'Where did the idea come from?' a friend asked me about my novel The Lie Of You.
Well the inspiration actually arose from the actions of a hostile colleague.
I had gone on holiday to Portugal with my daughter after a difficult few weeks at work. This colleague had been undermining me and I was worried about my job. After a few days I started to relax and as I was swimming in the hotel pool a speech popped fully formed into my head. It was one woman speaking with huge malevolence about another woman who seemed to have it all. I hauled myself out of the pool, grabbed my notebook and wrote this speech down. It was the beginning of what turned into THE LIE OF YOU.
So the setting is two women who work together on a magazine. One woman, Heja, is profoundly hostile to the other woman, Kathy, but she hides this brilliantly. Kathy is too preoccupied with a baby, a new husband and a promotion to be aware of any threat from her colleague. Why is Heja so hostile? It had to spring from some deep psychological disturbance.
THE LIE OF YOU is told in alternating chapters in the voices of Heja and Kathy. They had to be very different and sound different too. Kathy has a nice down-to-earth English dad and a flamboyant Portuguese mum, so she has been partly formed by the warm South. Heja is from Finland. She is beautiful, clever and cold and had been the face of Finnish TV News. I wanted the North/South geographical contrast to underpin the differences between the two women.
Kathy’s emotions are close to the surface. I conveyed this by showing Kathy's body often leaking: her breasts leak milk; a period stains her trousers; she sweats and tears leak out when she is stressed. She likes food, cooking and sex and needs warmth from her friends and lovers. She is smart but suffers from self-doubt.
Heja has her reasons for being full of rage. She hides her anger but it drives her every thought and action. Nevertheless, Heja is always in control. She would never leak sweat or blood or tears. We see her self-control in the way she wears her hair, in the way she dresses so immaculately and in her minimalist loft flat.
Well the inspiration actually arose from the actions of a hostile colleague.
I had gone on holiday to Portugal with my daughter after a difficult few weeks at work. This colleague had been undermining me and I was worried about my job. After a few days I started to relax and as I was swimming in the hotel pool a speech popped fully formed into my head. It was one woman speaking with huge malevolence about another woman who seemed to have it all. I hauled myself out of the pool, grabbed my notebook and wrote this speech down. It was the beginning of what turned into THE LIE OF YOU.
So the setting is two women who work together on a magazine. One woman, Heja, is profoundly hostile to the other woman, Kathy, but she hides this brilliantly. Kathy is too preoccupied with a baby, a new husband and a promotion to be aware of any threat from her colleague. Why is Heja so hostile? It had to spring from some deep psychological disturbance.
THE LIE OF YOU is told in alternating chapters in the voices of Heja and Kathy. They had to be very different and sound different too. Kathy has a nice down-to-earth English dad and a flamboyant Portuguese mum, so she has been partly formed by the warm South. Heja is from Finland. She is beautiful, clever and cold and had been the face of Finnish TV News. I wanted the North/South geographical contrast to underpin the differences between the two women.
Kathy’s emotions are close to the surface. I conveyed this by showing Kathy's body often leaking: her breasts leak milk; a period stains her trousers; she sweats and tears leak out when she is stressed. She likes food, cooking and sex and needs warmth from her friends and lovers. She is smart but suffers from self-doubt.
Heja has her reasons for being full of rage. She hides her anger but it drives her every thought and action. Nevertheless, Heja is always in control. She would never leak sweat or blood or tears. We see her self-control in the way she wears her hair, in the way she dresses so immaculately and in her minimalist loft flat.
I tried to get into the heads of the two women and to tell their story as truly as I could. Some readers have said that their sympathies shifted as they read the book. One ambition I had for the novel was to see if I could create any sympathy for a woman who was trying to destroy another woman.
 |
| Photo by Manu Palomeque |
I am on Twitter @janelythell
No comments:
Post a Comment