Writing And Belonging, Daisy McNally

I came to live in a city five years ago and felt foreign and uneasy for the first twelve months and the best part of the next. Of course, cities are busy places and that was not unexpected. It just seemed that all the all the busy-ness was connected; whether those I came across were school mothers, academics, pub-owners, artists, I felt as though everyone and everything was linked, and I was an outsider.

Recently divorced, bruised and awkward, I felt unwelcome and unbalanced. I kept getting lost; I pored over maps, learning how the river crossed the canal, and I started running again, as though the towpaths could somehow connect me to life here and help me navigate the strangeness of the city.

Things got better – my daughter moved school, we made friends, and I slowly began to lose the feeling that we were trespassing. And I joined a small writing group at CONTED, Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. I spent hours that winter in the Bodleian writing my first novel, an updated version of The Mill on the Floss set in Oxford and called After the Flood. I traipsed along frosty towpaths past coal-smokey narrowboats, thinking about isolated women, and being lost.

I went on to take an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, which is when I began writing I See Through You and wrestling with the complicated female protagonist I’d had forming in my mind.

When Skye meets Johnny, and it seems as though they have fallen in love, she not only thinks she has met someone she will spend the rest of her life with, but she believes a riddle has been solved, that a question has been answered. That now she knows the reason she is in the city she is. But shockingly for Skye, Johnny ‘ends’ the relationship and in the cruellest of ways – one which doesn’t allow for her to come to terms with the dissonance between their feelings, and which facilitates the fantasy life Skye goes on to lead.

I hadn’t heard of the concept of “ghosting” before my editor at Orion told me about it. The Urban Dictionary defines it as:

When someone you love disappears without explanation.
Then your friends and family act like your [sic] crazy.

The ghosting element in the novel was clearly something that resonated with many of the younger editorial team I was working with. 80% of millennials report that they have been “ghosted”. And I think I got it: I certainly understood the power of silence, and I was writing about not being heard, and not knowing you could have a place in the world without someone validating it.

About unrequited love and the shock and confusion that can play such a big part in it. I imagined it was all too easy to become obsessed with finding reasons and answers – things that don’t always turn out to be there, and how do we deal with that? Skye is confronted with silence, and combined with her broken heart, the certainty that she and Johnny were supposed to be together, she completely unravels.

The second sentence of the Urban Dictionary’s definition of ghosted is interesting: “Then your friends and family act like your (sic) crazy.” Why on earth should this be, I wondered? And a trend in recent fiction has indeed been to take a wronged or damaged woman and turn her into an unhinged or vengeful psychopath (eg Gone Girl). I decided that I didn’t want my heroine to be crazy, and Skye spends a lot of the book insisting that she’s not. Yes, she’s obsessional: she picks and picks like the character in Dr Foster, but it’s because of Johnny’s refusal to hear her.

She feels that her sanity and even her entire existence have been called into question because it is as if he has negated, and even cancelled her.

Of course, my character Skye isn’t perfect, and she gets a lot of things wrong. Above all, she makes the mistake of thinking she can unearth the truth in social media, which is impossible. Nearly everyone in the novel is either misrepresenting themselves or telling outright lies, not least the two main male characters whose sense of entitlement enables them to believe they are above dealing with what they label female ‘craziness.’ Towards the end, coming to terms about what she has done, and with the sort of man Johnny is, Skye asserts, again and again, what her name is, and who she is.

So although she behaves in a way that’s not really justifiable in a moral sense, it’s not so extraordinary given the context she finds herself in. She is trying to (re-) connect with people. I’d like her to make for uncomfortable reading because she’s someone that a lot of us, broken-hearted and ignored, might identify with at times in our lives. As she says in the book, “Liars are easily made,” whether we are just trying to conceal our innate loneliness or present a better, more palatable version of ourselves to the outside world and particularly those we want to love us.

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DAISY McNALLY writes from her home in Oxford where she lives with her two children and spends as much time as she can with her partner James on the Beaulieu River near Lymington in Hampshire. She is a Durham University English Lit graduate and more recently of Bath Spa University where she gained a distinction in the MA in Creative Writing. She is currently working on her second novel for a PhD in Creative Writing.

Twitter @daisy_mcnally

I See Through You

‘A beautiful and extraordinary debut novel. . . full of intelligence and utterly gripping’ Claire Kendal, author of The Book of You

It started with a lie . . .

Skye has finally met someone she can trust. A holiday romance, of all things. But you know when something real comes along, when it’s meant to be. Don’t you? A week after returning home, and Johnny has disappeared. He hasn’t called or returned her messages.

Then, with the easiest of lies, Skye finds a way back in to Johnny’s life – and to the people in it. When she makes an unlikely friend, they realise that Johnny is telling lies of his own. So will the two women find a way to bring him down – or each other?

It ended with the truth.

A perfect page-turning read for anyone who has enjoyed I LET YOU GO by Clare Mackintosh, 
THE SILENT WIFE by Kerry Fisher or YOU by Teresa Driscoll

‘A wonderful read for those who enjoy authentic characters, exquisite writing and intriguing plotlines. I loved it’ Melanie Golding, author of Little Darlings

‘A brilliant, page-turning novel with plenty of twists‘ Irish Examiner

‘I was hooked … I couldn’t read fast enough to see how it would all end’ Goodreads reviewer

‘A beautifully written book. The author is very skilled, and writes clever description, but in a way that feels very natural … her prose is wonderful’ Goodreads reviewer

I SEE THROUGH YOU is published by Orion and available in paperback, kindle and audio.

Buy the book HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing