REBECCA GODFREY was born in Toronto, Ontario, and grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. She attended the University of Toronto and received an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. She worked as an editor and freelance journalist before writing The Torn Skirt, which was named a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2002. Godfrey has received fellowships from Yaddo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Her most recent book is Under the Bridge, an investigation into a true-life case in which a group of teenage girls was accused of the murder of fourteen-year-old Reena Virk. The bestselling book received Canada’s largest prize for literary nonfiction and has been optioned for film by the actress Reese Witherspoon. Rebecca Godfrey lives in Brooklyn, New York.

About the book

Writing The Torn Skirt

THE TORN SKIRT started with an image of a girl running. I had this same, very specific image in my mind for so long that I’m not sure when it moved from something I likely saw to something I invented. I knew the girl was very skinny, in ragged black clothes, with an evident, even dramatic, sense of apartness. I knew her name was Justine, and she was around fourteen and running through an alley beside the Odeon theater. When I was a teenager, I used to hang out after school at a coffee shop near this alley, and perhaps I saw her one day and found the mystery of this slight, evasive, fleeing girl compelling. Many years later, I vaguely remember this glimpse of her as occurring one spring afternoon, and that my friend Christine, who was older and seemed to know everyone, had been both wary and admiring when she informed me the girl was a runaway named Justine. I’m not sure if this actually happened or merely seemed as if it must have, since the image of the girl was neither hazy nor fading, and seemed more fact than dream.

When I moved away from Victoria for college, I began to follow the typical advice given to young writers: write what you know. I wrote about my hometown of Victoria—the strange, fairytale quality of the place: the wilderness, the plethora of retirees, and the odd aspiration to re-create pieces of British life for the amusement of tourists. But I also wrote of this girl who I really didn’t know and had never met, and who in fact might have been dreamed up. After a while, the mystery surrounding her identity became the plot.

I wrote several drafts in which various characters recounted their clashes, run-ins, and romances with a runaway named Justine. One of these characters was a musician. One was a policeman. One was the owner of a Chinatown grocery built on top of a former opium den. Most of these pages ended up being tossed away, except for the character of Sara who, rather rudely, ended up taking over the book for herself.