LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 47

The Widow is beautifully, sparely written, the narrative switching
between the widow, the detective leading the hunt, the journalist
covering the case, and the mother of the child, revealing the lies people
tell themselves to survive.
Barton is sanguine about people assuming the portrait of Kate, the
journalist, is autobiographical, but says it’s “an amalgam of dozens of
people… I’ve been everywhere that Kate has been, but her reactions are
not my reactions, necessarily.”
The book is shot through with gripping detail, from the tabloids vying
for an exclusive to an interviewer buying her case study new clothes and
taking her to a posh hotel (something Barton has done herself).
“Everyone has their own moral compass, but then you’ve got a news
editor shouting down the phone, asking: ‘Why didn’t you ask this?”
We never find out the details of Glen’s alleged crime but we know he’s
addicted to looking at graphic images of abuse on his laptop (what Jean
dismisses as “his nonsense”). For Barton it shows how some men
compartmentalise their lives. “When I was doing research, one
paedophile in prison called it his ‘cupboard under the stairs’.” Jean is no
fool, but childless and lonely at 37, she prefers not to tackle the secrets
in her marriage. “She’s a youngish woman, but because she married
straight from home she hasn’t had that thing of being young and
carefree.”
Barton wrote the book when she and her husband took a two-year career
break to work on a VSO project in Sri Lanka. “The kids were starting
their own lives, my parents were young enough not to need constant
care.”
In Colombo she trained Tamil journalists to produce a radio show and a
newspaper for displaced persons living in refugee camps. It was lifechanging – and gave her the space to try fiction. “I’d get up at 6am and
write for two hours before work.”
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