The Girl Below (39 page)

Arriving back in London at the age of fifteen, I was appalled to discover that I no longer fit in at the school I had dreamed of returning to. (This, after two years in New Zealand of pretending, for the sake of survival, not to be British.) I had changed, become something else: the perpetual outsider, a writer in training—the member of a club that no one wants to belong to at that age.

A few years later, when my mother and I took a train to Cambridge University, where I was to be interviewed for a place, I gazed around at the absurdly beautiful grounds of Emmanuel College and felt almost seismically, if a little longingly, out of place. I was suddenly aware in a visceral way that nothing in my heritage had prepared me for this. It didn’t make sense. I had gone to a fancy academic school, my grades were good enough to get me an interview, and yet, walking into the dean’s office to be grilled, what I felt was a profound lack of entitlement.

I didn’t get in. I went to art school for a few months, dropped out, then went to New Zealand for a holiday, and ended up staying a decade.

Almost ten years after that, I’m still here.

In between those two decades Down Under, just like Suki, I went back to London at the age of twenty-eight to see if I had made the right decision. I had left in such an unplanned fashion, so impulsively, that I didn’t ever feel as though I had chosen to live in New Zealand but had simply washed up here, a beached pilot whale. In the meantime, I had picked up the disease that afflicts almost every New Zealander: a crippling insecurity that living on a tiny island in the Pacific makes us less sophisticated, less interesting, less intelligent than people in other parts of the world. The only cure for this provincialism is to escape.

What happened to me on that trip back to London is a bit like what happened to Suki, only without all the time travel, grisly discoveries, and underage sex. In other words: nothing like it at all, except in spirit. I did feel locked out of my childhood, that I no longer belonged in the place that had once been my home. It wasn’t a happy experience, but it was at least decisive.

After six months, I returned to New Zealand, where I had perched for ten years without ever feeling settled, and claimed it as my home. I got married (to a misplaced South African writer) and had a son (with a Greek name, Hector), who will no doubt grow up wondering why he doesn’t quite feel like a New Zealander. I stopped thinking I would have been smarter, better educated, a better writer, had I stayed in England and started to feel lucky that I had lived in a place that had allowed me to gain so much experience in so many different areas. The patchwork career is a uniquely New Zealand thing, and in my twenties I had tried my hand at journalism, screenwriting, radio producing, documentary-making, and even DJing, all fields that, in England, are too competitive to be able to dabble in.

I felt luckier still that I had grown up in a place as stimulating as London but that I wasn’t still trying to live there, where the living isn’t easy. I started to enjoy all things that had made me different, insecure about my place in the world—faux-English and a half-baked New Zealander—and then I started to write about them.

About the book

Getting to Know
The Girl Below

Journalist Emily Simpson interviews her friend, Bianca Zander, about the book.

Suki grows up in London and spends periods of her life in New Zealand and Greece—as did you. Clearly there are some autobiographical elements, but are there aspects of Suki’s character that you definitely don’t share?

When people ask if my novel is about me, I say that it’s geographically autobiographical, in that Suki and I both grew up in London, then returned there at the same age (twenty-eight), after living in New Zealand for ten years. However, what happens to Suki in London is, by anyone’s standards, fairly fantastical, and nothing like that ever happened to me.

Where it gets tricky though is that the psychological arc underpinning the book is one that I share with Suki—I definitely had some of the same epiphanies that she does. In that sense, it’s a deeply personal book, and intentionally so.

In fact, one of the hardest things to do in the later stages of writing the book was to remain true to my twenty-eight-year-old self. The writing process took five years, and in that time I got married, became a mother, and did a lot of growing up, but I couldn’t retrospectively go and give Suki more wisdom than she could be expected to have at that age. As a character, she seems self-absorbed to me now, quite screwed up, but when I started writing the book, I couldn’t see that stuff about her—I was too much like that myself.

Having convinced everyone that the events of the novel are not autobiographical, I’m now going to turn that on its head. One of the weirdest and most fantastical incidents in the book— the hand in the cupboard at the start of chapter two—is lifted straight out of my childhood. I too had a playful hand in the cupboard that came out and untied the bows on my dresses, and this memory, however bizarre, is very vivid, very fixed.

Significantly, it was this hand in the cupboard that kicked off the whole novel. I started writing
The Girl Below
in 2007, in a summer writing class at Victoria University, Wellington, taught by American writer Curtis Sittenfeld. (It was in this class that my writing group, The Sittenfelds, was born.) Sittenfeld assigned us a writing exercise and a scene about the hand in the cupboard is what I came up with—and everyone went, “Wow!” Prior to that, I had written screenplays and attempted a few short stories, but nothing, ever, with a magical realism bent. I had tried something new, and suddenly everyone was responding to it. From that moment on, I sort of became fearless in terms of what I could dream up, what I could imagine. Whether or not the hand was “real,” I have a lot to thank it for.

You’ve written a ghostly novel. Was this hard to manage as a writer, without it dissolving into B-grade horror or comedy? What was your touchstone for this—other fiction or experiences of your own?

I read some great advice, while I was writing
The Girl Below
, that was about getting readers to believe in magical or fantasy elements that crop up in otherwise believable worlds—as opposed to writing in the fantasy genre, where the entire world is make-believe. The advice was basically that the more far-fetched the scene, then the plainer and less adorned your writing should be. (This advice applied in reverse, too, in that a mundane scene about plumbing could be made less so with metaphor and so on.) I had already been doing this to a certain extent—my natural writing style is quite unadorned, typical ex-journalist—but after reading that advice, I kept things very matter-of-fact.

Another thing that came in handy is that I have what you might call an architecture fetish. As a kid, I liked to draw plans of boats and buildings, and imagine myself in the spaces I had created. My writing is full of that, almost like a tic, but I think it does have the handy side effect of tethering the reader within a concrete physical space while something fantastical is going on.

I actually don’t read a lot of contemporary magical realism— especially the whimsical chocolate-shop sort—but the books I most loved as a child were of that ilk. Books like
The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland
, and
The Phoenix and the Carpet
(E. Nesbit) were huge for me, and I wanted to re-create that slightly woozy feeling of entering an imaginary world.

Probably the last great magical novel I read, as a teenager, was Margaret Mahy’s
The Changeover
. Then throughout my twenties I read mostly realist novels.

All that changed when I discovered Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. In his novels anything is possible, but the crazy stuff happens alongside episodes of listening to jazz records and eating bowls of ramen noodles. He takes his characters on these mind-bending metaphysical journeys, but they are always rooted in a recognizable reality— and the language is so plain it’s almost casual. If I hadn’t read Murakami, I don’t think I would have realized how far out you can take your adult reader without losing them. His books are extremely compelling, even when they don’t make sense.

Just getting back to “the hand in the cupboard,” you’ve said people responded to it and that it opened doors for you as a writer, but which doors were they? Why do you mix that magical element in with what is otherwise quite autobiographical realism?

What appeals to me about magic realism, as opposed to straight realism, is that you can use the uncanny to explain psychological truths that are difficult to approach head-on or to write about in a literal way.

Before I discovered Murakami, I went through a Jung phase, reading about his theories of the subconscious and dream symbolism. (Note that I read
about
his theories; Jung’s actual writing is unreadable.) Then I read an amazing book about the meaning of myth and fairy tale that is disguised as a self-help book and whose title is so off-putting that most serious writers wouldn’t go near it:
Women Who Run with the Wolves
, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, is weapons-grade Secret Women’s Business, but it’s also the book that, for me, unlocked the secret language of storytelling. (I may be opening myself up for ridicule here . . .)

Estés’s book explains why myths and fairy tales (and ergo, magic realism) can be so powerful, and why they don’t always make sense—so much brutality, no neat or happy endings. The reason is that fairy tales explain psychological truths—the murky stuff of the subconscious—and such dark matter is not always understood by, or very appealing to, the conscious mind.

So part of what I was trying to do with
The Girl Below
was to tell a story on two levels: to harness the subterranean power of myth and fairy tale but without alienating the modern reader who doesn’t go in for that kind of thing.

As I explain all of this, I’m very conscious that I might not have succeeded in achieving what I set out to do, which is also the answer to why so many novelists write the same book twenty times over. They’re just trying to nail that one thing they want to say.

Going back to Murakami, his books are often quite perplexing because they contain metaphysical riddles, but he generally doesn’t solve them. Their dream logic cannot necessarily be decoded, even by a skilled interpreter— or Jungian shrink. Now, I was aiming to create a psychological metaphor, not a riddle, but that enigmatic quality is a huge part of Murakami’s appeal, and I was very mindful, particularly in the later stages of writing, that I didn’t want to give the reader all of the answers. The books I most enjoy are the ones where the reader has to do a bit of work.

Having started out as a journalist, you’ve said it took seven years to properly shed that mind-set in order to write fiction. What is it about that background that hampers creative writing?

It has to do with finding an authentic voice. I was a feature writer, not a news reporter, but a lot of what you do in journalism in general is strike a pose. You have a certain number of pages to fill about a topic, and often you adopt a persona or a standpoint because that makes it easier to write and more interesting to read. You manufacture an opinion that sounds authentic but often isn’t, not really. You’re always one step removed.

I didn’t discover this inauthenticity, this pose, until I tried to write fiction. Everything I wrote at first was false. I would try so hard to be clever, but always the feedback I got was that my stories lacked heart. I was completely miffed, of course, because the feedback I’d always had about my journalism was that it was a little too “creative.” I was always teetering on the edge of actually making things up for the sake of a more entertaining read. I took this criticism very personally too. If my writing lacked heart, perhaps I lacked it as well. Then gradually, it dawned on me that I had to stop being clever, stop posing, and expose something of my inner workings on the page. Fiction is the opposite of journalism in that instead of trying to make facts sound interesting, you’re making stuff up that has to come across as real. In fiction, you have to write honestly about all the emotions that make you human—rage, humiliation, sadness, shame—and you can’t write about them as though other people experience those things but you don’t. This is risky stuff, and in the beginning you feel very exposed. But then, when you get it right, people don’t say, “You’re a weirdo.” They say, “There is a sense of a soul underneath the words.” So, yeah, you have to put a piece of your soul into it or it comes across as phony.

The process I have just described took about seven years, which is why, I think, it’s wrongheaded to think you can take a year off your journalism job and spit out a novel.

You also have screenwriting experience. How does that influence you as a novelist?

It makes me enter a scene late and leave early! This is one of the fundamentals of screenwriting. You never, ever start a scene with someone opening a door and saying hello to the person outside. If you do start with a door, there has to be a surprise waiting on the other side—it isn’t who was expected, or the expected person is wearing a gorilla suit. Small talk, introductions, are superfluous. You cut all that out and you start straight in with the nitty-gritty. What needs to happen in this scene to move the story forward?

It also influences the way I write dialogue. Rarely do people say what they mean, or even what they are really thinking, in a conversation. The interesting stuff goes on underneath, in subtext. Every time your characters speak, they have an agenda, and you’re trying to tease that out. That’s why two characters discussing their political viewpoints sounds so dreadful, so false, but it happens all the time in novels— never in films or in real life. There are some points in the novel where my characters speak exposition—they reveal something that happened in the past for the sake of driving the plot forward—and let’s just say, I wish I knew how to avoid that.