It was really always in the front (rather than the back) of my mind that ONE DAY I would write. I’d written notes sporadically, waiting for that day to arrive – the one where the muse would descend, I guess. The muse didn’t ever really descend, instead, I was actually forced to write something for a creative writing course when I was doing my BA. I was twenty-five or six, I’d already had two of my four children by this stage, and was living a very different life to most of my peers. It seemed I had heaps to write about – once I began I couldn’t stop. I had always loved short stories, and that’s what I wrote for the first five years or so. I was fortunate to be published pretty early on in literary journals and anthologies. I also won some prizes, which gives you an incredible confidence boost early on — or always, I’m thinking. I started my first novel around 1998 – though I’d written notes about the case it was based on much earlier.

How did your debut novel come to be published?I had written the novel – which I’d titled Unfortunate Creatures – as the creative component of a PhD, but this first attempt  at a PhD fell apart for a number of reasons: the novel was too long, my husband was seriously unwell, I had four kids by this time – two teenagers and two babies – and looking back I think I was just completely overwhelmed by everything.  Anyway, I finally finished the novel after five years or so – it was a historical novel, pretty exhaustively researched – and sent it off to the lovely Pippa Masson, at Curtis Brown. After a few rejections Random House picked it up, and it was published in 2005 as Out of The Silence. It got one brilliant review, was shortlisted for the Dobbie, won the Ned Kelly for best first novel,  and then hit the remainder bins.  A pretty typical first novel experience, but it felt totally heartbreaking at the time.  Happily,  Momentum have since  released both Out of The Silence and my second novel, The Steele Diaries (whose reception was even more dispiriting) as e-books, so they’re available to any interested readers.

What was the inspiration behind your latest novel?

The Lost Girls was originally going to be set in the late forties, in Sydney’s Newtown, the story based on the murder of Joan Norma Ginn, a teenage girl who disappeared after being sent to buy bread for her mother, and who was found strangled to death in Camperdown Cemetery the following day.  What I was interested in was not so much the crime itself, but its aftermath – the impact on the friends and family who were left. When I began the novel we’d just moved from Armidale to Newcastle, and all the sights and sounds and sensations of coastal life transported me back to my own Northern Beaches adolescence. So while the the novel still tells the story of a young girl’s murder and the aftermath, it’s set in the late seventies, in the Sydney beach suburb of Curl Curl, close to where I spent some of my own teenage years.

I’m writing another novel about about families and crime.  This time it’s two families, and both perpetrator and victim are children. It’s about bullying and parenting and friendship, and there’s drama and suspense…  and I’m really looking forward to having that first draft done!

What’s your favourite book by an Australian female author?

Oh, there are so many favourites … It’s impossible to pick just one!  Henry Handle Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom is probably up there, as well as The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.  I’m currently re-reading Helen Garner’s Consolation of Joe Cinque, and I’m looking forward to her new work – though the subject matter is so painful. There are some remarkable contemporary voices in fiction – writing in all genres. I’ve just finished reading Liane Moriarty’s latest – and am seriously impressed. Her work is just getting better and better – somehow she manages to write lightly about dark subjects without lessening their impact. And I’m continually amazed by her ability to pull all the narrative threads together in the end – how does she do that?

The Mistake reviewed by Angie Holst

The Lost Girls reviewed by Angela Savage and Book’d Out