Claire Adam on ‘Love Forms’, memory, and going home

In Love Forms (Faber, 2025), acclaimed Trinidadian-British writer Claire Adam explores motherhood, memory, loss, and belonging through the story of a woman searching for the daughter she was forced to give up as a teenager. In this interview, Adam reflects on the novel’s origins, the role of memory in fiction, and the complex intersections of love, shame, and social expectation that shape her characters’ lives.

What was the igniting spark that inspired you to write Love Forms?

It’s not easy to pinpoint exactly what it was—it all starts as a bit of a primordial soup, to be honest. But somewhere along the line I began to have an image or an idea about a mother and daughter who’d been separated, and were trying to find their way back to each other. I didn’t know who they were or what their circumstances were, or why they’d been separated: I had to discover all that through the process of writing.

It was only through multiple drafts, working through the story from all possible angles, that I figured out who Dawn was—this woman from a middle-class Trinidadian family who became pregnant at 16. The circumstances of the separation emerged gradually: being sent away to Venezuela to have the baby in secret, the adoption, Dawn’s move to England. These weren’t things I knew at the beginning. The writing process itself revealed the story to me.

The narrator in the novel most often keeps unrolling her memories and her past. As a novelist, how do you look at the idea of ‘memories and the past’ for fiction writing?

Memory is fascinating for fiction because it’s not a simple record of what happened. It’s part of the character’s story of themselves, and susceptible to change over time. And, as in Dawn’s case, there are gaps. Dawn is always conscious of the fact that her daughter may be out there in the world somewhere, and that she (her daughter) may not have had a good life. Dawn is a very reluctant narrator for that reason. She doesn’t want to make herself the centre of the story, yet she has to try to put her fragments of memory together because she’s trying to find her daughter, firstly; also because she’s sort of preparing to give an account of herself to the daughter she may one day meet; and also just for herself, as a way of understanding her life.

Do you think asking Dawn to desert her illegitimate child was the only choice that Dawn’s parents had because of social unacceptance?  Or were they motivated by the belief that this was the best way to protect Dawn’s future?

I think it was both, really—and that’s what makes it complicated and painful. I think Dawn’s parents genuinely loved her and wanted to protect her future. In their minds, if word got out that she’d had a baby at 16, she would be sort of “ruined”—no respectable man would marry her, her prospects would be destroyed.

But at the same time, they were also protecting themselves, their own reputation, and their standing in the community. What’s tragic is that in trying to protect Dawn, they inadvertently may have caused a different kind of harm—the lifelong trauma of separation, felt by both mother and child. They didn’t know that’s what they were doing, of course, and Dawn didn’t know.

Did you visit Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela in order to understand these places more closely while you were writing Love Forms?

Wherever you grow up, that’s who you are. You never forget that place, and those memories. Even though I’ve lived outside Trinidad for all my adult life, I actually understand Trinidad better than, say, England, where I’ve lived for more years.

I didn’t make special trips to Trinidad while I was writing, but I did use photos and videos of Trinidad to help me mentally return.

For the Venezuela sections, the research I did mirrored the character’s very closely. I didn’t want to know any more or less than she did. I had my little bit of knowledge of Venezuela gleaned from growing up in Trinidad; then I had what was freely available in the news and in local conversation; then I had the internet. I considered making a trip—just as Dawn would have considered it—and then decided that my time was better spent in other ways.

Dr Mohammed Farhan teaches English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He often writes on books, and interviews authors for various reputed English dailies including The Hindu, Hindustan Times, and Hindu Business Line, among others.