With a part in the new Miss Marple TV series and a first novel published before her 24th birthday, life looks set fair for Rose Heiney. But there's sorrow in the background.

Steven Russell

With a part in the new Miss Marple TV series and a first novel published before her 24th birthday, life looks set fair for Rose Heiney. But there's sorrow in the background. The daughter of Suffolk broadcasters Libby Purves and Paul Heiney tells Steven Russell how her brother's death shaped her writing

IN your arrogance, you're convinced you know how the story goes.

The daughter of a media household - dad a TV presenter, mum on the radio and in print - is born with a silver pen in her hand. At university she breezes towards a 2:1 while throwing herself into extra-curricular drama - becoming president of the Oxford Revue (the students' comedy sketch group) and appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe.

As the dreaming spires fade from view, a book contract seamlessly materialises on the horizon - followed shortly afterwards by TV acting roles.

The founders of her publishing company appear to lend weight to the theory. Rose Heiney was still an undergraduate when they came across her, “and we knew then she was a budding star”. She must have been oozing ground-breaking fiction in the gaps between tutorials and play rehearsals, you imagine,

Of course, it wasn't quite like that. Life rarely is.

For a start, she swears she scraped her degree only by cramming for six weeks.

So what caught the eye of Short Books?

“Oh god, that was years ago!

“I tell you what I did write, and I'm really embarrassed about this, so please make it clear it was juvenilia and I'm very ashamed of it, but I wrote a non-fiction book about my gap year travelling experience - which would have been absolutely fine if my gap year travelling experience had consisted of more than, basically, two weeks in Belgium.

“It was 'My Big Adventure' - but I did nothing and went nowhere; and used my mum's credit card to stay in bed-and-breakfasts. Somehow it got into the hands of the ladies I now work with, and they effectively said 'This isn't very good, but you're clearly a good writer, and we hope you'll do something.' Four years later I did.

“The way I see it is the book's my first piece of proper writing and anything else has just been dabbling.”

The book - The Days of Judy B - had an odd genesis. Rose started writing it as mental diversion during her university finals in 2006.

It also began as one kind of story, but then tragedy took it off in a different direction.

A couple of days after Rose left Oxford towards the end of June, older brother Nicholas, 23, who had suffered serious depressive illness for a long time, committed suicide at the family home in Suffolk. “And then life just changed.”

The sudden loss of her close sibling forced into perspective any worries about life after graduation. Already on the calendar was a play she'd co-authored and in which she was due to act at the Edinburgh Fringe that August. She decided to stick to the plan, “which was an interesting decision, to say the least. But without that I would have been completely lost.

“You could say that, as it was, I was lost in grief; but, also, the fact is that something even so terrible as that does give you a tremendous amount of energy.” Happily, Edinburgh planted a seed with a theatrical agent that would blossom some months later.

It wasn't the only previously-sown possibility to germinate. During her Oxford days Rose had written an “angst-ridden monologue play” that got into the hands of a lady called Caroline Wood, a feature film producer looking for potential screen writers.

Nothing happened then but a couple of years later, with university life nearing its end, Rose received an email. Caroline was becoming a literary agent. “She said 'Are you writing any fiction?' I wasn't - but I opportunistically started writing some! After a l-o-n-g writing process, and the many months of family trauma, she ended up selling my book.”

Five months after graduation, Rose's perceptive debut novel was sold to Short Books on the strength of five chapters.

Not surprisingly, The Days of Judy B reflected this difficult time for the family.

It began, she explains, as an exploration of the split between someone's private persona and their public face. Then it morphed into the “jaunty nervous breakdown chronicle”.

Judy Bishop is a 23-year-old Cambridge graduate who muddled through an English degree, threw herself into singing, acting and comedy-performing at university, and then slumped. She finds herself writing a light-hearted weekly article for a national Sunday newspaper owned by News International.

Unfortunately, the sassy Judy B of column fame - an It-girl fashionista with a glittering metropolitan life - is a fabrication; Judy's real life is largely devoid of meaningful human contact or direction. Moreover, she despises her “finely polished and borderline-humorous sh*t”.

Judy does, however, realise she's in a rut and heading for “two years of eating mashed carrots in a home as a fitting preliminary to my sparsely attended DSS funeral”.

In the months before her 24th birthday she resolves to improve her fortunes: becoming a star of musical theatre, ditching her column, and - ahem - losing her virginity.

Er . . . hasn't Rose written a handful of articles for The Times (owner: News International), the organ for which her mum has penned a weekly (not at all frivolous) column since 1990?

Yes, she says - and that was one of the initial motivations behind the novel. Rose did about four articles during her years at school and university, and one in the December following her brother's death.

“I know this sounds dreadfully ungrateful but . . . no, it's just a fact . . . writing those columns made me unhappy, because I was a bit depressed at university, stressed and tired, and yet you just put on this jaunty face.”

Even the one produced in the final days of 2006 left her uneasy.

“I'll tell you precisely why I did that one: I was in debt and needed the money! It's passably entertaining; but the reality of that was it was our first Christmas without Nicholas and it was incredibly difficult, and yet I was writing this jaunty deck-the-halls kind of piece!”

In the earlier days there was also the niggling suspicion she might have got the work simply because she was Libby Purves's daughter, though on reflection she's confident the articles would have been spiked - binned - if they hadn't been up to scratch.

Anyway, Rose thought the idea of a journalist making a living essentially through deception, “which is what I felt like”, had comic potential and bite. Hence, the first chapter drew on her unease with the kind of my-life's-so-gilded writing that's prevalent today.

Then it changed into “an exploration of mental health problems and the different ways they can manifest themselves.

“Whilst, obviously, it's awful what goes on in people's heads when they're struggling to function or they are losing their mind - and I must make clear at this point I'm not talking about my brother, because he dealt with it with considerably more dignity than Judy - what they're actually doing is quite funny, because they're so incongruous. It's frightening and it's sort of shock-laughter.

“You see the naked man wandering down the street and stealing bananas from outside the greengrocer's, and your initial instinct is to laugh . . . and then (to feel) horror.”

The subject of suicide pops up early, Judy thinking “To be honest, I don't think it's really for me. Suicide is for the disordered, the complex, the mercurial. It requires courage - grotesquely misapplied courage, but courage nonetheless . . .”

She does later make an attempt to do away with herself, but it's ham-fisted, almost slapstick in nature. Even so, readers aware of the background will probably find the tone - humour laced with darkness - uncomfortable.

So, how much of Nick's dreadfully sad turmoil feeds into this fictional tale?

“It's very strange. Judy's breakdown basically occurs in the wake of grief and it's fuelled by that energy; and so it was possibly more to do with my reaction to Nick's death.

“In my mind I suppose it was kind of hypothetical: stopping and wondering - because Nick was so dignified and so quiet and polite - about what he must have been suffering. How he remained polite is mind-blowing.

“If I was experiencing severe mental difficulties, how would I deal with it? The answer is probably in the book: which is not very well at all.

“So it was sort of that - and me, looking for the first time in my charmed little Suffolk life, at something terrible, and the consequence of something terrible, and, I suppose, the different ways in which people can be hurt and the different ways in which that hurt can manifest itself.

“So it's all a bit muddled; I still haven't quite got it all straight.”

Is it trite to suggest that working through her thoughts and committing them to paper was cathartic?

“Not at all trite. Very accurate. When talking about it, I've used the word exorcism - which is extreme, but quite handy.”

What did Rose's parents think of the book?

“My mum read it in manuscript form. I came home for Easter last year and I brought a manuscript home with plans to perhaps decide whether to give it to my mum; and she snuck into my bedroom while I was asleep and stole it and read it! Good for her!

“It's a pretty shocking book for parents to read, actually . . . the sex and violence and mental illness. My dad's read it very recently.” Did they like it? “I hope so. They say they do.”

It must have been both difficult and poignant for her mum and dad to read about someone's fictional decline, bearing in mind their all too real loss.

“I'm sure it was. I was worried they'd read particularly the end of the book and think 'Oh God, not another one!' But, no, I don't think they had that response. I think they appreciated it was fiction.”

The Days of Judy B is published by Short Books at £12.99.

THERE was little doubt Rose Heiney would end up in front of an audience.

As a teenager, and at university, she was turbocharged: her heart set on a career as a stand-up comedian. Rose's “posh girl” act took her into the finals of Channel 4's So You Think You're Funny competition and the semi-finals of the BBC New Comedy Awards (where she bombed and realised she was, basically, a large, drunk child who didn't know what she was doing).

Her Edinburgh Fringe experience led to an agent, and acting jobs have come in the past 18 months.

One brought her back to Suffolk last summer to film Summerhill, a BBC production about the progressive school at Leiston. Rose played a young science teacher.

And she recently landed a part in the first episode of ITV's new Miss Marple series, which sees Julia McKenzie play the sleuthing pensioner.

The episode, A Pocket Full of Rye, was a lovely month's work, Rose says. She played “a tall and ungainly 17-year-old working-class, from-the-orphanage, incredibly stupid maid” who's strangled with a stocking while hanging out the washing.

She rents in London - Islington is currently home - and her flatmate is in musical theatre.

“I just assumed I'd fail miserably at everything, so even to be employed is a nice surprise. I'm still at the pathetically grateful stage of my career, where anything is lovely; and I've yet to have a bad experience. Obviously there are jobs I don't get, but it's lovely to get any of them.”

GROWING up as the daughter of well-known broadcasters wasn't at all a problem for Rose Heiney. In fact, she rather relished comments from other kids. “I was a bit of an obnoxious child; it just meant I was special!” she laughs.

The family lived on a farm near Knodishall before moving to another one at Middleton.

In 1990 Paul Heiney, who had become a household name through TV shows such as That's Life and In At The Deep End, decided to turn back the clock and become a small farmer doing things the traditional way, with horses instead of tractors. Hard graft for him, great fun for his daughter.

Rose went to Coldfair Green primary at Knodishall and on to The Abbey at Woodbridge, Saint Felix School on the edge of Southwold, and then the Royal Hospital School, outside Ipswich.

She's grateful for her upbringing. And it's a bonus that mum and dad are comfortable with the idea of life as a freelance.

“They know that everything will be all right in the end and the next money will come in. I've witnessed them waiting for the phone to ring, and having six jobs on the go at once and then nothing for eight months.”