I am not a writer who writes from the heart. Not because I don’t have one (and maybe there are some who’d be inclined to disagree) but because I think there’s enough literature out there written from the heart. How would mine be set apart?
I made a conscious choice, then, to write from the guts, to channel all my grief and rage onto the paper. Imagine: finding what your true, hot passion is, finding your outlet, finding your craft while kicking dope in rehab far away from home.
I was a New Yorker living in a Kentucky drug rehabilitation centre when I started to warm up to writing as a regular thing. There was a man, an older, very conservative counsellor who’d see me in therapy. He’d cringe every time I dropped the F-bomb in his office, wince when I’d colourfully detail certain unpleasant parts of my life.
In an attempt to not have to hear such things (I assume), he told me to journal: to write of the pain and anger I was dealing with. I tried, knowing right away I loathed journalling. I saw no point in documenting things I wanted to leave in my past, and would only leave the page madder than when I started. So, instead, I tried my hand at fiction. It was profane, it was sexy, it was everything I knew this man would frown upon. I sat antsy, shaking my knee as I watched him read, sitting in silence. One could imagine my surprise when he leaned forward and said “This is the best ****ing thing I ever read.” And so began, my road to Freedom.
Writing became my drug, my source of survival, my salvation; it was what I ate, breathed and slept. Every waking moment I could, I wrote. Soon after leaving Kentucky, I made the choice to hitchhike aimlessly around America. Some might have considered it homelessness (which I wasn’t stranger to), I considered it Freedom, where some of my best memories were produced from the open road, from the interactions of other nomads, from getting a million and a half ideas from scanning a brilliant countryside from the back of a motorcycle. It was while leaning a notebook on a motorist’s back that I began writing Freedom’s Child.
Looking back, there could be a lot of lonely times on the road. I suppose I just needed a friend, and so I created this character Freedom Oliver, the blacker part of my soul that needed to be let out, even on paper, lest it rotted the rest of me from the inside out. Before long, and with no real story in mind, this character became my closest companion while I tried to decide what the hell I was going to do with my life. I let her lead the way and before long, Freedom’s Child was born. It’s fair to say that both in fiction and in my own reality, Freedom Oliver is a hero in both our stories.
But the truth is, Freedom was a side fling, a little secret on the side while I devoted all my attention toward my first novel, The Assassin’s Keeper, the piece that would later help my name get out there when it was nominated for the Debut Dagger with the Crime Writers’ Association in London. The Assassin’s Keeper was my baby, so to speak, a dark story about an assassin succumbing to grief and addiction in a dystopian New York City. But I consider it practice, after too many re-writes when it’d become brain mush and stuffed back into the drawer where it sits today.
A couple years after starting to write and trying to piece my life back together, I met my (oh so patient) husband, John. It was because of him that I moved to Ireland and picked Freedom back up. But I didn’t want to finish Freedom’s Child, didn’t want to sever the tie between this fictional character and I. And so, I left the last chapter blank, for months, because I didn’t want to lose my companion. I realise that to the non-writer, I sound like a mad woman… I’m under no illusion that I’m very sane anyway. I was visiting my sister in New York when I decided to rip the bandaid off and whip out the last chapter (it was actually the very first scene I ever created: I always have to have the last chapter in my head before I start a book so I know better where to steer it). I hit the “send” button in the same 30 seconds of typing “The End”. Within 24 hours, I had a book deal.
The people who know me best can see many parallels between myself and Freedom, evident because many of our emotions are the same, while our circumstances are a bit different. But I went to the page without thought, just getting the screaming out of my head and soul, purging. I suppose it’s why it comes across as raw and hard hitting, but none of that was anything I had to necessarily feign. It’s just the way I am.
I think what people miss (and that’s OK) is that Freedom’s Child is mainly about one woman’s spiritual journey, one analogous to mine. In our own seeking of redemption in a world where we’d made so many awful mistakes, we take this gritty, hard path with God. We search for salvation from the dark, we often curse at God, but… I suppose we both get our bittersweet endings. On the beaten paths, we find different forms of peace.
I say I have enough skeletons in my closet and enough demons on my back to give me inspiration for writing to last me the rest of my life, so I’m far from done. In fact, I’m plagued with too many ideas. I’m just after finishing the second book in my contract. Its working title is This Neck of the Woods, a novel about the 14-year-old daughter of a serial killer in the early 90s, set in the tidal regions of Virginia. And like Freedom’s Child, it’s a novel where I apply no filters.
Freedom’s Child is published by HarperCollins, at £12.99. Declan Burke reviews it in The Irish Times on Saturday, August 1st.
