Ep. 224: Abigail Dean on Writing (Very Deliciously) Dark

How do you write dark? Like, REALLY dark? Abigail Dean tells us.

Abigail Dean works as a lawyer for Google, and before that was a bookseller. She lives in London, and is working on her second novel. Girl A is her first novel, just out in the United States after a competitive international auction that saw the book sell in 25 territories. It’s been optioned for TV rights for a limited series with Johan Renck, the Emmy winner from HBO’s critical and commercial hit “Chernobyl,” attached to direct.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

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Transcript

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #224 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. And I’m so pleased that you are with me here today to talk to Abigail Dean. Y’all, this book rocked my world. This was such a great book and it was so dark and it got me really excited about reading dark again. You know, 2020 kind of took a little bit of a, you know, the glow off of darkness? Is that a thing? I’m not even going to rerecord this because you understand what I mean. Like, I didn’t really want to read that dark in 2020, but I tell you what, 2021 looking a tiny bit brighter, the tiniest and I’m back into reading dark thriller. So, I will speak to, what’s been going on around here for just a second, and then I want to go back to talking about Abigail Dean before we start talking to her.  

[00:01:10] So, personal update around here, I’m just chugging along. It feels really, really great, as I have said multiple times, to be well enough to be back in the chair. I am working on, it feels like a million different projects at once, but I am doing it in big chunks, according to my new schedule, which is just brilliant each day that I’m on. For example, today’s Thursday, talking Thursday. Each day that I’m on, I always decide that it’s my favorite until I get to the next day when I decide that that’s my favorite. So I think that’s a really, really great sign as to how things are going around here. I did finish the read for revision of the Quincy book and I’m plunging tomorrow into starting to write a synopsis of it, which I will use to guide our revision eventually. And I did a bunch of work on this nonfiction book yesterday. Things are just going really well. Knock all the wood that is around. 90 day classes are going great and my students are just kicking ass and they’re getting stuff done and I’m really proud about them. Proud about them? Yes. I’m proud of them as well.

[00:02:18] How about you? Are you getting your work done? You are listening to this podcast because you are a writer. I know that. So, if you’re not getting any work done, try to get some done. Just a little bit crappy first drafts are what we make people. That’s what we do. They’re not going to be good. I say this all the time, because it takes a long time for this really, really to sink into people’s brains. It took me, being a professional full-time writer, for years before it sunk into my brain. Oh, that my crappy first drafts, they were never going to be good. I was never going to finally get good enough to make a good first draft. It doesn’t happen. Crappy first drafts are what we do or what 99% of writers do. So, write some crappy first draft words and then tell me about it. Okay. So we’re going to go back to talking about Abigail Dean. This book is called “Girl A” and I talked to her about the prologue, which I thought was fascinating. It’s very short. It’s one page. And I asked her permission to read this to you, and then we’re going to talk about it in the interview and you can see what she does with this, but, oh, it’s good. No spoilers. Again, this is just the first page, prologue of the book. 

[00:03:44] You don’t know me, but you’ll have seen my face. In the earlier pictures, they bludgeoned our features with pixels right down to our waists. Even our hair was too distinctive to disclose. But the story and his protectors grew weary. And in the danker corners of the internet, we became easy to find. The favored photograph was taken in front of the house on Moorewoods road, early on a September evening. We had filed out and lined up. Six of us, in height order and Noah in Ethan’s arms while father arranged the composition. Little white wraiths squirming in the sunshine. Behind us, the house rested in the last of the day’s light, shadows spreading from the windows and the door. We were still and looking at the camera. It should have been perfect. But just before father pressed the button, Evie squeezed my hand and turned up her face toward me. In the photograph, she’s just about to speak and my smile is starting to curl. I don’t remember what she said, but I’m quite sure that we paid for it later. 

[00:04:53] Oh, okay. And then the next line, that’s the prologue. The next line is I arrived at the prison in the mid afternoon. Tell me that you would not have to keep reading that. That prologue just knocked me out and I wanted to talk to her about how she came up with it, what it meant to her, how she does this. It’s one of those things that, you know, I went back to kind of take apart. There’s a “sweetness” to it, you know, a childlike sweetness at the end when she’s smiling at her sister, but there’s also that foreboding sense of menace and dread that just hangs over it. I just think she is phenomenal. So let’s leap into the podcast now and you’ll be able to hear me talk with Abigail Dean and, I think you all should read Girl A. Right, I also think you all should be doing your own writing, which is why you’re here while you’re listening. And, I know that you can do it. I know it’s hard and I know that you can do it. All right, happy writing.

[00:05:59 Hey, is resistance keeping you from writing? Are you looking for an actual writing community in which you can make a calls and be held accountable for them? Join RachaelSaysWrite, like twice weekly, two hour writing session on zoom. You can bop in and out of the writing room as your schedule needs, but for just $39 a month, you can write up to 4 hours a week. With our wonderful little community, in which you’ll actually get to know your writing peers. We write from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Thursdays and that’s US Pacific Standard Time. Go to RachaelHerron.com/Write to find out more.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:40] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show, Abigail Dean. Hello, Abigail. 

Abigail Dean: [00:06:46] Hi, Rachael, thank you so much for having me on as well. 

Rachael Herron: [00:06:49] I was, I was just bending your ear with what I thought about your book, but I want to talk about it a lot more today with a little intro here. Abigail Dean. Wow. I’m very excited. Abigail Dean works as a lawyer for Google, and before that was a bookseller. She lives in London, and is working on her second novel. Girl A is her first novel, just out in the United States after a competitive international auction that saw the book sell in 25 territories. It’s been optioned for TV rights for a limited series with Johan Renck, the Emmy winner from HBO’s critical and commercial hit “Chernobyl,” attached to direct. So, first of all, just, wow, flipping wow, I loved your book, couldn’t put it down, at all. How are you feeling about all of this like, sudden critical, big attention, just blowing up in your face? How does that feel?

Abigail Dean: [00:07:42] So I’m probably just going to sound completely, inarticulate. Because I, like, I don’t know really how I feel like I think I’m still in a bit of a state of shock. And you know, I think the shock is like 90% joyful and 10% terrified, I’d say. Like the best thing is, the characters being out there in the world and people getting to know the characters and, you know, as a reader like of my life, I’ve had known, I have so many relationships with so many characters, you know, you feel like I’ve loved them and I have detested them. And I think that hearing from readers that they have felt that way, about the characters, that’s the best feeling in the world. So yeah, kind of, a lot of joy, and then I think, inevitably a tiny bit of terror because there’s some exposure, of course, in terms of, you know, a small piece of your heart being out there. It’s a strange feeling as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:48] And Lex, the main character is so perfectly drawn. And without any spoilers, I will say that at the 25% mark, after we have, I was trying to figure it out as a writer, you know, why did we just go from first person into this third person? Why, why am I, why am I here with this male character? And then, Lex communicates with him at the very end of that scene and says, hello. And I burst into tears, at the 25% mark. Like that doesn’t ha, I don’t cry in books anyway. I just thought it was beautiful. It was beautiful. It was such. It was also such a dark book that dragged me through it. And I am a, you know, a psychological thriller junkie, I read them all. I’ve almost been feeling bored lately. I feel like I’ve seen all the angles and yours was fresh and new and beautifully, absolutely beautifully written. The way that you write characters is stunning. But what I wanted to talk about real quickly first is just before in the intro, I will have read the very short prologue to your book. And I wanted to read it because I think it is an absolutely brilliant way of capturing the reader’s attention and giving them just enough information to peak their interest in a way that is, it is absolutely impossible not to turn the next page because we must know more. And this is a very technical question, only the writers will be interested in it, but at what point did that scene arise? Either being written or when you knew it was the start of the book? 

Abigail Dean: [00:10:21] It was there from the beginning. It was like the first scene written. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:26] Holy crap. 

Abigail Dean: [00:10:26] Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:27] I was sure you would say like, no, that was impossible to come to. That’s amazing. 

Abigail Dean: [00:10:33] I think that what the reason, like the reason behind it was, I am a true crime junkie, you know. I’m like, I’ve listened to the podcasts, I’ve watched the TV shows. And I, you know, I think often in these cases there is this defining photograph or this defining image. And that’s how you know, that the people who were involved in that, in that instance, that’s kind of what these human beings, I think, sometimes are almost like reduced to and compacted into like these images that we kind of remember for years after. And I think in a way I wanted it to be like, sometimes that’s the end of the story, and that’s all you, that’s all you get. But in a way for, yeah, so for Girl A, I was, I wanted that to be the beginning of the story and then, everything that comes after the, you know, the rest of the novel is how the Gracie family, you know, who are they really? You know, this photo is such a, it’s defining, but at the same time, it’s completely not defining it. It’s like the tiniest tip of, of this iceberg of them, of what they’ve been through and, and the people they’ve become as well. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:53] So, okay. I love all this. So for a debut novel, did not read as a debut, it read as I, and I feel like I am, you know, covelling and waxing repsotic even too much, but it read like a masterpiece in thriller. Where is your writing history? I know you’re a lawyer, which is all writing and there are so many lawyers who then move into writing or the other way, is that part of it? Or where else do you come from in writing? 

Abigail Dean: [00:12:19] So I think it’s, I’ve been writing a lot since I was really little, like really, really little. And my, my mom has recently unearthed like some fantastic line of two pages of a four stapled together, I was like, yeah, this is my serious novel and I’m six. 

Rachael Herron: [00:12:36] How cute.

Abigail Dean: [00:12:37] Everyone has to read it. Yeah. It’s like, thanks mum, very much. Just what I, just I always wanted. And you know, I filled notebooks, with various stories and a lot of them were dark as well. I think, you know, in a pretty early age, I was sort of often writing once it was the soft toys. You know, basically someone’s had a bad time and then it was like the Barbies and they had a pretty bad time as well. And as a teenager, I also wrote a lot of fan fiction. Huge amounts of fan fiction.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:12] I don’t do it. That’s such a good training ground. I think. 

Abigail Dean: [00:13:17] Yeah. It’s one of those strange, strange things isn’t it? I don’t know if it’s, because it’s something that, you know, teenage girls often do and sometimes people like, well, your teenage girls, what are, what do they know? You know, fan fiction has, seems to somehow have a really bad reputation, but it’s an awesome way of writing and, you know, I can’t think of a, yeah. As a writer as well, they, I can’t think of a greater compliment in a way than people wanting to make your characters their own in a particular way. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:49] What was your favorite fandom that you were writing in? If you don’t mind sharing.

Abigail Dean: [00:13:52] No, that’s okay. I am. So I was a big gamer and I wrote a lot of like final fantasy. Fantasy seven and eight was my, was my light fandom at the time. And I still, they were still great. They are still great stories and incredibly inspiring stories that, yeah, I still like look back and I’m like, incredible inspiration.

Rachael Herron: [00:14:15] I just absolutely love that. Okay. So what, so you’re busy, you’re a lawyer where, where, how do you get the writing done? Where does this fit into your life? 

Abigail Dean: [00:14:24] So, for Girl A, I took some time off to start writing. It had been a case that in my twenties, I just, I basically just worked for at least sort of six, seven years, at that time, and I kind of didn’t write at all. You know, I would, I was doing like lawyer writing, so I was writing contracts and writing emails, many emails. But I kind of let writing slip away a little. And I was sort of coming with my 30th birthday and was like, why have you kind of abandoned this thing that you absolutely loved, you know, this long standing ambition and, and yeah. But more than ambition, I think, really just the thing that, you know, was probably for me, the most satisfying thing that I can do. So yeah, I decided to just sort of shake things up a bit and I left my job at a law firm, which we had incredibly demanding hours, lots of travel time, and spent three months, basically just sitting in my local library and, and starting to write Girl A. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:42] So it wasn’t even a, it wasn’t even a sabbatical. You, you quit, to do this?

Abigail Dean: [00:15:48] Yeah, I, I did. 

Rachael Herron: [00:15:49] Wow. How did that feel?

Abigail Dean: [00:15:50] I had. So I should, I want to be totally frank. I am a risky, a risk averse, lawyer standard, and I had another job lined up at the end of the three months. So I didn’t, I didn’t kind of quit, without anything, anything waiting, but I did, I, you know, it felt. Even just having a three months where you’re unpaid and you’re like, okay, I’m gonna see how this goes. I sort of made a bit of a deal with myself that if I was going to do it, I had to actually write, you know. Like, I have as much temptation as anyone to lie in bed and read and then watch Netflix. And I was like, okay, you know, you’re taking three months off. You have to actually, show up every day, you know, it doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to write X number of words a day, but you do need to show up and try and that was the deal, for that. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:49] Did you get most of the book done in that three months or was that the start of it? 

Abigail Dean: [00:16:54] It was the start. I had really grand ideas, you know, I saw myself like just getting this first draft, just getting it out in three months. And, yeah, that did not happen. I got about, maybe a third to a half of the way back and then it was another nine months of evenings and weekends and just, you know, just finding time, wherever I could. Like, I’m a big, I think a lot of the time I’d been quite precious about how I wrote. And I think one of the reasons I didn’t write in my twenties was I had ideas that I needed to be sitting in silence with like, you know, writing by hand, have like hours of time. And a lot of Girl A was written, you know, I would wrote on the note section of my phone. I wrote, you know, sometimes by hand, sometimes with a laptop, like whatever was easiest. And I think I kind of had to let go of those notions that the muse was going to like, come on, find me in my bedroom because yeah, it didn’t and you know, some scenes were difficult and challenging. I didn’t want to write them, but, yeah, it was, it was a much more mundane exercise than I had allowed myself previously to think. 

Rachael Herron: [00:18:17] That is such a deep comment and I want listeners to really hear that writing is just, work a day, so much of the time. Even when we’re very excited, we show up when we do the work. We kind of touched on this when we were chatting before, but how. So you’re writing dark stuff and I love writing dark stuff. And I just want to know how much do you have to do of self-care when you’re writing this? Because I sometimes worry about myself that I don’t need to do very much. Like even writing and thinking about dark stuff, kind of lights me up and I’m a really positive, well-lit soul probably. But, as I was telling you, I told my wife the idea for this new book and she was like, I can’t, I don’t know if I can live with a person who just thought of that idea. And I’m like, this is the best. I’m so excited. How do you handle writing that darkness and being in the world?

Abigail Dean: [00:19:07] I think there is definitely a big contrast between my writing and my personality. Kind of as, as you exactly, as you’ve sort of said, Rachael, you know, I think my, my husband would read some chapters of Girl A and, you know, he was kind of like, I, sometimes you, where does this come from? 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:25] Are you okay? Yeah. 

Abigail Dean: [00:19:28] Yeah, yeah, slightly. And, you know, I think if me, it is obviously, it’s fiction and, I think that I do have to be a little careful at times. I think, especially, I write often quite late into the evening. It’s kind of one of the times I actually really liked to write and I kind of have to stop doing that a bit. It was a pace that, you know, you go to sleep and I think the characters are sometimes still there, or they’re even worse, maybe that they kind of where you left them. And, that was a strange, and that was a surprise to me that I was actually like, oh, maybe this, you know, this is affecting you. And I’m obviously, there’s also the, there’s the constant reminder I think, that this is something that happens to people and you know, that I think is something that you need to be incredibly sensitive about writing, I certainly found, and I’m really kind of do consider the gravity of that. I think in a way as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:20:33] I love how, and again, no spoilers, but we’re dealing with Lex’s basically mental health and in most ways, not always, but in most ways she’s come out this very, very strong, beautiful person with a support system that is also beautiful. And I just, I really love that. I found a lot of inspiration in that. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? 

Abigail Dean: [00:20:59] I think my biggest challenge is probably, it probably is the showing up and the finding time. I think that, you know, for Girl A, I had the, just this luxury of that, of that period off. And I think that after that, you know, it, there is always the temptation of, of doing other things. And, you know, I think especially sometimes when being fortunate enough to be published in a way, sometimes that means there’s even more distractions. You know, it’s fantastic to connect with readers on social media and, you know, especially at this time at such a joy and, I think that all of those things, though, I know the way I try to sort of overcome that weakness and that challenge is very little as ever as satisfying as just a really good day of writing. You know all the kinds of feedback and reviews in the world are very unlikely to ever be a satisfying as when you’re like, yes. Like when you look back the next day and you’re like, that was a really good day, like I’m happy with those paragraphs. And I tried to cling to that a bit. Yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:16] How is the writing of the second book going? Cause I really struggled with my second novel. How, are you, are you having second book blues or is it just going well? 

Abigail Dean: [00:22:26] It’s gone in different, it’s gone very differently at different times over the last year, I would say. At present, it’s going pretty well, and I feel like I’m getting there. Things are kind of really moving into place, some sort of getting that. For me, I think, you know, needs to be an obsession in some ways, you know, but I need to be thinking about the characters when I’m out for a walk or when I’m like, you know, unstacking the dishwasher, you know, they’re kind of, I’m thinking of them and trying to sort of, you know, think what, what they, what they’ll do next and think about the conversations that they are going to have. And it took a while with this, with this novel to, to get to that stage. I think it took a while for the obsession to set, to set in. I think I was maybe a bit stuck with the Gracie family and with Girl A. And I think now I’m there and that feels really, really good, like they’re my obsession now, rather than a Lex and her story. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:27] Oh good. What’s really nice is that now the rest of the world has this obsession with Lex and it just, we’re recording on February 4th and it just released in the US I think two days ago, right? 

Abigail Dean: [00:23:40] Yeah, that’s right. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:42] I’m looking forward to this one climbing the charts. I really, really am. So no, I mean, not to make anything more intense, but I just, I can see this rocketing to the top. When, so talking about writing, can you share a craft tip with us that you use in your writing? 

Abigail Dean: [00:24:01] Yes, I, yeah, I think I can. So I think I said before about kind of using notes on my phone, as a sort of way that I write and I kind of do that very, very sort of consistently. So I sort of try to use, I think I try to use kind of my phone in terms of it being something I have to hand as a way of kind of planning and writing. So I write, and I promise this is not a promotion. I always feel very guilty saying this. I write on Google doc, this is not a promotion. Something I find really useful is, is having that the manuscript in one Google docs file. And I, as I sort of think of different things, different points that need to happen later in the manuscript, I just drop them in to the bottom of the file. And sort of in a way that I find that by doing that, the plan, almost shapes itself. So you have kind of everything you’ve actually written so far. And then underneath that you have featured kind of snippets of dialogue and you have a kind of vague plan of the plot. And I think it just means that as you get to future scenes, you find that you’ve already got, you’ve got kind of little guiding beacons, I guess, in a way that you’ve added in the past. I find it’s a way that the, you know, a way of planning that doesn’t feel like planning. It still feels like it has an imagination, imaginative side to it. And yeah, it just means they feel, you never come into a scene completely blind or clueless because you might’ve already left yourself little, little assists, I guess, to help guide the way.

Rachael Herron: [00:25:53] Yeah. You’re never alone on the page there’s always something below you to kind of catch you almost. I would love to ask a direct question about something you’re so good at, and that I really struggle with, which is character description. You have a way of- I really believe that, when we’re describing characters who may not be the most important characters in the book, the best way to do it is with a sentence or two that are extremely explicitly clear and visual, and then leave them alone for the rest of the book and you do it so beautifully. There was one where I think the person was just described as looking round and damp, with round and damp hands and around a damp body. And it was so good. Is this something you consciously think of or is there something that just comes out of your fingers? 

Abigail Dean: [00:26:38] I think it is something that I am that I think of quite a bit, yeah. It’s, there is an amazing book that I’ve certainly found really, really useful, which is called “How Fiction Works” by James Woods. I think he’s a critic for the, I think he’s a critic for the New York Times, I want to say, but I might have that wrong. I found that incredibly, and it just has some fantastic little insights into sort of describing characters, and it is one of the sort of, I don’t tend to, I try not to read too many kinds of books about writing because I feel like it can kind of often throw you slightly off course, but this is one that I kind of, I read probably for the first time, like by my late teens and I’ve kind of kept returning to it. But another thing I would say that, that I found really useful for, for kind of character descriptions, is actually songs. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:38] Really?

Abigail Dean: [00:27:39] Song lyric. Yeah. I think it’s a case that, you know, in a song you maybe have like what I mean, like in terms of word count, you probably have it down, maybe in the tens, I’m not sure, maybe a little more early hundreds. There are some, artists though, I think, so vividly draw characters, 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:04] That’s so good.

Abigail Dean: [00:28:06] In their lyrics, you know, that you really get an impression and, you know, as to who this character is, and you’re like, the artist has done that in like, you know, seconds. And I found that really, really, useful, especially what one of my, just to give an example, I think, Craig Finn, who writes the whole study. So, and as an independent artist too, he is someone whose songwriting I kind of go back to again and again, in terms of how he draws these characters, this whole cast of characters on an album in a space of like a few lines. So there, there’s a few things I tried to look to in terms of character descriptions and, and just, yeah, quite to sort of study how other people have done it and how to shape my characters that way.

Rachael Herron: [00:28:57] Well, if it gives you any pleasure to know, I always underline and highlight in my kindle the lines that then I can go back and study and there are a bunch in your book, but I was like, how did she do that? That’s amazing. Okay. So, what thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way?

Abigail Dean: [00:29:18] It’s, there’s a few, there’s a few things I think. One has been actually, I’d say it’s the support of my, of my partner. He, you know, I, I’ve known him obviously I’ve known him for a while now. And he, you know, I think you know, he’s not actually somebody who is particularly interested in writing or at all, like, he’s a big reader, but you know, he doesn’t write himself. And it was really his, his sort of encouragement towards the end of my 20 years, that did make me think, you know, maybe this is something that I should go back to. We’ve known each other for quite a few years at that point. And I’d always said, you know, I’d love to be a writer, you know. I love writing. It’d be fantastic to be a writer. And he sort of said to me, well, he is very kind of blunt and said, you know Abby, you’re probably not going to be a writer if you don’t write anything. And, 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:25] That’s a good man.

Abigail Dean: [00:30:27] It was one of those moments that, you know, it was actually a sort of epiphany moment slightly because it was very close to the bone. But I thought, you know what, that is, it still, I think the piece of advice that I keep going back to, as well. So yeah, that, and it was just, I think it just also came as a surprise because, it was one of those things that at the time it didn’t necessarily feel so supportive. It felt quite kind of a bit of a sting to, you know. 

Rachael Herron: [00:30:57] Absolutely

Abigail Dean: [00:30:58] I, it was, I think it was deeply very, very supportive, and, and a very kind of, there was a kindness to him saying that. 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:08] That is beautiful. I love that. Do you have a hard stop at the top of the hour? Or can we go a couple minutes over? 

Abigail Dean: [00:31:14] We can go over that. I don’t have a hard stop

Rachael Herron: [00:31:16] Okay. Then I’ll ask you the next couple of questions. Well actually, I guess there’s just one left, before we talk about your book, what is the best book you’ve read recently? I know what mine is. 

Abigail Dean: [00:31:28] Oh, it’s tough. Isn’t it? 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:31] No, no, mine is not tough. The best book that I’ve read recently was yours, so. 

Abigail Dean: [00:31:36] So most recently, the one I loved was Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane. I read that a month or so ago. And it was just one of those books that I found really, really moving. It is not told in a particularly kind of, emotional way. But it’s, I think it’s really a story about mental health and at about mental health at a time when it was not really understood or acknowledged. And I think what’s quite frightening is that time was not that long ago either. I think we’re talking kind of novel setting us begins at least in the seventies, I think, and yeah, just a really, really beautiful exploration of that and how it affects two particular families and in upstate New York. And it’s also a novel that I’ve, I hugely admire in terms of it deals with a really long time period, you know. Sometimes, years are told in the course of a few paragraphs, but it still managed to be really specific and really moving in spite of that, and that’s something that I kind of really admired. 

Rachael Herron: [00:32:48] Oh, thank you very much. I wrote that down, going to the top of my TVR pile. That is always a selfish question that I ask on my part. And now can you tell us, what, what is your elevator pitch for Girl A, for the people who don’t know what we’ve been talking about? 

Abigail Dean: [00:33:03] Sure. Girl A is Lex Gracie, and as a child, Lex manages to escape from her family home, which becomes known over time as the house of horrors in the press. And as she escapes, she manages to free her six brothers and sisters and exposes her parents’ crimes, which have been committed as part of a kind of religious cult, governed by her father. And Girl A opens for 15 years after that escape. By that time, Lex is a successful attorney, like she’s living in New York. And she really lives independently of her past. She does everything she can to avoid thinking about it, and that isn’t until her mother dies in prison. And when she does, she leaves Lex and her siblings, their family home, the house of horrors, where they grew up, and forces lacks as the executor, the administrator of this will to return to the UK, to reconnect with her siblings in order to decide the fate of the house and to try to turn the house into a force for good.

Rachael Herron: [00:34:24] The way that you draw the relationships between Lex and her siblings is marvelous. I, at the beginning of the book, I love talking to writers transparently about this stuff. At the beginning of the book, there were a lot of names, you know, Ethan and Noah, and I’m like, and I was like, how am I going to keep these names apart? And you worry about that as a reader moving forward. And they’re all so unique and drawn so vividly. And each such a very real relationship between all of them. It’s just, it’s just beautiful. I cannot say enough about your book. This is going to be the one I recommend to everyone who loves thriller. You know, people who love thrillers, who love a certain genre, we have, you know, the list in our phone of our best friends who only read the great stuff and I’ve already been, I’ve already emailed, I texted all of them. Just, just go by it. 

Abigail Dean: [00:35:13] Rachael, thank you. Thank you so much that just mean the world to me, like, you know, that I think having like people talking about the book and recommending it to their friends is that’s the dream, beyond the dream 

Rachael Herron: [00:35:27] It is. And I’m so glad you’re living the dream. I am going to be following your career with incredible interest and I can’t wait to buy the second book. So thank you for being on the show today. I really appreciate your time and your book. 

Abigail Dean: [00:35:41] It was wonderful to be here and yeah. Thank you to you and thank you to everyone who’s listening as well.

Rachael Herron: [00:35:46] Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.