“I knew a lot about the street life just from my own experience growing up in Victoria and hanging around downtown when I was a teenager. Some of the characters are based on legendary girls whom everyone talked about or knew.”

Seamus’s biggest fault is that he feels too much. You wrote: “‘Don’t care,’ Sara wanted to tell him. ‘Just shrug your shoulders. Don’t love your daughter so much. Don’t be moved by scenery.’” The reader really feels for both Sara and Seamus here. Did you want the reader to feel the same compassion Sara feels toward Seamus, so he wouldn’t be judged too harshly for abandoning his teenage daughter?

“The scene in ‘The Red Room,’ where the girls cut themselves, was difficult—I’ve actually never been able to reread it.”

I was interested in that dilemma. What happens when you feel too much? What happens when you don’t feel enough? It’s something explored through every situation Sara gets into. She’s scared by vulnerability, which she sees as weakness. She wants to be tough because she wants to survive. But she keeps having these eruptions of feelings, of empathy, and that’s her conflict.

Which scene in the book did you most enjoy writing? Which was the most painful?

I enjoyed writing the “Blue House” chapter. It was fun to try to re-create that kind of drunken abandon, where everything is a little out of control and wild, and I wanted the reader to get caught up in her good time. The scene in “The Red Room,” where the girls cut themselves, was difficult—I’ve actually never been able to reread it.

Sara’s voice is unusual—both colloquial and poetic. What was your intention in regard to her distinctive language?

Many adolescent narrators in literary fiction ring so false to me. You can feel the authors are writing their idea of a teenager; they use formal, academic words the character would never know or use. It’s very difficult to capture a true teenage voice—to make your character sound authentic, but not make her sound like an idiot. The challenge of creating this language intrigued me. How does an intelligent person speak when she doesn’t have an intellectual’s vocabulary? How can someone who is innately poetic speak in a lyrical way when she only has the corrupted language of a shopping-mall society?

Your latest book, Under the Bridge, is nonfiction and explores teenage girls as well—girls who were involved in a murder. Why are you drawn to this age group?

Teenagers are unguarded; their emotions are more explosive and their situations are more precarious—so for a writer, at least for me, this provides powerful material. I’m also interested in exploring the forces that influence individual action, and teenagers are generally more vulnerable to these forces than adults.

Sara gets involved in crime in The Torn Skirt. Were the girls you met while researching Under the Bridge similar to your fictional creations?