THERE’S a memorable scene in the movie, Love Actually, in which Colin Firth’s character loses the manuscript of the novel he’s been slaving over when a gust of wind suddenly carries the typewritten pages out of a window and into a lake.

I was reminded of this when Maggie O’Farrell related a similar, painfully comic experience she encountered whilst writing her latest novel, This Must Be the Place.

She was apparently more than 150 pages into her 500-page narrative when every writer’s nightmare struck.

“I was about a third of the way in and I realised it was going to be quite large in terms of the number of pages, geography, the number of characters, the number of voices it was going to have in it,” she told the rapt Queen’s Hall audience.

“So I did go out and buy myself an enormous pin board and every character had a different coloured post-it note. I did this beautiful chronological arrangement and I did all the chapters next to each other.

“Well, I should never plan because I was in the bathroom cleaning my teeth when my youngest daughter, who was about 14 months at the time, came in and she was saying, ‘All gone, all gone!’

“I said, ‘What’s all gone darling?’ and she opened up her hands to reveal this ball of multi-coloured post-its – partly masticated – and I realised… it was my novel!”

However, Maggie said, in a sense it strengthened the book as it forced her to re-evaluate what she’d written.

“Yeats said: ‘For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent’. So I went out and bought some more post-its and put the pin board very high up on the wall! In a way, it was good as I had to rejustify every decision and had to rethink it from scratch really.”

This Must Be the Place is Maggie’s seventh novel and at its heart is the relationship between a reclusive former film star, Claudette, who has escaped to live in a remote part of Ireland with her American husband, Daniel, who is about to make an exit of his own after receiving a shock about a woman he last saw 20 years ago.

Maggie explained that the idea for the book had been brewing in her mind for about eight years, since the day she came face to face with a celebrity in a Soho café.

“Everybody in the room was staring at her and taking photographs and there was a bank of photographers outside the window banging on the glass. She was very heavily pregnant at the time which is I think why she was being hounded.”

After pushing her way through the waiting paparazzi outside the café, Maggie said she remembered thinking: ‘If that were me, I would fake my own death and I would run away’.

By the time she got to the other side of the road, she was thinking it would be a great idea for a book.

It may seem a little harsh, but purloining other people’s experiences like this is just what writers do, according to Maggie. “Don’t tell a writer anything if you want them to keep it to themselves,” she told interviewer Caroline Beck. “It’s a pathological thing – we can’t stop ourselves!”

And when authors are not borrowing from real life, they’re making stuff up – something that has been a trait in Maggie since childhood and now comes in very useful as a writer.

“I remember as a child telling the girl next door that I was deaf in one ear. It just comes out. But now I don’t get into trouble anymore.”

Another experience drawn from Maggie’s own life in this novel is that of being the parent of a child with severe eczema. Daniel’s son, Niall, is afflicted by the chronic skin condition which Maggie’s middle daughter also suffers from.

“It was something that was really consuming me as I was writing this book,” she said, adding that there were two reasons she decided to inflict the condition on Niall.

Firstly, he was the literal representation of one of the dominant themes within the novel – that of people looking to escape their own skins.

But she also wanted to right (or write) the wrongs of previous authors who have used the condition as a metaphor for weakness in their characters.

Maggie said, “Whenever I read fiction and you find a character with something like eczema or allergies, it’s almost always used as a comedic device. It’s always used to signal to the readers that this person is a weakling, or certainly feeble or a bit pathetic, which makes me really crazy because the people, especially children, who have these things are the complete opposite. They are so strong and stoic and put up with such suffering on a daily basis.

“My daughter and I were reading a very well-known children’s series of books and the hero’s best friend has eczema and asthma and my daughter said, ‘Why is that funny?’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s not funny is it?’

“I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to write a character who is completely a real life person who just happens to have this disease so that when she grows up she can read it and know that I did it for her.”

What came across through Caroline Beck’s perceptive questioning was just what an amazingly gifted, funny, intellectual yet down-to-earth writer Maggie O’Farrell is – and by the size and reactions of the audience, she evidently has many fans in the North- East.

But one question remained unasked – the name of the celebrity in the Soho café that inspired this latest novel.

Reading it, I’d had in my mind Julia Roberts in Notting Hill and couldn’t resist asking Maggie the Muse’s identity as she signed my book afterwards.

And, dear reader, I can report that Maggie graciously declined to tell me. “I’ve considered it, but then I decided I would just be like one of those photographers if I revealed who it was,” she said.

Let’s see which actress Hollywood chooses to portray Claudette – the book has been optioned by a film company, so watch this space.

l This Must Be the Place is out now in paperback by Tinder Press.