Elizabeth is Missing

Kimberly McCreight (KM): One of the things I most admire about Elizabeth is Missing—and there is so much to admire—is the utterly convincing voice of Maud, both in her advanced years and when she is much younger. How did you tackle the challenge of presenting a single character at such disparate times within a single narrative?

Emma Healey (EH): I’m so glad it’s convincing, thank you. I started with Maud’s voice as an eighty-year-old and found that only needed a little adjusting to take her back into childhood. The voice overall is very much based on my mother’s mother, Vera. I was very close to her and she had (ironically) a brilliant memory and had lots of stories to tell about her early life. I spent most of my school holidays with her, so remembering and sticking to the kind of words she would have used gave me a guide for Maud’s lexicon. Voice is so much about vocabulary. I do have to say though, I think writing from the point-of-view of a single character, even in two time frames, is much easier than swapping between characters. Reading Reconstructing Amelia, I am amazed at how well you alternate a first-person and third-person narrative, from the point-of-view of a teenager and a mother, as well as using Facebook statuses and text messages, all in one novel. I should be asking you how you made that work so well!

KM: Was there something that drew you to writing about a character losing her grip on reality, particularly one struggling with dementia?

EH: The initial inspiration for the book came from my father's mother, Nancy, who has multi-infarct dementia, but my aunt’s mother-in-law had suffered from Alzheimer’s for several years before that and other members of my family had had various forms of dementia. At the time, dementia wasn’t something that was being talked about so much and I was fascinated (as well as terrified and upset) by the way a person could come and go—one minute their old selves, the next in a world of their own. Their patterns of behavior could be anything from perfectly reasonable to completely bizarre and it seemed like there was a lot more going on under the surface, which was difficult to discover or explain, and this seemed ripe for fictional exploration.

KM: Elizabeth is Missing has such a smooth, flawless structure. You move so nimbly through time, without relying on chapter breaks or some such device to delineate different sections. It works so well that I think any demarcations would have interfered with the story. Can you talk a bit about the decision to include chapters that switch back and forth through time?

EH: Thank you. Again, I’m really glad you think so. The structure happened fairly organically. I felt that a dialogue between current and past events was truer to the way memories work – they break into your immediate thoughts, rather than wait for you to decide to have them – and I wanted the sections to be relatively short in order to mirror the fragmentary experience of dementia. Not dividing the past and present into separate chapters made it easier too to increase the length of the past story as Maud’s preoccupation with it intensified (and as her awareness of the world around her faded), without signaling too heavily to the reader and without losing the thread or balance of either narrative.

KM: Your book is both a compelling emotional story as well as a mystery. Which comes first for you?

EH: I find plotting a book very exciting, and really enjoy trying to weave in narrative strands and tie up all the ends, but I have to feel there is some real experience behind the story, some “truth” that I’m attempting to represent, too. And these two things seem to me to be inextricably linked. It’s much easier to engage emotionally when there is an intriguing story unfolding – a dull character or a character in a dull situation is difficult to take an interest in, even if they are sympathetic. Similarly, for a mystery to work and for the reader to care whether, and how, it is solved, there needs to be a certain amount of emotional investment in the characters and themes.

KM: I couldn’t agree more. There needs to be a constant dialogue between character and story. Trying to achieve that balance is, for me, one of the greatest joys and the greatest challenges of being a novelist. What's your biggest challenge as a writer?

EH: Being a writer means being constantly mentally engaged. This is great in some ways as it’s exciting and gives a context and significance to every aspect of life, but it also means there are no off-duty hours. So anytime I’m not writing (or not observing, listening, note-taking), I’m feeling guilty about it. Justifying writing is sometimes difficult, too: Why this subject? Why this character? But most of all, why me? What can I offer that another writer couldn’t? A terrible question because the answer is invariably nothing.

KM: You’re right, that “why” is very important. It inevitably pushes your story to a much stronger place. What's your background? Elizabeth is Missing is such an accomplished debut, I'm assuming—okay, maybe hoping—there was some writing that came before it. Otherwise, I might be far too jealous.

EH: Ha ha! Well, I wrote lots of bits of things, of course, but I hadn’t really finished anything before Elizabeth is Missing. My first degree was in Book Arts, and the course did offer a Creative Writing module, but I was too shy to take it. Instead, I learned how to sew pages together and foil block and print. I was always an avid reader though, and I began to take short courses in writing and editing after I graduated and started the novel while I was working in an art gallery in London. I also found a workshop group, which was brilliant and gave me the confidence to experiment and find Maud’s voice. Eventually, I went back to university to get my MA in Creative Writing at UEA.

KM: Well, I certainly can’t wait to see what you do next. Best wishes with Elizabeth is Missing. It’s such a wonderful book.