Past Life Ponderings

 

What if your life was somebody’s past? What echoes would you leave in their soul? Could they be the answers you need right now?

These are the questions that Roz explores in My Memories of a Future Life. 

Who are your main characters, and who might they have been in a past life? 

The narrator is Carol, a musician. All her life she’s been a pianist, but her body is now in rebellion. Whenever she plays she has terrible, debilitating pain, but doctors can’t find out why. The piano is everything to her. She has sacrificed a normal life to build a career playing classical concerts. It’s her one constant, where she’s always turned when friends fell away and love affairs went wrong. It is the way she comes alive. If she cannot play the piano, she literally cannot see a future.

Her flatmate, Jerry Williams, also has a desperate problem. He has panic attacks so severe they have put him in the cardiac ward. His luck changes when he goes to a stage hypnotist, who helps him discover that in a previous life he was killed by Jack the Ripper. Carol is sceptical, but when Jerry is cured, she starts to wonder if hypnosis could help her. But she doesn’t believe in reincarnation, so when she goes to a hypnotist she asks him to take her to the future.

Initially she intends to drop into her own life a couple of years on, hoping for reassurance that this crisis will end. But instead she rides into another life. Thus begins a bizarre and unsettling journey. 

Carol’s hypnotist, Gene Winter, is a disturbing and intelligent man. He’s ferally gifted at coaxing people into trances. People ask me if he’s based on anyone in real life, but he isn’t. I don’t know where he came from, except that he burst out of the story. His hold over Carol becomes one of the central fascinations of the novel.

Who might you have been in a former life? 

In my previous life I’d have made things. If I couldn’t create I’d explode, so if something recognisable continues down the ages that’s the trait I’m sure I’d keep. Maybe, if circumstances allowed and I was able to get educated, I’d have been a poet, writer or musician. Perhaps I’d have built cathedrals - but I might have been just as happy with chairs. 

However, if I answer honestly I’d say I can’t have lived before. I’ve never felt any of the signs. I’ve always had a firm sense of my identity, of what fits with me and what doesn’t. I’m sure I’d have noticed a spooky draw to a place or a past era.

But I’m fascinated by reincarnation stories. They really get me. Vertigo, Somewhere In Time, On A Clear Day You Can See For Ever, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Double Life of Veronique. Okay, the last two are parallel lives rather than reincarnation, but they play with this same sense. Reincarnation is a wonder, a way we try to understand this unkillable idea that we all contain far more than the literal and explained.

I’d always wondered, could you turn it around? We can’t all be old souls. And I played with these ideas in my novel.

About Roz

You’ll have seen my novels on the bestseller list. You might even have read them. But you won’t have seen my name. My first published books were ghostwritten for famous authors. Now I’m coming out of the shadows with novels of my own. I write stories with a nose for the unusual - magic realism meets psychological thriller. My Memories of a Future Life is available in weightless e-editions and also in print here. 

Aside from that I’m a writing coach and book doctor. I have a set of books called Nail Your Novel, a blog of the same name and I run a series where I celebrate writers who are inspired by music - The Undercover Soundtrack.

Thank you, Roz, for your past life ponderings. Learn more about Roz here.