Hypable: In this book you have a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder story, which again is something that isn’t raised often — not even in Young Adult — just in fiction generally. In ongoing series, you often don’t see the ramifications of a trauma from a previous book.
EM: That was another thing that I thought. I’ve read a lot of it like, now people are going into the Hunger Games arena, or they’re going into other situations where their lives are threatened or they’ve been assaulted, and then the next day they’re okay. I couldn’t imagine how Rachel would recover just like that. I tried to write around it just to see what it would be like, but it just didn’t feel right. So I tried to follow the instinct I had right from the beginning which was to keep it real, and write how I thought she would be. And after five weeks, I thought she’d still be pretty screwed up.
Hypable: That story felt especially personal. Were you basing it off something in particular?
EM: Sure, I think every woman has had some kind of experience. And as we were getting close to publication, I asked the publishers if they wanted to include some links at the end, and they said that isn’t something we usually do in Australian fiction, so we left it. But I followed it up anyway and talked about it a bit on my blog, just to let people know that I’d been in contact with those organisations. You have to be aware that it might have an impact on somebody. I’m not really into trigger warnings.
Hypable: You’re of the Roxane Gay school of trigger warnings.
EM: Exactly. I think anything could trigger anybody. And look, I’ve had personal experiences, and I’ve talked to people who have studied it. My experience was that I lived in Asia for a long time and I lived in Jakarta around the time that President Suharto fell. The whole city was basically at war, and it was a really full on time. We didn’t live in a separated expat area, we lived right in the middle of the city and actually along one of the main thoroughfares for protest marches. I was teaching at the time, and all my students and I had an overnight backpack in case we got trapped at the school.
“I’m not really into trigger warnings.
I think anything could trigger anybody.”
I think anything could trigger anybody.”
I’d ring my partner every day and say, “Is it safe for me to go home along these roads? Am I going to get hit with rocks, or Molotov cocktails, or is there a riot?” That was every day, for a long time. Then a whole bunch of students were shot outside our apartment building during a riot protest, and it was around that time that we started thinking, why are we living here? We were given an opportunity to go, which we took. We were expected to return after five or six weeks in Australia for a holiday, and it was only after we got here that we thought, “Did that really happen? And we really going back to that?” And we decided no, we really weren’t going back to that.
So we went to India, and we arrived right in the middle of Diwali, and there’s firecrackers going off everywhere and it was quite stressful. It was a very strange experience to go through, and it was like living in a war zone and it wasn’t until we left that it ceased to be normal. It took us a while to come back from that. And every woman has had a pretty full on experience on a one-to-one basis. Lots of people reading the book might relate, and hopefully they get the feeling that it’s possible to work their way out of that.
Hypable: Let’s go to more cheerful things. I want to talk about the meta.
EM: You love the Sherlock meta!
Hypable: I’m obsessed with it. We’re inundated with these modern Sherlock Holmes stories, and I just love that your characters exist in a world where Sherlock Holmes also exists and that they’re aware of the irony of their names and their situation.
EM: Well it started as a modern Sherlock Holmes story. Then I thought, there’s no way I can write around that, especially if I want to ground it in reality. How could they not know that he comes across like a contemporary Sherlock? And how can they ignore the symmetry of their names? It would be something that you would play on if you were a teenager. And of course, it ends up snowballing in the third book, so even the villain becomes part of the whole meta, and starts to goad them with clues taken from Conan Doyle’s canon. I had a lot of good fun with that.
Hypable: This book is heavily influence by Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem. How did you go about incorporating it?
EM: I had a few key things in the back of my mind, and I had a few keywords. Before I started writing the book I thought it has to come back to Rachel’s story, we have to have a resolution of Mycroft’s story, and there has to be a nemesis in there somewhere. I liked the idea of playing into that. But I wanted it to be on Rachel’s territory; I wanted it to be her show. I did want to hit some beats but I didn’t want to follow the track that Conan Doyle’s story actually took.
Hypable: More of an interpretation rather than an adaptation.
EM: Yeah. Taking a few things and weaving them in. I thought that would be enough for people, I didn’t want to overwhelm them. Some people have actually said to me, “Oh my god, enough Sherlock stuff. It’s a bit heavy-handed.” But they have to be aware of it, and it’s fun to play on it if you’re writing it. I read a lot of Conan Doyle when I was a teenager, and I went back through all of the stories when I was writing this series. And I’ve watched Sherlock, and Elementary, so I’m pretty well versed with the canon. And one of my favorite movies when I was younger was Young Sherlock Holmes. I love that movie so much! And I think the tall, English guy with the dark hair must have really lingered in my memory. I’ve read The Beekeeper’s Apprentice as well.
Hypable: I haven’t read that one.
EM: Oh you really need to read it. You’ll love it. It’s so faithful to the characters of Holmes and Watson, but such a completely beautiful retelling, and inserting this beautifully constructed character into that universe.
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