The Mistress's Revenge (39 page)

1. The Mistress’s Revenge is your first novel. How did you come up with the idea for your protagonist, Sally Islip? Were you inspired by any classic fictional tales of romantic revenge?

Even the most logical and rational of people can find themselves possessed by an urge for revenge when deeply wounded. Where matters of the heart are involved, that urge can become overwhelming. The great classic writers were well aware of the dramatic potential offered by this conflict between reason and passion. But while I wish I could say The Mistress’s Revenge was inspired by Jacobean melodrama or
Shakespearean tragedy, the truth is that Sally Islip owes much more to Fatal Attraction than to Hamlet, more to Tiger Woods’s mistresses than to Iago. I wanted to write a modern book about a woman scorned. I didn’t really know who she would be until I started writing. And then, immediately, I knew exactly who she was.

2. How did narrating The Mistress’s Revenge exclusively from Sally’s perspective impact your experience of writing the novel? At any point did you consider an omniscient narrator? How did you channel or get into the mind of this very troubled character?

I wanted to write from a first person perspective because obsession and heartbreak and desire (whether for love or for revenge) are such primeval, impalpable emotions that it’s impossible to experience them except from the inside. It’s strange, but when I first started writing as Sally, she appeared as a normally sane woman who just happened to be in the throes of a crisis, but the more I wrote, the less sane she revealed herself to be. I didn’t really have to “channel” her—she just seemed to do it all by herself.

3. Do you think that many of your readers will be able to relate to Sally’s experience as a scorned lover?

Anyone who can’t relate to it in some degree has obviously had a very fortunate love life—or no love life at all. Some of Sally’s emotional responses were drawn from experience, others from talking to friends. The difference is that while most of us might fantasize about things we’d like to do to a lover who’s gone cold, Sally actually does them. I hope that, for that reason, women readers particularly will experience a kind of “there but for the Grace of God” recognition.

4. To what extent did you base your depiction of Sally’s suffering on any real-life experience?

No one gets to their midforties without being affected in some way by rejection and infidelity, either directly or indirectly. And while I’ve
never been a stalker like Sally, nor been quite so neglectful to my own children (I hope), I know what it’s like to feel that life is spinning out of control. Just before writing The Mistress’s Revenge, I experienced what I guess could be called a midlife crisis—a gut-wrenching feeling that options were closing off all around me—and was prescribed antidepressants for a while, just as Sally is. Those parts of the book—the prescription pills, the feelings of incipient madness—are largely taken from my experience at that time. You feel suddenly as if you’ve moved into a parallel universe away from your normal, healthy life, where everything is the same and yet not the same. It was quite a scary time, so I do recognize a lot of Sally’s fears and understand how easy it might be to lose grip on reality.

5. Of all of the characters in The Mistress’s Revenge, whom do you relate to most, and why?

Slightly worryingly maybe, I relate most to Sally because while she does these terrible things, she still manages to find a black humor in even the most desperate situations, and because her feelings are so raw and so exposed.

6. Some of your nonfiction books include Deadly Divorces and Killer Couples. Is it safe to say that you have an interest as an author in relationships that go awry? What draws you to these stories?

There’s very little of interest to say about a straightforward, healthy, perfectly functioning relationship, is there? Be honest, would you rather listen to the friend who tells you at length how great her relationship is or the one who is open about the arguments, and the disappointments, the flaws? Tolstoy wrote that happy families are all alike, whereas every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The same holds true for couples. I’m interested in the complex dynamics of dysfunctional relationships, partly due to inherent nosiness (not for nothing was I a magazine advice columnist for five years), partly because hearing about other people’s failings always makes me feel marginally better about my own, and partly in the hope of learning
how not to make the same mistakes they did (particularly the murder-related ones!).

7. Why did you decide to leave many of the details of Sally’s life with her husband, Daniel, and two children out of the book?

Sally is a grossly unreliable narrator, and as everything is told from her viewpoint, there are as many omissions as there are fabrications. She is in the grip of an obsession, which is all bound up with Clive, and that is all that matters to her at this point in time. Everything else in her life becomes peripheral, even her partner and children.

8. Based on your experiences with both, how does the difficulty of writing a novel compare to the challenge of writing a work of nonfiction?

As a journalist, I’ve always made a living from writing nonfiction—the nonfiction books were just an expansion of what I’ve always done. Writing the novel was completely different, and much, much scarier. Until I was a third of the way through, I didn’t have the faintest idea where the book was going, so it was a bit like setting off on a hike without a map or directions. Blindfolded. Also, because it was my first novel I was plagued by insecurities, which meant I didn’t dare show it to anyone until after it was accepted for publication. So I was literally holed up on my own with this unhinged narrator and this story that kept getting darker and darker, and I kept thinking “who on earth is going to want to read this?”

9. The way in which you’ve characterized Sally leaves open the possibility that she is more than just temporarily unhinged by her breakup from Clive. How important was it for you to be sympathetic with Sally’s situation while writing The Mistress’s Revenge? Do you expect readers to be sympathetic as well?

As I said earlier, I think the reason Sally unravels so spectacularly is because the emotional rejection from Clive coincides exactly with a crisis
point in her life, where she is beset by doubt about herself and about the future, i.e., “Not only is this all there is, it’s all downhill from here.” Once you realize this, I think you can’t help but feel a certain amount of sympathy. You might not like her, but to a certain extent I think you can understand how and why she got to where she is.

10. What did you learn about yourself in the course of writing The Mistress’s Revenge?

I learned that:

a) I probably have a darker side to me than even I realized.

b) You shouldn’t ever try to judge anyone else’s relationship from the outside.

c) Writing a 100,000-word book in too small a font ruins your eyes.