by Holly Brown
Since I’m a practicing marriage and family therapist as well as a writer, I take my psychological fiction very seriously. I know I have to raise the stakes, since it is suspense after all, but it’s important for the plot twists to derive from who these characters are. That’s how it’ll feel credible and real. I want readers to consider what they’d do if they were presented with a series of choices always escalating in complexity. The fatal flaws of the characters consistently push them closer to an edge they never saw coming but that feels inevitable to the reader. And who among us is without flaws? Who doesn’t occasionally need a vacation from their real lives? Who doesn’t, every now and again, want what they can’t have?
Q&A with Holly Brown
Where did the idea of two women squabbling over an Airbnb-esque vacation rental property initially come from?
From my own vacation gone wrong, of course! (I’m only partially kidding.) I did stay in a rental with my family and was subsequently accused of leaving a “child-sized gray stain” on the sheets. I felt pretty offended, since my daughter was two at the time and being bathed regularly. The “host” and I went back and forth a few times, each of us increasingly aggravated with the other’s failure to see her point of view. Then she kept part of my security deposit, I left a nasty review, and that was the end of that. Until, that is, I had the idea about what kind of women would keep going, past the point of no return.
How did your profession as a marriage and family therapist influence the characters’ home and family life?
While I don’t provide substance abuse treatment to those who are addicted, I do work with their families. I counsel around enabling and codependency issues, and how to hold boundaries. There’s no way a parent can truly prepare for that most extreme scenario: having to cut off a child. It’s very much like cutting off a limb. You feel the phantom pain always. So I didn’t base Miranda on any specific client, but my professional immersion in the experience of family members was very much with me when I created her.
As for Dawn, she’s the victim of childhood trauma that has shaped the way she relates to other people and the man she’s chosen for her husband. She sees the world through a certain lens because of what she’s been through. That’s something I often see in my clinical work. As a therapist, my job is to supportively help correct the distortions. As a writer, my job is to create drama. Same knowledge base, very different objectives!
A recurring theme in the book is the notion that the two main characters, Miranda and Dawn, each believe the other to be living a life very different from her actual one. How does this idea relate to our cultural aspirations, and how is it exacerbated by social media?
I think staying in a VRBO or an Airbnb rental is often about wanting to feel like a local and not a tourist; it relates to the cultural ideal of authenticity. But paradoxically, it’s also about trying on someone else’s neighborhood, trying on their life. It’s a very intimate thing to stay in another person’s home, surrounded by their taste if not their actual possessions, and we form all kinds of impressions.
Dawn browsed all the listings and then chose to stay in Miranda’s home. She wanted to live like Miranda for a long weekend. On the other hand, Miranda never really chose Dawn.
Their status imbalance quickly comes to the forefront once they start sparring. Then they look at each other’s social media, and—surprise, surprise—it seems to confirm their biases about one another. So often, we find what we’re looking for because we create it in our own minds. We turn our own perceived deficits into someone else’s strengths.
Social media perpetuates this. People are curating the reality they want to present, and if you forget this, you can really wind up feeling inferior. I have a number of clients who’ve benefited from the intervention of just getting off every social media site so that they’re not constantly interfacing with the supposed perfection of other people’s lives. Then they can just focus on improving their own reality.
A lot of the exchanges between Miranda and Dawn are via e-mail and text. In this day and age, what are the risks and consequences of communicating behind a screen instead of face to face?
Face to face, we have to deal—in real time—with the consequences of our actions. We say something hurtful, we see someone flinch. Witnessing another person’s reactions creates a layer of civility. It’s at the heart of etiquette.
It’s also at the heart of empathy. Humans are wired to empathize based on facial expressions and vocal cadences. We see that someone is sad or about to cry, or we hear a choked-back sob, and it’ll inspire compassion. Or we can tell that someone is sincere when we might have thought they were false if we’d had only the written word, devoid of nuance.
Think of Internet trolls and cyberbullies. They don’t have to see their victims, and it leads to a very dangerous sort of liberation, to an aggression that’s unchecked by empathy.
If Miranda and Dawn had met earlier in the book, if they’d actually met, they could have defused the situation with relative ease. The events of this novel could happen only because of the dehumanizing channels by which the women communicate.
There are a lot of “little” details that both Miranda and Dawn don’t tell their husbands that eventually snowball into major events within the book. Why would you say the women are so reluctant to communicate honestly with their husbands? Do you think this reflects a trend in marriages today?
I wouldn’t say all women are reluctant to communicate honestly with their husbands, but telling the whole truth is as fraught now as it’s ever been. When we share absolutely everything, we risk hurting or alienating our partner; we risk exposing ourselves, maybe the parts we feel are undesirable. While we may have more honest marriages now than in the past (or at least there’s a lot more talk about intimacy than ever before), I think the fundamental insecurities and vulnerabilities are the same as always. The impulse to withhold a small detail or tell a white lie is just part of human nature. We all want to be loved, and once we are, we don’t want to risk losing that love by exposing ourselves, especially when we can just rationalize our omissions. One thing I know for sure from therapy is that people have an infinite capacity for justification.
In the book, Miranda has a drug-addicted son, and a lot of her actions and decisions are influenced by this fact. In your opinion, what are some healthy ways to support but not encourage someone who may be struggling with similar issues?
If someone you love has truly committed to their recovery and taken the crucial steps to remain sober, then the best way to support that person is with acceptance and patience. It’s going to take a long time to learn a new, chemical-free way of being in the world. There may be relapses. But it’s about commitment to the process. You need to let them know you believe they can stay clean and that it’s worth doing, and insist that they continue to engage in that process.
However, if the person you love refuses to get help, or seems to be manipulating you (as is the case with Miranda’s son), it’s important to stand firm on what you know to be true. Confront in a supportive way. Hold your ground. Enabling is about going against your gut instincts and supporting the addiction by pretending to believe the lies and/or providing practical and financial support. I tell clients to think of it this way: you hate the addiction; why enable it to flourish?
You’ve written two books prior to This Is Not Over. What did you learn from writing those two that helped shape this one?
With each book, I come up with the idea for a situation, and then I figure out what type of people would inhabit that situation. I think: What characteristics, personality traits, and psychologies will propel the narrative forward? That’s because it’s really important to me that all the plot twists feel like they derive organically from who the characters are, when placed inside a pressure cooker. My job as a writer is to turn up the heat.
While my method was the same for This Is Not Over as for the other books, I feel like it flows more with each effort. I could visualize the char
acters with a lot of clarity right from the start. I always had the image of Miranda and Dawn playing this game of chicken, poised for a head-on collision that I could see coming but they couldn’t.
What’s next for you, writing-wise?
I enjoy writing a hybrid of women’s fiction and domestic suspense. I have a true interest in the psychological underpinnings of everyday life, because often, there’s a lot there that’s combustible. There’s a lot of kindling waiting for a match.
With my next novel, I don’t want to give too much away yet. Let’s say I’m broadening the canvas. My first three novels were fairly different from one another in terms of plot, but they had in common that they were about just a few people and their loved ones. It was a fairly intimate setting. This time, I’m going to have a much bigger cast, and a lot of red herrings. It’s a whodunit. And a who-keeps-on-doing-it and what-will-they-do-next.
Sorry to keep you in suspense! (Or maybe I’m not.)
ALSO BY HOLLY BROWN
A Necessary End
Don’t Try to Find Me
CREDITS
Cover design by Ploy Siripant
Cover photograph © OGphoto / Getty Images
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
THIS IS NOT OVER. Copyright © 2017 by Holly Brown. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition January 2017 ISBN 9780062456847
ISBN 978-0-06-245683-0 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-06-265959-0 (library edition)
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