Erin:

I’m obsessed with how much other writers’ first drafts differ from the finished manuscript. What was the biggest difference between the book you set out to write and the novel in your reader’s hand?

Susan:

You would be shocked by how different the early drafts were! The biggest difference is that the early drafts of The Silence were largely written from the point of view of Louisa, Isla’s mother. And there were a lot more chapters set in England. But all my early readers told me my story was in the Australian sections of the book. They said to cut Louisa back, keep her as a character but not as a protagonist. It took me a long time to accept they were right.

I eventually deleted all of Louisa’s chapters, which left me with half a book. This was initially terrifying, but it gave me the space to imagine a new way to tell my story, and the 1997 timeline came in at that point. I began to develop Isla as an adult character, to imagine what had happened to her parents thirty years on and of course what had happened to Mandy. Because I’d worked for so long on the 1967 strand of the book and knew my characters well, I found it relatively easy to imagine where they would all be thirty years later and the people they would have become. It gave the novel the depth and mystery it had lacked. I can’t imagine the book without that second timeline now, but maybe it was no bad thing that I spent so long on the 1967 section. It was my foundation and none of it was wasted; even those deleted chapters were useful as I imagined Louisa thirty years later.

Erin:

The Silence has been billed as a literary thriller. How conscious of genre were you when you wrote it?

Susan:

I didn’t know what genre I wanted the book to be at the outset. I thought I’d to try to write the kind of book I enjoyed reading, but once I got started that felt like quite a tall order. I spent a couple of years thinking my writing was no good because it didn’t read like Anne Enright. I had to accept that I wasn’t that kind of writer. And as much as I love literary fiction, with its considered prose and complex characters, I also love plot-driven fiction that keeps me reading into the night, desperate to know what happens. What I’m always looking for as a reader is a book that combines these two things, that doesn’t sacrifice one for the other. When I was asked what sort of book I was writing, I started to say I was aiming for a ‘well-written page-turner.’

It was much later, when I was looking for an agent, that I came across the term ‘literary thriller’ and I thought, ‘that sounds like what I’ve written’. Luckily the agent I signed with thought so too. I’m glad my book fits that category, but I’ve also heard it referred to as a mystery and I think that’s a good description. It probably straddles those genres, which possibly isn’t the easiest thing to market, but that’s where the cover comes in. Readers don’t always know what genre they’re looking for but I think they can judge the mood and tone of the book by the artwork. HarperCollins did a great job with the cover.

Erin:

What I loved about The Silence was the way it starts out as a family drama and then blows wide into something bigger and darker than you expect from that claustrophobic, domestic opening. What starts as one woman’s story becomes a story about generational, even national, trauma and shame. Why did you decide to use Isla as the entry point to the novel?

Susan:

When I started writing Isla as an adult in 1997 I imagined her as this black sheep, a sin-eater, who has taken on all the mistakes of the past, even those she’s not responsible for and knows nothing about. I pictured her in this dark basement flat in the middle of the night, newly sober, scared to do anything but sleep and work. There’s something wrong with her but she doesn’t know what it is and she doesn’t want to know. She’s existing but she’s not living. Her sobriety is fragile and she’s on her own.

I think I imagined her this way because she was four years old in 1967 when the events that drive the plot took place. She was too young to understand any of it but she absorbed it all, the way children do. She was never going to grow up to be well-adjusted and carefree, coming from such a troubled family. But she has stopped drinking and she is starting to remember things from the past. If she’s going to stay sober and get her life on track, she’s going to have to deal with all this trauma.

Isla seemed like the right person to solve the mystery of what happened to Mandy, and in turn the mystery of what happened to William, because there is still hope for her. She is still young, strong and resilient. I wanted to put across a message of hope, that healing is possible, and Isla was a vessel for that hope.

Erin:

It’s interesting that you chose to tell a story about two families living next door to each other on a suburban street by the sea. Why did you juxtapose the Green family with the Mallories in that way?

Susan:

There is a terrible irony in Steve Mallory living next door to the Green family in 1967. Joe and Louisa’s marriage is toxic; Joe has a growing alcohol problem and Isla is witness to her parents’ violence. But nobody intervenes or considers removing Isla from her home, because the Greens are a respectable, white nuclear family. Meanwhile, Steve is removing kids from loving families, taking them away from homes where they were safe. I wanted this irony to run through the book. It worked best if they were neighbours, I thought. I wanted them to know each other, to see each other all the time, and to miss the very thing that was staring them all in the face.

Many historians have pointed out that the policy of removing First Nations Australian children from their families was carried out quite openly, continuing into the 1970s, with very little objection from journalists, politicians or the public. Most people who look back on that time say they had no idea. They are shocked by it, and confused. Why didn’t they know? Surely some people must have known. Perhaps they denied the knowledge somehow, choosing not to process it or to forget.

I wanted to know what that level of denial might look like in a community. The residents of Bay Street are forced to confront what Steve is doing: he cries on the veranda in broad daylight, then later he brings a baby home. This prompts a few questions and comments. Joe eventually makes some phone calls. But this is discomfort rather than outrage, and it soon settles back into silence. Why is that? I wanted the book to ask that question, to prompt the reader to think about it.

Erin:

The book felt very timely to me in light of the conversations we’re having about black history and revising the white, male narrative of the textbooks. Obviously The Silence had to be set in the 1990s and the 1960s for timeline reasons, but do you think you would have been able to write the same novel five years ago? Ten? Twenty?

Susan:

I honestly thought, when I was researching The Silence, that I must have missed a chunk of the history syllabus at school. Maybe I was off sick the week we discussed the brutality with which Australia was colonised, and the massacres that followed. When I asked around among my British friends, it turned out they were as clueless as me. We hadn’t missed a chunk of the syllabus. It’s just that Australia wasn’t on the syllabus, at least not the aspects of its history that I’d been researching. It bothered me that someone somewhere had decided it wasn’t important enough for British children to learn about. Or maybe that wasn’t the reason. Maybe it was too important, too contested, and it was easier simply to leave it out.

The film Rabbit Proof Fence, which was released in 2002, made a big impression on me. I read more about the stolen generation, and the gaps in my knowledge became a bit more defined. It made sense of my time living in Australia and the unease I’d felt about the way First Nations Australians lived, and my half-formed belief that I was part of the problem. I wish I’d asked more questions when I was living in Sydney, instead of following the crowds to Byron Bay and Cairns in a camper van, living the clichéd ex-pat lifestyle. In my defence, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

So the simple answer to your question is yes, I probably could have written The Silence five, ten or even twenty years ago. It actually took me the best part of a decade to write the book, and it had been percolating in my head a long time before that. But maybe it wouldn’t have resonated in the same way if it had been published earlier, before the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed. The Black Lives Matter movement led to a debate we’d needed to have for decades, all the more explosive because it was long overdue.

Erin:

Steve is a flawed character in so many ways but his actions are ultimately understandable. Did you find yourself judging him as you wrote, and what do you hope your readers make of him?

Susan:

Steve was quite challenging, but he was the character I kept coming back to every time I started to despair of the book; he always fascinated me. He’s inspired by a policeman in a non-fiction book called Australia, History of a Nation, by Phillip Knightley. The policeman in Knightley’s book cries on his veranda at the end of the day because of his regrets over the child removal part of his job. I wanted to know how someone would live with that inner conflict, and that creeping knowledge that something they’d believed in had caused untold damage.

My intention was for the reader to empathise with Steve. Empathy is quite different to sympathy, and I think it’s possible to empathise with people we might disagree with or dislike. If we understand what Steve does, it doesn’t mean we condone it. I certainly empathised with Steve as I was writing. And I hoped my readers might be prompted to ask themselves what they might have done in his position. Would they have walked away from the job earlier? Would they have refused to do it at all?

When you empathise with somebody it’s harder to judge them. I don’t much enjoy reading about villains who are entirely bad, who we can write off as evil and comfort ourselves that we are not remotely like that. It’s so much more interesting to consider whether anyone is essentially good or bad. Do we all have the capacity to do something terrible? Are we only ‘good’ because we haven’t been tested? If we do something bad in the belief we are doing good, are we still bad? I wondered all these things as I was writing and I still don’t know the answers.

Erin:

You lived in Australia but you’re British. Did this outsider status shape your writing of the novel?

Susan:

I’m certain that it did. I was very homesick when I was living in Australia in the late nineties, and I eventually went home to England with a real sense of failure. A short time after returning to the UK, I met an Australian man, who I went on to marry. We talked a lot about my time living in Sydney and the overwhelming need I’d had to come home. He told me about his paternal grandparents and their experience of emigrating from England to Australia on the assisted passage scheme; his grandmother’s homesickness that her husband and children didn’t share. I started writing about that feeling of alienation from a culture that was on the face of it very similar to my own, and the book grew out of that place.

I don’t think I’d have written The Silence if I’d still been living in Sydney. I visited family in Australia a few times while I was writing the book, and I couldn’t write a word when I was there. How could I possibly have something to say about such a rich and varied place? Did I even have the right to try? But when I got back to London I found myself drawing on everything I’d seen and heard, trying to capture it all.

I wasn’t sure how Australian readers would respond to The Silence, but so far they’ve received it positively and that has meant a lot to me. A couple of Australian reviewers have said that it needed an outsider to tell this story and I wonder if there is some truth in that. Maybe it’s easier to see things clearly when you don’t belong.