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 t
o 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.
By far the biggest tool you learn from screenwriting is how to build drama and tension in a scene. But it can also backfire when scenes become too dramatic at the expense of subtlety or meaning. Your readers have wet their pants with fear when you were trying to make them feel heartbroken—that kind of thing.
Would The Girl Below make a good movie and would Bianca Zander be the only person who could write the script?
It would make an excellent movie (of course I would say that), but I would like absolutely nothing to do with writing the script. Ideally, I would hand it over to some amazingly talented filmmaker and they would go for gold. To make something work as a movie, you need to take liberties with the story, and I would be happy to give someone the license to do that. The trickiest thing to pull off would be the timespan. The novel covers a period of about twenty years, whereas film, as a medium, lends itself better to stories that take place over a single weekend or a year at the most. The time travel aspect might also present challenges . . .
Over the course of writing this book you’ve been childless, then pregnant, then a mother. How did those three writing experiences differ from one another?
The childless writer has endless amounts of time to sit around dreaming and writing, but that time has no shape so you often waste it; procrastination becomes a problem. Pregnancy sharpened my focus. The birth became my second-draft deadline because I was terrified I might never write again. I sent the manuscript off to various editors the night before my son was born. They all rejected it. I did write again; I had to. Writing as a mother teaches you that it’s possible to write two thousand words in four hours because you might not get another four hours free for a week. What you really miss is reading and thinking time, and I do worry that my work, from now on, will suffer from inadequate consideration.
Read on
Ten books that inspired me while I wrote The Girl Below
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Wonder Boys
by Michael Chabon
Kafka on the Shore
by Haruki Murakami
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Ice Storm
by Rick Moody
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters
Norwegian Wood
by Haruki Murakami
About the Author
British-born BIANCA ZANDER has lived in Auckland, New Zealand, for the past two decades. An established journalist, she has written for numerous publications, including The Listener, the Sunday Star-Times, and the Dominion Post. She has produced radio shows and written for film and television, including writing the dramatic short film The Handover, which screened in competition at the Chicago Film Festival. Bianca holds an M.A. in creative writing from Victoria University, Wellington. The Girl Below is her first novel.
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Credits
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photography © Paul Knight/Trevillion Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE GIRL BELOW. Copyright © 2012 by Bianca Zander. 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, downloaded, 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 hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zander, Bianca.
The girl below : a novel / by Bianca Zander.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-06-210816-6
1. Young women—England—London—Fiction. 2. Family secrets—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9639.4.Z36G57 2012
823'.92—dc23
2012012394
Epub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780062108173
12 13 14 15 16 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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