Santa Montefiore talks sense and spirituality in her new book, ‘Wait For Me’.
I was intrigued to meet Santa Montefiore, bestselling author of too many novels to count. Luckily her Instagram tells me, it’s 23. How does such a prolific writer maintain her success? Coming up with tantalising new storylines to sate the huge fan-base she’s acquired can’t be easy. Nor can keeping herself entertained in the process. ‘I think loving what you do is the key to success in any endeavour’, she says.
She unsurprisingly leans on dogged diarising to get the job done, but when I ask her if she ever gets stressed, she pauses. ‘I think stressed is the wrong word, I get more sort of twitchy. If I do a lot in the week, then I start getting in a bad mood. I want to be writing, I want to be at my desk; that’s the main anxiety I think’.
Santa has always woven romance and spirituality into her novels. However her latest book, Wait For Me, takes these themes several steps further and she’s clearly nervous.
‘It’s always a worry if you’re too woo-woo people are going to think, ‘I don’t want to go there”.
The story centres on the tragic death of a WW2 soldier named Rupert Dash. Rupert’s grieving wife finds a poem he left for her, Wait For Me, which says that somehow, he will return. 40 years later in London, a young man suffers from recurring nightmares of a war-torn battlefield. They eventually lead him back to Dash, his widow, and the poem.
Breathtakingly, the book is based on her friend Simon Jacobs’ true story and Santa is quick to point this out. The more unusual the circumstances, she says, the harder it is for the reader to suspend disbelief.
She reflects that her husband, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, doesn’t have the same issues. Extraordinary things happen in real life and no one questions it but in fiction, ‘one almost has a little bit more of a challenge’.
I am keen to know Santa’s take on the metaphysical, which plays a huge part in the novel. She tells me that she’s got to a point in her career where ‘I’m going to be more true to me and write what I really love writing about, which is spiritual things’.
I wonder where this comes from and she reveals that after suffering terrible nightmares as a child, in her early twenties she sought out a medium called Susan Dabbs.
‘I started developing with her my psychic ability through meditation, doing a lot of things like psychometry, which is when you link into an object. And she then suggested I do a regression’.
This is when the subject is taken on a journey back through their past lives whilst under hypnosis.
‘I’m very open-minded about it’, she says of her experience. ‘From a historian’s point of view it’s not interesting at all, I wasn’t Cleopatra or Elizabeth I!’ Rather, she found herself on the cobbled streets of Yorkshire and in 19th century rural Spain. It is now clear why Jacobs’ story was so enticing to Santa, providing her with a chance to explore themes which have interested her for decades. She says the words were ‘literally just flowing through me’ and it was one of the easiest writing experiences of her career.
Despite this fascination, however, she doesn’t spend her life with her head in the past. ‘We are who we are in this life and I think we’ve got to focus on that, that’s what we’re here for. My sister died eight years ago and you can either spend your life beating yourself up, or you can just be philosophical about it and say ok, I accept it, this is the way it is. This is all part of the great plan’.
I come away from the call even more intrigued than when I started. Though I don’t think Santa Montefiore’s audience needs to worry, she’s got a lot more stories up her sleeve.
‘Wait For Me’ is out now.
September, 2023
