Before she wrote her debut novel, The Names, Florence Knapp was already well known as a heritage craftsperson. Twenty years ago, with young children at home, she began a sewing blog that focused on English paper piecing, a specialised type of hand-sewing that drew a devoted community of fellow makers. Florence wrote extensively on the craft, lending her expertise to books and magazines. But all the while, she was experimenting with fiction on the side. In 2022, Florence spent six months working on the first draft of The Names, a novel that tracks the fallout of domestic violence, and the ordinary decisions that can shape a life. “For me,” says Florence, “the actual violence is not the main point of the book. The point is how people survive awful things, and then go on to heal.”
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What are you having for breakfast this morning, Florence?
I have to tell you something.
Okay great. What is it?
I never eat breakfast. Sometimes I don’t eat at all until around 2pm.
Come on.
It’s true. You know how you’re always told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day? I read somewhere that, actually, that was said by someone high up at Kellogg’s. I don’t really crave eating first thing, whereas if I leave it until around 2 o’clock, that’s my perfect time. I feel exactly right when I do that.
What gets you out of bed?
Since the light changed, I’ve been getting up around 6 o’clock in a way that feels fairly effortless - in the winter that’s not the case; I like to stay in my cocoon. But lately I tend to go downstairs and sit in a window seat with my husband, and chat through what’s ahead for the day. We’ve just had that window seat put in, and it feels so much more like you’re part of the garden now. We watch the plants change and see what else is happening. There’s so much life going on.
My children are grown up now - they’re 21 and 23 - and so it’s suddenly like we’ve reached this new stage in our lives where you can get up when you like, and there’s no one else to take responsibility for. I’d actually felt really sad to say goodbye to the last stage, because I absolutely loved it, and in so many ways it was my dream. But now I’m discovering that this time has gorgeous things about it too.
When your kids were young, that’s when you started your first career in sewing, wasn’t it?
Yes, that came about organically when they were really little. I’d always made things, and I started coming across crafting blogs around 2002. And it was like, oh my goodness, there are all of these people who are my people, and the internet was providing a way of meeting them. So I started writing a sewing blog, just for fun, and then I started writing patterns, and wrote for magazines, and then I was asked to contribute to a book about sewing for the Victoria & Albert museum. I also wrote my own book about English paper piecing.
Can you explain what English paper piecing is?
It’s a traditional method of hand sewing. You work with all sorts of different shapes and wrap fabric around them, then either sew or temporarily glue the fabric to the paper, so that it gives you a framework to sew the pieces together, and you sew them together with a whip stitch. When you’re finished, you take the papers out, although when people were originally doing this, they didn’t take the papers out because it gave an extra layer of insulation.
How did you end up doing this traditional craft?
I’m not very good with wool or yarn. I just get in a tangle. But that thing that knitters have, of being able to knit wherever they are, I really craved that. Sitting at a sewing machine feels quite antisocial in comparison, especially when you have a young family. So when I came across English paper piecing and realised that you can just sit and do it around people in the same way that you can knit, I wanted to do that.
I don’t like the label “introvert,” because I think we all contain multitudes, but I suppose I have quite introverted tendencies, and working with your hands can make it easier to be in a crowd. It creates a private space in your brain, where even though 95% of you is with other people, there’s 5% of you doing something completely quiet, just between your brain and your hands.
Are a lot of people still practising English paper piecing?
Yes, and because it’s been done for hundreds of years, it feels like in addition to the large modern community doing it, you have this connection with the past. And that just feels really, really lovely, the fact that it isn’t anything new. It’s just that a baton has been handed to you, and you’re keeping that going.
One of the things I love the most is when you go to a museum and see an English paper piece quilt, and you can see the maker’s stitches. When you see the imperfections in those stitches, you feel like you can almost see the person sitting there, sewing.
How long have you been sewing?
Since I was a child. It’s funny though, when I look back at the things I was doing right at the start of the blog, they were awful. But the quilting community is so generous. You can talk about your failures, and people will just encourage you and give you tips. It was a really great way of learning amongst and alongside people.
Were you always writing too, or did that start later?
I was always writing on the side. My husband was clearing out the garage recently, and he came over and handed me this folder. Inside was a manuscript for a novel that I’d been working on in 1999, when we’d just left university and had our first flat together.
I feel a need to write, and it has often been fiction, but it doesn’t have to be. Writing the blog, or having a Substack, or writing an Instagram post - those things also feel as though they serve the same need. It’s a quiet form of communication, isn’t it? It’s having a connection with other people.
When did you start working on The Names?
It was in 2022, and it took me five or six months to finish the first draft. And then I put it in a drawer for three months and let it sit, then came back to it and started to rework it.
It felt very quick. None of my earlier novels, which weren’t published, have come that quickly. I think the narrative structure of The Names really helped me, because you revisit the characters every seven years, and my roadmap was laid out. I had these stepping stones and always knew where I was going, which felt like a safe place to write from. I never hit that boggy middle patch, like I have in the other novels I’ve written.
Were your writing days long?
When I write, I tend to write very quickly and in a flurry, but I’m not consistent. I am not someone who gets to my desk at nine o’clock and writes for four hours. That is not me. If I tried to do that, I would just stop and down my tools. I might spend, say, seven or eight days writing really intensively, and then put the book to one side and maybe not write for another two weeks. And during those two weeks off, I’d be thinking, ‘Am I still writing this novel? Will I go back to it?’
During the time when I’m not writing, I always assume that I’m not thinking about the novel. Then suddenly I’ll wake up one day and be ready to go back to it, and I’ll realise that in the background, I was working out all the things I needed to be working out. And so when you sit down to write again, you have so much more clarity about what you need to be doing. It felt like a helpful way to write, also, I suppose, because some of the scenes in my book are quite emotionally intense. It was quite welcome to have some recovery time.
What led to you writing about domestic violence?
About six months before I started writing The Names, when it was still the pandemic, a woman from a domestic violence charity came to speak to a women’s group that I belong to. While she was talking, I was struggling not to cry, and I felt like I couldn’t cry because this was her job and her reality every day.
When you’re learning about domestic violence, I think there’s always a part of you that thinks, why would anyone stay? Even though you hear all of the reasons why women don’t leave. And when I walked alongside Cora in this novel, every time she would try to do something to change her situation, Gordon had a road block to put up. By the end of it, I felt as though I understood why someone stays, and why they might believe that it’s the safest choice for them.
I was drawn to write about it for those reasons, but also, the ripple effect of violence plays a huge part in this novel. I wanted to write about how people can heal from those situations, and how it goes on to affect their lives and the people that they become, but also how they’re able to go on and lead meaningful lives—how someone actually recovers and remakes themselves after those experiences.
The narrative splinters into three storylines after Cora, a mother in an abusive marriage, decides what to call her infant son: Bear, Julian, or Gordon. Of all the characters in this family, why did you decide to follow the secondary effect of violence on Cora’s young son?
In order to understand what shapes someone as a person, I think you have to understand their childhood. In this scenario, we could follow this character, this boy, right from birth into adulthood, and see the dynamic of the family that forms around him. We can see most clearly how he’s been affected by the changes in the story.
Was there any part of the writing process that wasn’t fluid?
When we edited the book, I actually added 10,000 words. Beforehand, I’d felt that I was finished, but once we got started, I realised that there was more work to do to make the characters fully realised people. And the Epilogue: I cannot tell you how many times I rewrote it during editing. I really struggled with it, and got to the point where I was just thinking, I cannot rewrite this another time. But now, in the place where we ended up, I feel like it was really worth going through that pain barrier, because it does do what it needs to do.
For what it’s worth, I loved the Epilogue. I don’t think it gives too much away to say that it ends by suggesting that Cora could just as easily have called her son “Hugh,” after her late father, and spun an entirely different story.
That ending was always there. To me, the three storylines for Bear, Julian, and Gordon feel a bit like the Very Hungry Caterpillar chomping through loads of different options, and then when you get to Hugh, it feels like the day when the Caterpillar gets to start again with a nice, green leaf.
Are you working on anything new?
I really want to, but I feel like I probably won’t be able to start writing again until the publicity tour for The Names has finished. This part of publishing, particularly the standing up in front of people and travelling, is so far out of my comfort zone. I had my daughter when I was 23, and since then, I’ve always worked from home. It’s felt almost like being taken out of mothballs to suddenly be going into office environments and having meetings and public speaking. It’s been a real opening up of my life, but also quite an anxious year, because it’s required bits of my personality that I wasn’t sure even existed.
Once the publicity is over, then I hope I’ll go into total hibernation mode, completely step back, and become reabsorbed in another novel. I hope so.
Any comfort reads on your nightstand?
I think I’ve read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan four times. There’s so much quietness in her books, but also so much impact. She’s a magician, the way that she pulls it off. On the nonfiction side, I don’t think I would have written The Names without Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, because it was so clarifying. He essentially says that you have time to focus on three things in your life, and you have to clear away everything else and accept that you can’t do it all. And when I read that, I thought, I really do want to write a novel. That has to be one of my things.
Florence wears the TOAST Lofty Alpaca Blend Knitted Poncho and Lia Garment Dyed Boat Neck Tee.
The Names by Florence Knapp is available now.
Words by Jo Rodgers.
Photography by Aloha Bonser Shaw.
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