artistic talents: as well as being a gifted chorister, his good looks had won him an entrée into acting at Oxford, where he appeared alongside Hugh Grant and Imogen Stubbs. He also fancied himself as a literary talent. But instead of dabbling, he dedicated himself to getting a novel published, writing it in his three-hour breaks while working as a singing waiter at an all-night restaurant. His first two novels were published at the same time, when he was 24. This twin-pronged launch got him noticed, though he says it only happened because the publisher was having a clear-out.

Gale freely admits that his work increasingly mines his family background, and this latest novel is no exception. “I have really drawn on my adored older sibling and their breakdown,” he says. Despite this, he is paradoxically anxious to protect his sibling's identity.

A story with a happy ending

For once, though, this is a Gale story with a happy ending. “My sibling is absolutely brilliant now and reaching the top of their profession... a tribute to the power of finding the right psychotherapist.” Gale seems entranced by the process of psychotherapy, though wary of it, too. “We have an unhealthy habit of distancing our childhoods from our selves. As a novelist, you write about emotions and relationships and you kid yourself that you are making it up. But really you realise that it is therapy for free.

“If anyone asks what I would do instead of writing, I say that I would train to be a psychotherapist. It is completely fascinated by motivation, what makes us grow into the adults we grow into. I have never had therapy, despite having good reason to go. In fact my agent worries about writers going to therapy; it might cure us of the need to write.” Gale tends to joke and giggle a good deal; despite all this misery, he is lively, jocular company. Book-writing seems to exorcise his gloom efficiently.

But why, when he comes from a staunchly Anglican family, did he make the male lead in his latest novel a Quaker? “I had this dreadfully unstable woman in the book, so I had to find a man to anchor her.I came to the idea of having this Quaker, unjudgmental, who would be a perfect balancing figure,” he says. “I had known quite a few Quakers in my life, but I had never been to a meeting before I started researching the book. Then I went to a great number.

“I definitely have a spiritual sense, but for a long time I tried to ignore it. I come from a strong Anglican tradition; my grandfather and great-grandfather were priests, and my father was in that tradition of public service in the prison service. I think they were all hoping that I would become a priest, in the old tradition of what you did with the gay child of the family. But I am hugely impatient with the C of E and its puerile attitude towards sexuality. It was very interesting to spend time with the Quakers, to see how advanced they are.”

Getting his religious fix

But Gale says he won't be taking up Quakerism, for family reasons of another sort: “Aidan, my partner, is strongly atheist, so it would cause ructions to start going to church. But I get a big religious fix each year from being the chairman of the St Endellion Summer Festival, which is held annually at Collegiate Church of St Endelienta in Port Isaac, North Cornwall.” Gale continues to perform music, as a singer, pianist and cellist. “I think the cello is closest to the human voice. There is something incredibly immediate about the emotions it expresses. I practise at least every other day. I don't play professionally, but in local amateur orchestras.

“I am in the choir at the St Endellion festival. It's our 50th anniversary this year. In some ways the festival was why I came to live in Cornwall. I sang there as a child and stored the memory in my mind. When I got some money from my first novels, I bought a house in Camelford. I have been moving west ever since. I'm the most westerly novelist in England.”

Gale spends his days working on words but also helping with his partner's farm. He even lists his main ambition as “perfecting the art of reversing a tractor and trailer around a corner”. He adds: “I have an amazing work-life balance here, fantastically healthy. Writing is very unhealthy, but I write out of doors. I sit in a field whenever I can.”

Notes From An Exhibition (HarperCollins, £7.99) is available from Times Books First for £7.59, free p&p. Call 0870 1608080 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst . Richard&Judy, Channel 4, weekdays at 5pm

What is bipolar disorder?

Bipolar disorder formerly called manic depression, causes extreme mood swings.

Symptoms People with bipolar disorder experience euphoric highs, the so-called manic period, where they feel capable of doing anything. They also suffer deep lows, characterised by intense feelings of depression and despair.

Some sufferers have long periods of stability between their moods, sometimes years. Some people experience prolonged high and lows, while others have more frequent mood swings.

Who does it affect? About one person in 100 is affected at some point in their life. Men and women are equally affected.

Causes Bipolar disorder is thought to run in families. Although it is not caused by stress, it can be triggered by a stressful experience, or physical illness.

Treatments Mood-stabilisers such as Lithium are often used, as are antidepressants. Non-drug treatments are also used, such as mood-monitoring, which teaches people to recognise when their moods are changing and how to cope.

For more information contact the Royal College of Psychiatrists, www.rcpsych.ac.uk ; or Mind, the mental health charity, www.mind.org.uk

Kate Wighton

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