In writing I was inspired by those orphaned girls of children’s literature, and I was equally inspired by the books I hadn’t read—the stories that hadn’t been told. My parents were strong advocates of Canadian classics; when I was in high school, they handed me books like Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women and Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House. I loved and admired these books, but they seemed distant from my own world where girls were passing out in the bathroom or cutting words into their skin. I wanted to explore the lives of these girls and the very modern reality of small-town life, despite the fact that I hadn’t read such darker details in classics—and thus the moments didn’t seem proper or literary. In graduate school, I was chastised by a professor for writing about “these girls” and guided toward Katherine Mansfield for a model of a more worthy type of heroine. I persisted with “these girls” out of some stubbornness or selfishness and wrote the type of book I wanted to read but had never been able to find.

Before the book was to be published, I gave a draft to an artist friend and asked him to draw an image for the cover. I thought the cover image could be a drawing of a skinny girl running, and I outlined a few descriptive passages for him from the second chapter and worried that I’d saddled him with an impossible task. A month or so later, he sent me some sketches drawn on heavy white paper. In the midst of the whiteness, a girl ran with her legs kicking up and her face turned to the side, somewhat furtively. Though a sketch, this girl on paper might have been a photograph, so perfectly akin was she to the runaway I’d seen in the alley and the vivid image I’d held in my mind for so many years. As it turned out, the drawings were deemed too rough and faint to be used for cover artwork, but I held on to them nonetheless, unsettled and grateful for this “Justine”—a girl who was neither my friend nor a person whom I had ever met.

A Conversation with Rebecca Godfrey

Can you talk about the role gender plays in The Torn Skirt? For instance: Sara truly loves her father, despite his frailties and faults. To what extent does Sara’s resilience arise from his absence, from her having nothing to fall back on?

A lot of novels about women’s lives explore the domestic or romantic, but I wanted to explore the ways women seek out and find danger or trouble, rather than safety or security. As for Sara’s father, he believes his daughter is someone who should not be sheltered or controlled, but he’s not able to be present as a guide. Even though he’s not the typical “good father,” he gave her strength by raising her to question the world around her, to not worry about what others think.