My debut novel was inspired in part by an experience we had as children. Our father was a university professor, and he had a female student stalker. She did some highly unusual things. She’d walk up and down outside our house with a wooden oar over her shoulder, prompted perhaps by the small rowing boat we had in the front garden. She’d turn up at our school at collection time and follow us home. She even somehow had access to a small private plane, and she would fly over our house, time and again.
This intrusion became part of our everyday lives. Our father was wise and calm and didn’t react to any of it, just let it be in the hope it would play itself out. Our mother was very unnerved by it, and she was worried about us, her three daughters, but she veered away from reporting it. It was a long time ago, and it was difficult to know what to do for the best. We, as children, were terrified and fascinated in equal measure. Who is she? Why is she doing this? What is she going to do next?
We knew her full name and would call it out in the back garden, under the roar of the plane’s engine. We came to expect her to be there, up in the sky, chugging over us. I think we almost normalised it. Apart from her name and what she looked like, we didn’t get to learn anything more about her, and my father’s wise approach to not react seemed to work, adding no fuel to her fire. Over time she disappeared from the front of our house and from above it, and she stopped turning up at school collection times.
I’m not entirely sure that my memory serves me correctly, and it’s a little odd if it does, but I think I might’ve missed her a bit, or missed the swirling drama that it added to our lives to have her showing up, showing an interest, wanting to go out on our boat with us, making sure we got home from school safely. Perhaps it was a touch of Stockholm syndrome I was experiencing when I found myself wondering about her. Wondering if she just appreciated our family for some weird reason. Wondering if she deserved a chance to tell her story. I wanted to know her story.
For years afterwards I enjoyed surprising new friends with this tale. I only really understood how unusual it was in the retelling of it. Humdrum suburban Dublin life became elevated, brimming with murky menace. The details never failed to draw gasps, and the unanswerable questions kept coming. Then over time it was spoken of less, and it faded. Something once deeply felt and known, buried.
When it came to writing my first novel, Her Last Words, it bubbled up, unbidden, from the depths and began to breathe a little again. Just on time too. I had wanted to join a writers’ group, and the only one local to me was a group for people working on novels. I was writing short stories. I applied anyway and was under pressure to come up with an idea and a plan prior to the first meeting. Then, the weekend before I had a vivid dream — nightmare really — and I woke from it in a cold sweat.
I had witnessed something on a beach that would change our family life entirely, once it was spoken. In the dream I pressed pause on speaking up, to work out what to do and to have one last day before everything changed. By the way I was feeling when I woke — heart racing, nauseous, fearful — I knew I could be on to something in terms of writing a thriller. That’s when the childhood experience, with elements of dangerous obsession, swam up in me and I merged these elements with the fear from the dream and wrote an outline for the book.
I knew that I wanted my book to be many things, but psychologically evocative was the main pulsing drive. I wanted my readers to be deeply immersed in the psychological intricacies of the main characters. This is where my passion lies, and my short stories are driven by this same pulse. It’s trickier with a novel, though, as quite early on you need to think about where the book might lie on the shelves. I didn’t want to think about this. I wanted to write it like a short, to tell the story I wanted to tell without care for genre or how it might be classified, how it might sell.
Halfway through I thought I might just stop and focus on a collection of shorts instead. Nobody quizzes too much about shorts, little bursts of art that they are. But the story in the novel wouldn’t let me go. I fell for the characters, big time. I could picture them out and about. The character of the young woman — Nina —. She was everywhere. Sitting on the light-blue bench down on the east pier. Swimming in Sandycove. In Finnegan’s pub in Dalkey. There was no choice but to finish it.
It’s close to publication date. I’m sitting in a cafe writing a scene for my next book when I’m distracted by a swirl of activity opposite me. Someone is setting up to work. I hear the tinkle of bracelets. The click of a mouse. The place is infused with a lovely, fresh, vibrant energy. I look up and I see her. She is exactly as I describe her in the book. Petite. Long, dark, curly hair. A twisty silver ring running halfway down her middle finger. Doc Martens. Creamy skin. Half-Italian looking. Twenty-two or thereabouts. A shiver runs through me, but there’s a surge of relief too. You made it, I want to say to her. I knew you would.
Her Last Words by EV Kelly is published by Quercus in trade paperback, ebook and audio
