1. Mishearing a nun

I WAS on a retreat in the 70s and we had to write down something you liked about another person and then talk about it. I thought the nun said I was very graceful and I could not believe it as I was a fat wee girl and thought I was very clumsy. She said when I walked into a room I just lit it up and went on at some length like that and it just blew me away.

It really changed my life as it changed my view of myself and opened up worlds that I didn’t think were open to a fat wee lassie. It also made me much less prejudiced about other people as it made me realise what was superficial.

At the end of that retreat we took the sheets of paper away with us. I found mine years later and saw that she had written that I was cheerful, so I can’t thank her enough for having poor diction.

2. Getting in to university

I LEFT school when I was 16 or 17 then took night classes at Langside College in Glasgow to get my Highers. I was desperate to get into university and was accepted by Glasgow University to do law when I was 21.

When I heard I’d been accepted I could not speak for days. Then I told everyone I met and people were so pleased for me. I was working in the kitchens at Gartnavel Hospital and felt like I’d won the lottery. It really felt life changing.

A lot of my cousins did law because we were the first generation to go to university and felt we should do something socially useful.

You didn’t study English because you had to come out and get a job and do something useful as a tribute to all those who made it possible for you to go to university.

3. Garnethill being published

I HEARD it was to be published in 1996, although it did not come out until 1998 because publishing takes forever. I was doing a PhD at Strathclyde on the ascription of mental illness to females within the criminal justice system, which I thought was fascinating, but when academics discover amazing stuff they spend the rest of their lives trying to disseminate the information.

I was interested in the narrative paradigm which is that if you put complex ideas in a narrative that people can engage with they can absorb the ideas. I saw there was a job for a features writer at Take A Break magazine and I thought that would be a good way to disseminate feminist ideas. I applied but never even got an interview, so I wrote a novel instead.

I loved crime writing and sometimes literary writing feels quite exclusive, so I decided it should be a crime novel. At the time, a lot of crime writing was incredibly right wing with a lot of tropes. There were lots of dead female sex workers and the police would shoot people instead of arresting them and giving them a trial.

I wrote the first 80 pages then got quite stuck as it was much harder than I thought it was going to be, so I went to a course at the Women’s Library on how to write a detective novel and that really helped. I sent the 80 pages off to publishers and one of them asked to see the rest. I wrote it and sent it off. They had it for months then said they would publish it. I couldn’t sleep for a week as I was really shocked.

4. Living in Paris

MY dad was an engineer working in the oil industry. At that time if men in the industry got a job abroad, the wife and children would stay at home, but my mum decided she wasn’t going to stay in East Kilbride, which was quite adventurous and fearless of her – as well as being quite unusual.

We lived in a caravan in Holland and tiny flats in Amsterdam, then moved to Paris when I was eight. We stayed there until I was 11 and everybody used to come to visit us in the summer holidays, so we were aware of how lucky we were to be in Paris. I think for all of us it really formed our identity as Europeans and as people who felt they had a place anywhere in the world. I think it was quite unusual for working-class Glaswegians to have such an international outlook.

Where we lived felt as if it was part of a much bigger history. There were medieval walls, German pillboxes left from the Second World War, Napoleon’s Malmaison Palace was very close by and the Vietnam peace talks were taking place across the road from our house. Nixon was there and we could see fleets of limos going by.

I think living in Paris had a long-lasting effect for all of us and for me particularly as it always made me feel it was all right to be different. It made me a bit detached which is fantastic for a writer.

5. Having kids

I HAD my first son in 2003 then the next one in 2005. I always wanted to have kids and it made me recommit to being a writer. I had been so lucky getting published with my first book and afterwards everyone was really kind and gave me work. When I had kids I realised it could all just disappear as I was self-employed, so I worked like I had never worked in my life before.

Sometimes I did not leave the house for days at a time and I would get up at five to write. I became incredibly time-efficient not because I am a genius but because I needed to. I cut a lot of stuff out of my life that I really did not like, such as worrying about things and being concerned about what other people thought of me and going to parties that I did not want to go to.

If you are self-employed and have responsibility for either children or parents and want to keep working then you have to shave off all the flummery. I didn’t worry about being fat and thought that if people did not like me then fair enough, just let it go – how time-saving is that? It has been a lovely part of my life as it has been so relaxing. My husband was fantastic but he was working full time so if I just had an hour to write then I would write in that hour. I feel really lucky to have had that experience.

6. Getting a bike

I BOUGHT a bike with my first advance in 1996, a Ridgeway bike which cost £300. I felt like I had bought a Porsche.

My boyfriend had a bike and my dream was that we would both have them, and it has been the joy of my life. I don’t cycle because it is good for the planet – I predate all that stuff. In Glasgow nobody cycled then and it was so long ago that people were not angry at you for being a cyclist, they were baffled. We went cycling holidays across Arran and Kintyre and I am still cycling about Glasgow. If I am going to get messages there is always a wee bike ride involved. I take the bike to London on the train if I am going there for work and I get a nice bike ride.

I’m not very good. I’m quite slow and if I get to a hill I get off and push. I don’t wear all that lycra as you just look crazy. I just wear my normal clothes and put cycling shorts on in case my skirt blows up. Those skin-tight clothes are hellish and I think it puts a lot of women off cycling. Most people think of cycling as a chore but I really love it. We even bought our house because it was easier to get them in the door – my first bike was nicked from a close, which was sad, but it did me well.

7. Studying art history

I WAS very aware that going to university was about getting an education, but I didn’t feel I was getting a rounded education in law, so I did art history as an extra subject.

We studied topics like the history of architecture, sculpture and painting and it was such a left-field, world-changing topic and so sociologically based that I was fascinated. Because of that course I can walk through an area in a city and see the history of when things were built. It really made me feel privileged to get a university education. One of the good things about going to university when you are older is that you have a life-long thirst for knowledge and education. You own your own education and don’t expect someone else to come in and tell you what to know. When you go in straight from school it feels like a chore and not particularly lucky. I did feel very privileged, although I had to get three jobs in the summer as even with a full grant I was in terrible debt.

8. My Twitter avatar

THE picture I have on Twitter is of the strongest emotion I have ever felt in my life. It is a picture of a fat lassie wearing a communion veil and a cape outside a council house in East Kilbride. I remember the day so vividly.

I was about four and my sister had been making her first communion. Her outfit was borrowed from a very well-to-do family and she looked amazing. She had a hair piece and a gorgeous deep royal-blue velvet cape and a little sticky-out white skirt.

Communion was not a big thing then, although now it is. At the time your granny gave you a prayer book and plastic rosary beads and that was it. But I spent three hours that morning staring at my sister in the way children do, thinking “I want that”. I was so jealous. It used to be the tradition that if someone made their first communion everyone got to try on the veil and cape, so I finally got to wear them. If you look closely you can see how unbelievably chuffed I am. I remember the intensity of the envy and the transcendental delight of getting the outfit. That was amazing. I still love capes and I have a thing for big outfits. I dress in quite an eccentric manner and I know it comes from that moment.

9. Going on an Ibiza Uncovered holiday

I WENT on a wild summer holiday to Corfu with two pals in 1985 and we went to a place which was full of English breakfasts, Union Jack underpants and drunk people trying to shag each other. I had no idea what we were going to as I thought we were going to Greece to look at churches. I had fundamentally misunderstood what this holiday was about.

I was about 18 and thought “this is really not for me”, so most of the time I sat up on the roof reading. I did not read much before that but one of the girls had brought 100 Years Of Solitude and The Master And Margarita with her and I fell in love with reading. It really changed my life. Meanwhile the two others went partying – they could not stand me. Our whole holiday was a fall-out, in fact, as one of the girls had gone off with my boyfriend just before we went. But the other two fell out with each other as well so then they were both trying to be friends with me.

By the end of it I had decided I would never go on a holiday like that again.

10. Winning a prize for my last novel

IT was the Gordon Burn prize for The Long Drop. I have won other awards but I think it was the most touching thing that ever happened to me professionally because I am such a big Gordon Burn fan and have an intense engagement with his writing. He is the writer I always aspire to and I buy his books as presents for other people. I was shortlisted for the prize but did not think I would win.

The ceremony was in Durham, a four-hour drive each way from Glasgow, and I was getting up the next morning at 6am to go to France for a festival, but I went because I love Gordon Burn’s writing so much.

He is doing such an odd thing – writing true crime in a high-art form. There is an argument that some art really matters and some doesn’t because it is ephemeral, such as pop music and crime fiction. It’s mostly a class distinction and he cuts through that entirely by the way he writes. He’s a really amazing writer.

Most true crime portrays the crimes in a pornographic way but he doesn’t do that – he looks at the context and the attitudes at the time of the crime.

My next book, which is out in May, is called Conviction, and is about a woman obsessed with true-crime podcasts.