You’ve had a 20-year career as a lawyer. When did you start thinking about pursuing writing?
“I actually was obsessed with writing as a child. I was always reading. Always writing stories. Somewhere along the line at high school the careers advisor talked to me. ‘What do you want to do?’ It was sort of at that point that the idea of writing for a job or a career fell away. I think it was partly my generation. If you were a humanities student, you were steered towards law. So, I ended up in law school and I think lost confidence in my ability to be in a creative role.
I didn’t know anyone that worked in the creative sector, so it just felt like an impossible dream. I toiled away as a lawyer for a long time and always was writing little stories on the side but never shared them with anybody, never thought I’d do anything with them. Then two things happened.
First of all, Covid. Like everybody else, especially at the beginning when we didn’t know what we were dealing with, I thought, ‘Gosh do I really want to keep being a lawyer forever?’ I always thought I would leave but it gets quite hard to know what you’re going to leave to do, especially with a mortgage and bills. In the first lockdown I thought, ‘Okay. It’s time for a change.’
Then my younger sister got diagnosed with really aggressive breast cancer. She’d just turned 40 and had a clear mammogram six weeks before. It was the craziest thing. So she had this horrendous process. We’re really close and she’s come out the other end cancer-free, thank God! But, when she got her clearance and we all took a sigh of relief, that was the moment I thought, ‘Life is short, what am I doing? I want to try learning to write. I Googled creative writing courses and found one at my local university and that was really the start of this whole process.
I hadn’t appreciated that during the year you write the first draft of a novel and I applied at the very last minute. It was all very eleventh-hour stuff. I came up with the idea on the spot as part of that application process and wrote half of it during that year at uni.
It was one of those things I’d always wanted to do, but to take that step took 20 years.
Had you always been drawn to crime writing? You mentioned you were writing stories on the side when you were a lawyer. Was it crime fiction that you were exploring?
I actually wrote a play. I wrote a kids book. I don’t even read huge amounts in the crime genre. It was an accident. I was trying to come up with an idea for this uni course and, what do they say to new writers? Write what you know. So I thought, okay, I could write about being a finance lawyer but no one’s going to read that book. I don’t want to write that book. So, the other thing I know about is being a mum and I could write about that motherhood bond and that fear of something happening to your child. That Tilly and Skye relationship was the first kernel of the book. Then I started thinking about Skye being married to someone in a really unbalanced relationship. I’ve always been interested in power imbalances, whether that’s across a workplace, or society, or in a marriage, I was thinking about what this family would be that she’s married into.
Then they became the vile, super-wealthy Turner family.
Then there was the idea of what if the threat to the child was coming from within the child’s own family. So I accidentally stumbled into that thriller, crime territory. It was kind of annoying because then I had to go away and do all this research. What happens if there is a homicide? That’s definitely not my background.
It would be much better if I was a criminal lawyer. So the story definitely came almost accidentally.
Was your legal background an asset in building this novel?
It’s an interesting question because it was really helpful but maybe not in the obvious way. Even in my area of law you have to be able to research and so I definitely got into the nitty-gritty and the procedures because I wanted it to be credible if someone from law enforcement was reading the book. I wanted to be sure I’d covered all that off. But at the same time I came through corporate law at a time when there was some really bad behaviour. I started my first law firm job in 2000 and I worked in the UK and I studied in the States so I’ve been around the block and I’ve worked with some very powerful people, and some very wealthy people. Not necessarily on the Turner’s scale, but you do see that collision of power and money and the toxicity it can breed.
Although the characters are of course all fictional, there are definitely personalities that I came across that have come through in some of the characters. Particularly in the gaslighting and the sense of privileged entitlement that characterises the Turner men. Needless to say I’m glad that I’m not in that world anymore. I know that there’s much better behaviour now and it’s certainly not limited to corporate law. I know that across a lot of industries women put up with some pretty bad behaviour but we still can’t take for granted that it’s gone or that it’s disappeared forever. I think there’s still this vein of misogyny that we have to be really vigilant to ensure it doesn’t creep back into society.
Did you have any subject matter experts that you drew on to create the world?
The main area was actually, because Mei is half-Chinese, half-Irish, I was very conscious that it is a controversial decision to write a character from a different ethnic background. So, I spoke to friends who are mixed race or of Chinese heritage to talk about their experience in Sydney or in Auckland growing up because I wanted to be as authentic as possible.
The reason that I wanted Mei to have that background was that she popped into my head that way, which is very bizarre, I can’t really explain that, but I think I was conscious that Sydney is a cosmopolitan, contemporary city. Not everybody is white. But I really wanted to do some homework. I definitely spoke to quite a number of people to get that right.
What about that rarified world made it so tempting and fun for the setting of a crime novel?
I found it really fun to do the research on the homes and the boats. Through my work and some contacts I have visited places like that, so part of it was from personal experience. There is something that draws us to the super wealthy and I think it’s escapism. I think it is people wanting to see a dollop of schadenfreude. These people might be super wealthy but have actually got super-sized problems as well. People like to see them get their comeuppance as well.
For me as a writer, I began writing the Turner family and I just wanted to explore this whole imbalance. I think when you have a lot of wealth, the decks are stacked against a character like Skye. And even Mei.
The other characters are really going to have to work extra hard to defeat the obstacles put in their way when people have that much power and influence. I started the book halfway through 2022, so it was just after the MeToo movement and Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, all those kinds of guys were all over lots of lots of documentaries and I’d just read She Said by New York Times journalists Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, so I think I was also influenced a little by those personalities; people hiding in plain sight who’d just been offending so egregiously for so long and yet nobody did anything about it. It just took such courage from some people to start to tip the scales.
See How They Fall follows the stories of two women, Skye, who married into the glittering world of the Turners and Mei, a detective with a complicated past. Did you always want to tell the story from the inside and the outside? Why did you make that choice and did it complicate the writing process?
It came as a secondary thing. It started with Skye’s story and I knew that because that story was so claustrophobic I did need an external perspective. So I originally had a character who was a journalist, but because the journalist was still one step removed from the investigation I realised reluctantly that it was going to have to be a detective. And I say reluctantly because of this whole procedural element that I had hoped to somehow get around.
It actually worked really well, slipping in and out, until I was about two-thirds of the way through the book and a whole heap of stuff had to happen, procedurally. It actually ended up being quite helpful. I’ve worked this out with writing. You’ve got to write yourself into a corner and it actually helps.
The novel has some great twists. How did you construct them? Did you come up with the twist, and then reverse-engineer the rest of the story? Or do you build them in after?
With this book, I knew there was going to be a death at the beginning, and I knew the very final twist. But I had no idea of anything in between. I think what was helpful was because I wasn’t writing this to be a published book, I was doing it initially just for a uni course, I was happy to take my time just to see what happened. I think it’s harder when you’ve got a publisher and a deadline. I read a couple of craft books where they talk about you needing a big turn at the mid-point. So, I suppose it naturally developed.
The hardest chapter was the first chapter to write because I wanted to set up everything to give people a fighting chance to, not necessarily work out everything that was going on, but not to get to the end and feel cheated. I had to keep going back to that first chapter which drove me bananas. I got to a point where I was like, ‘I can’t read this again.’
You mentioned earlier that you read really widely and also that you hadn’t particularly intended to write a crime novel. I would love to hear what reading you did to prepare to write this book. Did you reach for some crime stalwarts?
There’s a book by Ursula Le Guin called Steering the Craft. That was quite useful. There’s also a book called Save the Cat Writes a Novel that someone in my class recommended and that’s very formulaic. But it was quite useful in the editing process.
In terms of the books I was reading, none of them were crime books, which might be really bad, or maybe good. The problem with reading a lot of crime books is I find a lot of them have very one-dimensional female characters. Especially in thrillers. I just wanted the characters to be real women characters, and women I could encounter in my real life rather than hard-boiled detectives who are, you know, have been alcoholics and live alone. I just didn’t want to go down that pathway.
I was reading a lot of quite feminist books. I read Wifedom by Anna Funder, which is so different from what I have written, but again that’s a book that deals with imbalance in relationships.
I was probably reading stuff that was quite different and I don’t know if that influences what I was doing, but, if I’m reading really beautiful literary writing it can only improve my own writing. Even though I wouldn’t presume to put myself in the company of these wonderful writers, it’s like playing tennis. If you’re playing tennis against someone much better than you, you tend to improve. I think it’s the same with reading and writing. If you’re reading the great novelists, it can only help you lift your game.
You’re writing your next book. Will it be a stand-alone story or will we see some recurring characters?
Mei possibly may come back but I think it definitely will be a stand-alone novel. It’s about three middle-aged sisters who live in Sydney. Two of them are preposterously wealthy and one of them is a scientist. One of them gets bumped off in the first chapter, so it’s a similar format. It’s a mystery, whodunnit, but I think this time I’m going to delve much more into the tensions and pressures for a woman in mid-life but also the importance of family. We’ll see how it goes!
Read the book review here.
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