Q: Signs of Damage is a departure from your style of narratives that we saw with Love & Virtue and Seeing Other People, were you looking to give yourself a challenge?
A: Very much so! With each book, I want to push myself and try new things, because that’s how you improve as an author, and also how you stay interested in your own work. I’d much rather start a novel with the terror of thinking, “I don’t know if I can pull this off,” than with the calm, verging-on-boredom of thinking, “Yep, I’ll just do what I did last time.”
Signs of Damage is a departure from my previous two books in several ways. It took twice as long to write as Love & Virtue and Seeing Other People; it’s the first book I’ve written that inhabits a male perspective (it actually encompasses several male perspectives, from teenagers to men in their seventies), and the first that’s not set entirely in Sydney (the South of France features heavily, and Tuscany briefly). It was also the first novel where I was a bit more experimental with the structure.
Q: Thank you for writing such an intricate, addictive and absorbing novel. It’s been such a long time since the characters really left an unforgettable impression on me. Each of the characters in this book are deeply complex, well detailed and vivid. Did you start out with the idea of the family first, or did you build each character individually?
A: Thank you for reading! And selling, haha! I feel like I rarely conceive of characters in isolation, because the first thing that comes to me is a central relationship or dynamic. For this novel, I had an idea of these two very old friends—one who was a traditional patriarch, and the other who had lived a comparatively solitary life—on a disastrous family holiday together. So I had this notion that there would be a very conventional nuclear family and then a few outsiders orbiting it. I built the other characters out around that core relationship.
Q: Time and memory are a core element to this story, what did you want to explore with these themes?
A: I’m always interested in human subjectivity—the way two people can live through the same event and emerge with completely different stories about what happened. I’m also interested in how time interacts with that process: how we change over time, but also how we reinforce the same narratives over and over again. A novel felt like the perfect place for these preoccupations, because you can present everyone’s conflicting stories side-by-side, and demonstrate the way a character’s interpretation of an event is shaped by their own foibles.
Q: I love the way you use the past and the present timelines to reflect on unravelling memories and understanding the past, was this intentional?
A: Thank you! It was very intentional, and something I really had to labour over to get right. I’d noticed that a lot of novels and tv shows utilise a flashback-structure to reveal a character’s “core wound”. You’ll meet a protagonist in the present day, like Phoebe Waller Bridge’s character in Fleabag or Jude from A Little Life, and they’re exhibiting self-destructive traits. Flashbacks then reveal the Big Bad Thing that made them the way they are in the present.
I wanted to subvert that narrative and force the reader to reflect on how their expectations are manipulated by these traditional storytelling devices. I thought, what if you have a character who insists that nothing terrible happened to her… would the readers still feverishly reading from one flashback to the next, expecting a Big Bad Thing to be revealed? In other words, I was interested to see whether the reader would believe her or not.
Q: How did you approach writing and structuring the two timelines?
A: In the first draft I wrote them each discretely, so I wrote the past timeline first and then the present timeline, so it was like a novel in two parts. It was only in subsequent drafts that I started intercutting. Originally, the events of the holiday in the South of France took place over a week, and the events of the present with Cass’s illness and Skye’s wedding took place over a whole year. When my publisher read it, he said I was allowed to keep both timelines, but they had to cover the same span of time. So now they both cover a week. It’s an example of a great edit. I handed him this mess and he was able to recognise the potential elegance within it.
Q: Speaking of writing, what does a current writing day look like for you?
A: I’m very fortunate in that I write full-time, so I try to vary it up. I do a few days a week at my local library, and then a few days at home. Then if I’m on a deadline I often work in a café as a last resort. The guilt about sitting on one cup of coffee for several hours usually motivates me to stop procrastinating.
Q: What have you learnt as a writer in the process of writing and publishing book three?
A: At the risk of sounding naff, I’ve learned that you never regret doing the thing that scares you. There were several times during the drafting process when I really didn’t think this book would work: I thought it was a terrible idea, or that structurally it would just be unreadable. And it’s funny, now it’s coming out I find that I’m not that nervous about what other people think. That’s not to say that I’m indifferent to public opinion—obviously, it’s flattering if readers like it (and objectively better for my career), and if they don’t then that’s not ideal. But my opinion about the novel won’t change either way. I’ll always know that this was the book I needed to write, and that it pushed me to become a better writer.
Q: If you could turn back time, and give the Diana Reid about to publish Love & Virtue any words of advice, what would it be?
A: I think I would tell her to savour it all a bit more. Not that I ever took any of it for granted, I was always so thrilled with my good fortune in being published at all, and I was so grateful for the positive reception to Love & Virtue. But I converted that gratitude into a kind of panic about making sure I maximised my opportunities. I was so focussed on consolidating my success that I think, in hindsight, I could have taken my eye off the next shiny project, and just soaked up the moment a bit more. Because I now know that a career in publishing is a long road—it can be lonely in the years between publication, and there are always ups and downs—so when you’re up, you might as well stop to admire the view!