So, a classic police procedural done well will gift us a sense of order and justice in a chaotic world. We go to a book seeking something, and though we are not always conscious of the needs we’re feeding, we are definitely awake to the fact of whether they have been satisfied by the final page. Fans of these books get called voyeurs.īut it is reductive to cast readers as passive observers, to suggest that their decision to spend hours, days or weeks consuming one story rather than another is basely simple, not nuanced, involved. The action is too unpleasant, they say, too gruesome. And it is this propensity for violence which often provokes criticism from those not so enthralled with the genre. In crime and thriller, the setting can be warm and exotic, but the characters are likely shady, unsympathetic, violent. Though we turn to fiction for escape, there is no requirement that these holidays of the mind be sunny. My agent’s response to my first, gentle draft of Little Nothings leapt out with fresh meaning, ‘I thought you were really going to go there at the end,’ she said, ‘and I felt let down when you didn’t.’ When I eventually returned to my desk, my social media feed was filled with finger-pointing, a daily accounting of our Covid villains, driven by the human desire for people to be wholly good or bad-an environment far more conducive to the thriller writer. And this did not feel like a kindness it was an insult. Maybe it was moving enough to draw tears and plaudits from the uninitiated but for me, it pulled punches. I sat through a drama that left me cold, then raging-a drama that didn’t come anywhere close to showing the squalid reality of losing a loved one to the virus, no chance to say goodbye.
By the time Covid dramas started hitting our TV screens (written by peers who had not ignored that call from the pandemic muse) I was ready to see them, eager for connection, for the catharsis of seeing my own experience and emotions being portrayed by others.īut that’s not what I got. In the meantime, I read lots, and watched even more, filling my brain with stories that offered escape from my own. I stopped work because I was convinced that grief had made me mad and that any words I set down on the page could not be trusted. Not because I didn’t want to write-writing had always been my lifelong way of dealing with everything, no matter how terrible. It was ridiculous to be playing make believe instead of addressing the immediate truth. No plot conjured up in an author’s mind could rival the suspense and horror of the pandemic. If darkness must feature, then let my story speak to the real-life drama unfolding around us. I should have been writing a comedy, that’s what I told myself, or else a romance a happy ever after was what people needed right now. With a deadly virus tearing through the population, with livelihoods dwindling and small businesses collapsing, and with social media beaconing the message that we must in the face of this be stoic, jolly and above all kind, I couldn’t follow through on my promise to write a book about betrayal, bitterness and wrath. Duped, then dumped, Liv plots her merciless revenge.Įxcept she sort of doesn’t. On a joint holiday-of-a-lifetime to Corfu, Liv discovers just how narcissistically divisive Ange can be. Then along comes Ange-an aspirational new member to their group and a divisive one.
I wrote the first draft of Little Nothings in those first months of isolation-a book led by Liv Travers, a woman with a solitary personality (so far so Covid-friendly) who, after giving birth to a daughter, forms strong bonds with fellow mothers Beth and Binnie. Whole symphonies of generosity scrolled across my laptop screen! Which was great news for humanity a total nightmare for a thriller writer.
Neighbors who had never spoken before were forging bonds and performing symphonies, both literal and metaphorical. Parents were building epic Lego-scapes with their children, others stitched, most of us baked. The news was dire, yet this window on the world was rose-tinted. It seemed churlish to hit all caps and respond, YOU DO KNOW THIS IS HOW WRITER’S EXIST ALL THE TIME, RIGHT? Especially churlish when, for one beautiful moment, social media was a nice place to be. In those early lockdown days, my social media feed was, in the most part, a narration of other people’s strange new routines: working from home, staying in pajamas, eating leftovers for lunch, seeing no one. The just-released books that you’re reading now were likely written during Covid lockdown, a period that was weird for authors-this author at least-in the sense that, it wasn’t that weird at all.