On Writing She’s A Killer by Kirsten McDougall

My novel She’s a Killer is set in Wellington, New Zealand, a few years from now when climate change has made many people’s countries unliveable, forcing them to flee to New Zealand, survivalist-style. That makes it sound gloomy and dystopic. This is why I tried to write in as many jokes and funny lines as possible, told by a woman who doesn’t take anything seriously and whose only real friend is an imagined one.

It’s so hard to read news stories or books about climate change. Every time we do we are confronted by the necessary changes we haven’t yet made to our fossil fuel burning lives. I started writing my novel in 2019, and now in 2023, apart from the blip when the pandemic forced planes to stop flying, we haven’t seen any changes in carbon emissions globally. 

My novel grew out of a fear and rage I still feel. What, I wondered, does it take to make us change our behaviour and systems? What sort of action is useful? Does political activism change anything at all? What if we just started to take out all the top offenders when it comes to climate devastation?

I’m not so naive to think fiction or art will change our behaviour or systems, but I do think it is useful as thought experiment. The novel in particular is a great big sandpit of extended thought experiment in which we are given direct access to another person’s mind and feelings. So I wrote a character who represents the torpor that most of our businesses and governments exhibit when it comes to making the change necessary to halt climate change.

The narrator of the novel is a woman named Alice. She is 37, and a bit of a loser. Alice is obsessed by her one-point-off genius IQ, which she hasn’t done anything useful with. She lives in a dingy groundfloor flat under her mother’s house, with whom she has a dreadful relationship – they only communicate via Morse code. Alice is followed around by her imaginary friend, Simp, who goads her. Life is pretty awful for Alice; it’s expensive, she can barely pay her water bill, let alone afford any niceties on her crappy job’s salary. She’s pretty much given up. She dates wealthugees for money which is how she meets Pablo, a charming wealthugee who shows an interest in her. Then she meets his 15 year old daughter, Erika, and Alice is forced to change.

Alice’s imaginary friend, Simp, is a foil for her. Simp is a fly on the wall of Alice’s life. In a first-person narrative, an imaginary friend is also a device to let in a little more perspective to Alice’s stubborn, prickly version of the world. Simp is Alice’s missing piece of empathy and vulnerablity, carefully carved off into an imaginary friend as a survival technique. If your feelings are contained in a virtual person, you don’t have to fear getting hurt. 

Sometimes I think this is what we do when it comes to our fear of climate change – out of necessity we carve out our fear and put it in the never never land of the future. We put it in the hands of those who should be in charge – governments and businesses who should be subject regulations. But we are part of these systems, they are us, we are them. If climate change is teaching us anything, it is that we not only live in, but are intimately connected to the air, the soil, insects, animals, plants, the weather. Our job is to appreciate that fact; and recognise that we cannot be separate from any of these things. 

She’s a Killer doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre. It’s been called a thriller, a cli-fi, a dystopian story, a crime story, a satire. It’s definitely an oddball. I make it sounds deeply serious, and it is – it’s about climate change! But it’s also written to entertain and make the reader laugh. Part of my policy in life is to laugh and joke; I think humour is one way that we ease our way through hard times. When we laugh we relax a little, our bodies and minds open up a little more, and difficult tasks might seem slightly more possible to tackle. This is why I wrote a serious book with jokes; I want things to change. I want a future where we, and all life on this planet, can thrive.

—

Kirsten McDougall lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Her novel She’s a Killer was longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2022 and the Dublin Liteary Awards 2023. It is published by Gallic Books.

SHE IS A KILLER

Smart, assured, and extremely funny’ Eleanor Catton

‘A fabulously dark pleasure, delivered in prose of singing tautness’ Luke Jennings

Eleanor Oliphant meets Killing Eve in this darkly funny and gloriously unhinged New Zealand sensation, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2023.

ALICE: 30-something, IQ of 159 (almost a genius), only communicates with her mother in Morse code. Her imaginary friend is back.

ERIKA: 15, daughter of hot ‘wealthugee’ who loves Russian literature, genuine genius, killer eyeliner and killer instincts.

The climate is in crisis and wealthy immigrants are flocking to New Zealand for shelter, stealing land, driving up food prices and taking over. But Alice has far more important things to worry about: hating her best friend’s husband, getting free wine and quiet-quitting her dull day job. Until she meets Erika.

Now, Alice is about to find herself drawn into action of the most radical – and dangerous – kind. Just what is a slacker to do?

Bold and brilliantly bizarre, She’s a Killer is the satirical dystopian cli-fi thriller you never knew you needed. Until now.

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing