I suggest first of all you give yourself a different identity...
...change your name, style of clothing, hair, appearance and so on.
We'll dye your hair a kind of browny auburn, and although that may look strange with your black skin...
I think you'll suit it with the nose I'm going to give you.
I just remember getting really involved in this character,  Lucy, who changes her name to Emma.
And she changes her appearence and identity, and basically goes on the run.
On the run from herself.
When I wrote this book, I was 12. I liked the title, I remember thinking the title up...
One Person, Two Names
I was very imaginative as a child, and I was always making things up...
...and always had different stories going on in my head.
And life was full of possible selves.
I grew up in Bishopbriggs in Glasgow with my mum and dad, and they were my adoptive parents.
There weren't any other kids my colour, so there was just really me and my brother.
You did often feel surprised when you looked in the mirror. You felt surprised at your own face.
And it wasn't so much that other people treated you as a stranger...
...or called you names which they did sometimes...
...but it was more that you were a stranger to yourself.
And I found that quite an interesting thing, as a kid, being startled or surprised by my own face...
...because it wasn't like the face of my friends. And it wasn't like the face of my family...
...it wasn't like my mum or my dad's face.
My whole identity felt like it was shifting and changing as I became a teenager.
Around about the age of 16, I became aware that I was a lesbian...
...and also I became aware of being black in a more conscious way.
I remember feeling a sense of being followed, which I've since met other gay people...
...that around that time, before people were openly gay, and before it was easy to be out...
...you had a sense of almost being watched. A sense of feeling liberated, but also...
...a sense of fear, and deep unease. And so I remember feeling both of those things.
I thought, you know, I wonder who can see me? It was a strange feeling, of being watched.
The act of writing was a wonderful thing, because it made me feel like inside my own imagination...
...I was really quite strong.
We often write because we have a secret self, if you like, we have another self that's not being articulated...
...and we often write to find a voice for that silent self, that's what writers do.
When I was creating that character, I was thinking about peoples' journeys...
...that really, in a way, the journey is a journey to find herself.
That if you get a chance, I suppose, to follow some of your dreams...
...that you can be one person, two names, one person three names...
...that you can be multiple, and that we're always a society searching for singular truths...
...but actually it seems to me that the truth is multiple.
If I was to go back, I'd like to go and have a wee word with myself and say...
...you can fall in love with who you want to. You can be exactly who you want to be...
...you can run towards yourself if you like, because it's going to be fine.
