Authors Interviewing Characters: Emma Grey interviews Audrey Sullivan from START AT THE END
Start at the End
This is a love story . . . but not the one you’re expecting.
Audrey Sullivan and Fraser Miller tumble into a romance for the ages. After an unlikely start, they fall deeply in love and dream of the life they’ll build together—until one tragic moment upends everything. Facing the unimaginable and wrestling with guilt, they’re left haunted by “what ifs,” each asking where they would be if fate had spun a different story…
***
It’s a mistake, thinking Audrey is ready for this interview, but we’re here now.
Emma: “I’m sorry for your loss. How are you today?”
I can see exactly how she is. Clothes crumpled, face ashen, breaths shallow while she scrambles for an answer to my impossible opening question.
Audrey: “I’m fine.”
Her voice is so thin, I put my notes away.
Audrey: “Please tell me I’m going to be okay?”
There’s fierce desperation in her eyes as she looks at me, knowing I’m ten years down this same shattered path. How can I tell her it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better?
She takes a sip of wine. A gulp, really. And another.
Audrey: “I’m selling my piano.”
My breath catches. Music is her world. When she was younger, she was enrolled in the doctoral program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, until… Ugh. I can’t remind her of the plagiarism case.
But sell the piano?
Emma: “You know what they say about making big decisions?”
Audrey: “Josh said he’d take care of it.”
I’m hit by a flash of anger. Now she’s all guilt and resentment, looking as though she’ll never untangle herself from that betrayal.
The reality is that Audrey Sullivan can’t have what she wants. But it’s not too late to carve out the glittering, creative, parallel future she deserves.
Emma: “It won’t always be this hard. It gets easier to carry.”
Eventually, you’re going to fall in love with an unrecognizable life…
She looks at me blankly. I need to tread carefully. This shattered version of her isn’t strong enough to hold the dream of the woman she will become.
Emma: “One day at a time.”
One breath at a time.
Audrey: “The music has stopped.”
This woman can write music that strangers play on repeat. Her name should be up in lights…
But she has to fight through this gauntlet of loss first.
She picks up her glass.
Audrey: “How do you know if you’re drinking too much?”
The words fly out of her mouth in a panic. Now the truth is hanging between us. Her truth, and another: That could have been me.
When I was where she is now, I wanted this awful reality just to vanish. Who wouldn’t be desperate to obliterate that kind of pain, any way that works…
Audrey: “I don’t know who else to tell.”
She’s going to tell the very last person she expects. That person is going to step into the wreckage of her life and help her up in a way that will rock her entire understanding of ‘family’.
Emma: “I can’t promise this won’t get rougher than it is now, but you’re never as alone as it feels.”
This not the path she asked for, just as I didn’t ask for mine. But, one day, she will open her heart to the kind of hopeful, romantic, magical future that her current self can’t even let herself imagine. I’m sure of it.
Emma: “I promise we can start again, Audrey. Here, at the end.”
***
“A powerful, romantic drama about love and loss. Emma Grey is so skilled at navigating relationships and tragedy, imbuing her stories with such feeling, wisdom, and originality. This one will keep you guessing right until the end, with a sliding-doors twist that kept me turning the pages late into the night.”
—Sophie Cousens, author of This Time Next Year
“Start at the End is a tour de force of honest humanity. I was utterly enthralled by these characters who leap off the page and this premise which so masterfully explores the question of fate. Emma Grey’s writing cuts straight to the heart, leaving the reader in awe of the complicated gifts of life and love. Somehow, this book is both an immersive escape and a bold confrontation of reality at the same time. I was swept away and will not soon forget it.”
—Sarah Damoff, author of The Bright Years
“Powerful, perceptive, and cleverly woven, Emma Grey’s Start at the End is a luminous, must-read novel about love, loss, and those sliding doors moments that can transform a life. Fiction doesn’t come with more heart, humour, or hard-won truth than this. I loved it.”
—Hannah Richell, author of The Search Party
“A new novel by Emma Grey always goes straight to the top of my TBR list! Warm, wise, and wonderful. I could not love her books more.”
—Alexandra Potter, author of Confessions of a Forty-Something F##k Up
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Emma Grey is the international bestselling author of The Last Love Note and Pictures of You, and the forthcoming novel, Start at the End. Grey lives in Canberra, Australia, where her world centers on her three children, loved stepchildren, and stepgrandchildren, as well as writing, photography, and endlessly chasing the aurora australis.
Category: Interviews, On Writing
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