The heroine of Ignoring Gravity, Rose Haldane, is confident about her identity. She pulls the same face as her grandfather when she has to do something she doesn’t want to do, she knows her DNA is the same as his. Except it isn’t: because Rose is adopted and doesn’t know it.An addict of television programmes about family history and adoption reunion, Who Do You Think You Are? and Long Lost Family, Sandra has long been fascinated by identity and what makes ‘us’, ‘us’. “Is it our genes, the influence of our parents, our experiences or education, our interests? I became a journalist but I was born on a dairy farm. I don’t remember ever deciding I wanted to write, I just did. Where did that urge come from?”
The more she pondered this question, the more she wondered how people who don’t know their family history can ever achieve a sense of who they are. “And that led me to adoption. I researched late-discovery adoption and the more I read the more I knew that Rose Haldane would discover as an adult that she was adopted as a baby. Future novels in the series will examine adoption for the point of view of other people in the adoption mix. For example, the next book Connectedness tells the story of a birth mother who regrets losing her daughter. The third, Sweet Joy, is the story of a baby left on a doorstep.”
