I recently took part in a discussion about All Her Secrets with Sam Taylor of Max Minerva’s, a wonderful independent bookshop in my hometown of Bristol. Sam was great at asking searching questions that made me think about All Her Secrets in new ways.
Here are his questions and my answers.
Can you introduce All Her Secrets and the two girls at the centre of the story, Sofie and Julia?
Sofie is a shy young Greek girl in early adolescence. Her family live in Paxos, where they caretake for the estate of a rich English industrialist who arrives each August with a party of family and friends.
Sofie longs for adventure and when the boys in the party pay her attention, she thinks her world is opening up at last, but she is wrong; the terrible things that happen to her at their hands one night at the beach will change her life forever.
Julia is the eighteen-year-old daughter of the industrialist who uses her to entice wealthy clients; she will become the glamorous wife of a Westminster headmaster.
Their two very different lives collide in a story of revenge and hubris, which has an ancient Greek myth at its heart.
Why choose a Greek island for a thriller?
I wanted to fold all the sensory experiences of Greece into the writing, the warmth of the sun, the smell of thyme, the noise of cicadas and the incredible turquoise of the sea. The taste of the grapes and the silence of the dusty interior. These things are there to provide the reader with a redemptive shot of summer pleasure. The loveliness of the place was also intended as a foil. Amid all that sunshine and beauty, people expect to be happy; they buy into the myth that they can pay to escape sorrow and difficulty, but my narrative fractures those expectations. The unexpectedness of horror in a lovely place enhances that shock but also mitigates it, we don’t expect darkness in a sunny place, but the sunshine helps us deal with it.
If this seems sneaky, I am not alone: Ian Fleming took James Bond to some fabulous locations to combat evil, Patricia High-Smith gave the Riviera to the murderous Tom Ripley in ‘The Talented Mr Ripley,’ Daphne Du Maurier set her haunting story of ‘Rebecca’ on the beautiful Cornish coast and the blood-soaked action in ‘Jaws’ takes place on a stunning beach in Massachusetts. Shadows are always darker when thrown across sunshine.
I chose an island because I wanted that sense of claustrophobia that comes from a small community with everyone listening in, gossiping and talking and how that might feel if you wanted to keep what happened to you a secret.
Islands are also cut off; help can take a while to arrive- adding to the tension.
Finally, Greece is still a place of myth and palpable magic; in the deserted olive groves hidden in the landscapes of Paxos, those ancient myths seemed to lurk very close. They gave me the inspiration for how the story would end.
Was the split narrative, between events in Greece and years later in England, present from the very beginning of writing the story?
The split was always there. The story is told over a twenty-year time frame, it would be tedious for the reader to trudge through the events chronologically as well as risking giving away elements of the plot which can be buried in the intervening years for a later reveal. I thought it would be far more interesting for the reader to be presented with the story as a jigsaw to fit together, with the satisfaction of finding answers to questions raised earlier, (though of course, always important not to give away the plot in the latter strand before the relevant events have occurred in the former!)
Each story had to be a stand-alone, with its own internal coherence and structure; this had the added bonus of being able to craft a hook in each time frame.
Your descriptions for even the most incidental things are great at creating a sense of unease; do you craft those descriptions as you go or are they added during a second or third draft?
It depends. Sometimes I am sunk so deeply within the character that those added things come very naturally, almost like a gift; other times they are added later; very often, I’ll be looking to see where I can add brush strokes of unease. I like to build tension slowly, so some of the descriptions are very subtle aiming to give the readers an almost imperceptible shiver.
The clash of residents and visitors is at the heart of All Her Secrets. What drew you to that conflict?
Conflict is always interesting, it’s the engine that powers the plot in a thriller and creates its own shape. There are many little rises and falls in an upward graph of tension, often leading to a larger event or crisis, after which there is a resolution.
In my story, the visitors, the industrialist and his guests, have all power their wealth commands but they use it carelessly, even criminally, and irrevocably damage the lives of the family who look after them, thereby losing the keys to the slice of paradise they thought they owned. These residents are far from passive victims however and their reaction resonates throughout the book.
What happens to Sofie and her family is a metaphor for what can happen to beautiful wild places such as the Greek islands; sought out and visited by millions, the very thing many seek, wilderness, beauty and peace could be at risk of destruction.
The way you describe violence is quite graphic at times; what made you decide on that approach?
It was something I thought very hard about as often in the case of depicting violence less can be more. In this case, however, what happened to Sofie was so shattering and had such a long-term effect on the rest of the narrative, spanning as it does some twenty years. I felt I owed it to the reader to give them a proper understanding of the event in order to believe in its lasting power.
I was writing this around the time that stories concerning sexual violence in schools inflicted on girls by their male peers began to emerge in the press; girls were talking about it for perhaps the first time and the stories were pouring out. Although the stories stopped and the media circus moved on as it does, I knew that these girls would carry what had happened to them for the rest of their lives and in some ways I felt I owed it to them to honestly spell out what can happen in the same way that they so bravely described.
You came to writing after a career as a GP. What drew you to the crime/thriller genre?
When I started my new career, I wanted to write a story that honoured the way my patients carried grief with such grace, people who had suffered unimaginable loss continued their lives with enormous bravery. In the very first draft of my new novel, I wrote about a woman who was grieving and on her own with just a dog for company; my American tutor on the MA course at Bath Spa told me it read like one long dog walk; if she’d been in an air B and B with a few books to choose from she would have left mine on the shelf after a cursory glance. Where was the plot?
Plot? What was that? I began to realise that every book I’d ever loved from Macbeth to Anne Patchett’s mesmerising books via Gone Girl, had a plot or at least a well-crafted strand of tension to pull me through the story. I decided I’d better learn about this thing called plot and read Girl with a Dragon Tattoo over one weekend. I thought carefully about the very worst thing that could happen: one of my children disappearing without a trace, with no way of knowing what had happened and I came up with the story of a missing girl. I threaded it through my existing narrative. My American tutor told me that not only would not have been able to put it down, but she would also have taken it into the bath with her. Thanks in large part to her, Daughter became a bestseller.
I love writing stories that build tension subtly; they don’t usually start with a bang but more with a sensation of unease so light that you could be imagining it, I aim to gradually increase that tension until the reader is aware that something very wrong is happening, they hadn’t taken notice of the signs that were pointing to danger though when they look back it becomes obvious. These are stories that usually take place in the home, in a family which is of course the perfect place for secrets and tension to build.
