Generally, I like to start with a theme, a setting and at least the essence of a protagonist and their voice, then leave the rest to sort of unfold (or, more realistically, be pried open) within that framework. I knew I wanted to write about vulnerability, which eventually morphed into an amalgamation of truth and identity and the idea of moving on and remaking ourselves once we get to where we’re going. I was also stuck on the idea of a teenage girl with the temperament of a hard-boiled detective, a bit of a nasty but ultimately well-meaning piece of work, willing to go to great and often dubious lengths for what she thinks she wants. Setting-wise, the Sandown in my mind borrows heavily from an island off Ohio’s Lake Erie coast called Put-in-Bay; I spent a lot of summer days in my childhood there and always thought it’d be interesting to set a story in a similar sparsely populated visiting-place. That was the initial skeleton.

What is your writing process like? How does your novel-writing process differ from when you write your poetry?

Total anarchy. I outline then ignore the outline, add characters halfway through and often edit non-linearly. It’s bad and I can’t make it stop. I therefore need great stretches of time where I can focus solely on a book to get anything done. There’s definitely a life-consuming element to writing a novel – for months it appears in the shower and on walks and in bed – but I tend to write poems in short bursts. Poetry to me is also a slightly freer intuition-and-aesthetic-based endeavour, while novels are more structure-reliant. Luckily they’ve each improved the other; I think writing poetry makes me more economical and deliberate in my novels, and writing novels makes me a better storyteller in my poems.

How did you find inhabiting Mona’s point of view, and getting into the mind of an unreliable narrator?

Her original skin was easy to slip into given the fact we share a certain less-than-savoury mood involving misplaced cynicism towards most people and things (though Mona has her reasons and I just suck). And though I’ve not dealt with the same situations as her I did tap into events from adolescence that I feel have affected me in unwelcome ways in adulthood.