Sally Hepworth had nothing better to do when she went on maternity leave before her first child was born, so she decided she would write a book.
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"He came about two weeks late so I had six weeks to get into it before I had the baby. I thought I would need something to do while I was home with my newborn. It all went fine until I had the baby and then, yes, it all fell apart."
The book, Love Like the French, was finally published in 2014.
Pregnant with her second child, Hepworth began another book. Her children Oscar and Eloise are now five and two and the book, The Secrets of Midwives, has just hit the shelves. Her three babies.
Hepworth laughs when she thinks about how naive she was at the start of her writing career. Even now, with an another book on the way, she admits to finding snatches of time at the dining table, or at the kitchen bench with a child on her hip, so she can write.
"That's the reality of being a working mum, a working writer," she says.
"I have days when they're in kinder and at creche, but if you've got words to get on the page you just have to keep writing."
Hepworth took advantage of the fact she was pregnant to do plenty of research for The Secrets of Midwives. She asked lots of questions of midwives at her check-ups, read fiction and non-fiction accounts of midwives and birth.
"Two of my favourite books are The Birth House by Ami McKay and MIdwives by Chris Bohjalian. I just gobbled them up. The book of the Call the Midwife series, which ended up on television, had just come out and I read the memoir of Patsy Harmon, Arms Wide Open, an amazing story."
Hepworth was also able to source videos of the birth process to watch.
"I wanted to get a good visual understanding of what it looked like from the midwife's perspectives," she says.
"My husband got used to coming from home from work to the tune of a woman in advanced labour. I'm sure he thought it was me on a couple of occasions!"
The Secrets of Midwives follows the story of three generations from the same family, all midwives. Floss, the grandmother, worked in England back in the 1950s, wise and all no-nonsense; her daughter Grace, basket-weaving hippie, who rejoices in the magic of birth; and Neva, Grace's daughter, who doesn't even particularly like babies, but loves mothers.
Neva has a secret that will force all three women to think about their past and their future. The story is told from the perspective of all three, and their stories intertwine.
"I wanted to tell a multi-generational story … tell these stories alongside each other … how birth has changed, how little it has changed," says Hepworth.
"It's such a wonderful, beautiful thing to create a life, but it can be scary. So for a book, it was an ideal theme. There is lots of potential for things to go wrong and people love to experience a bit of excitement and fear in fiction because it's a safe place to experience it."
Hepworth, 34, who lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children, worked in event management and human resources before she turned to writing. The next book is done, The Things We Keep, about a couple who are both suffering from early-onset dementia, and she's been asked to write another by her publishers, St Martins, based in the US.
The Secrets of Midwives is based in the US and that was a little disappointing from an Australian author with so much potential.
She's upfront enough to admit that she did that so she could sell books in the US market.
"But birth is such a universal story," Hepworth says.
* The Secrets of Midwives, by Sally Hepworth. Macmillan. $29.99.
