Lighthouse Bay
Page 38
The coastline of Australia is literally crowded with shipwreck history. I grew up in a town where a wrecked ship was used as a breakwater at the bottom of my street. So the wreck of the Aurora was imagined after a lot of reading about wrecked ships in Queensland. One particular source was a journal, written by a man who had survived a shipwreck with his wife and dog (everybody else on board was lost). They had eventually been picked up by a passing trade ship and made it back home, where he wrote down everything he could remember. The description of the shipwreck itself was more harrowing than anything I could have imagined. It would be the equivalent of going down in a plane: that kind of horror and feeling of complete helplessness. I really tried to capture that when writing the scene of the Aurora going down. In fact, some of the details (for example, the ship breaking into pieces) were taken directly from the journal account. I had no idea that something as large and well-built as a sailing ship could just turn to splinters under the force of rocks and stormy water.
What was your research process like? Did you discover anything in your research that particularly intrigued you?
It’s a funny thing, but this is the first time I have written about the area where I live. I’ve always reached for slightly more exotic places, but I started to realize that where I live doesn’t feel exotic just because I’m so used to it. When I started working on the first idea for the novel, I developed a strong friendship (which later grew into a lovely relationship) with a man who lived up at the Sunshine Coast, about two hours’ drive away. I spent a lot of time going up there and back, falling in love with the area, mapping out where the story would take place. I also spent a lot of time in the State Library where I live, reading up about local history. It was wonderful to find those deeper layers of history in the place where I live, and to find that my hometown was just as full of romance and intrigue as any of the other places I’ve written about. In terms of what really intrigued me: when I discovered that paddle-steamers used to take people between the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. That blew my mind! I think I let out a little whoop of joy in the library and said to myself, “I am SO putting a paddle-steamer in my book!”
Isabella overcomes many physical and emotional hardships in her life. What do you think is the source of her strength?
Isabella was a great character to write in some ways, and in others being trapped inside her head for months on end was unbearable. She was just in so much pain. But I did love the idea that, no matter how bad things got, she was able to stand up and keep going. In some ways, I saw this as an innate stubbornness in her: she gets an idea in her head, and she won’t let go of it. Once she sees the lighthouse, she knows she must go there. Of course this gets her in trouble, too—it’s the same willfulness that makes her want to take Xavier to America, for example. Isabella is a person who lives a lot in her head, so it’s really mental tenacity that gets her through.
Lighthouse Bay is, in many ways, a story about relationships. It reflects how men and women can build each other up as well as bring each other down. Can you comment on how this idea factored into your writing?
I had cause to see this fact firsthand during the year around the writing of the story, which was the most difficult time of my life. After twenty years and two children together, my childhood sweetheart and I had parted. The incredible complexity of relationships was very much on my mind, and that’s not to say that any of the characters were based on anyone I know. Far from it. I have a lovely relationship with my ex-husband, and he is a wonderful friend and father to the kids. But in the slow breakdown of my marriage and in the horrible, horrible aftermath of the split, I thought a lot about relationships and how impossibly difficult and complicated they can be. And then of course while writing the story, I was trying very hard not to fall in love and eventually capitulating! So I think a lot of that turmoil of the heart has made its way into the story.
Distance and history deeply complicate the relationships between both pairs of sisters. Are you writing from personal experience here?
No, I have no sisters. I have a brother and we have always had a very close relationship. But I remain fascinated by the idea of sisters. I have a handful of incredibly close female friends, I love the company of women, and I imagine having a sister must be the most wonderful thing in the world! Anyone who has one is so lucky (not that I’d trade my gorgeous brother in!).
Isabella’s most precious treasure is one that doesn’t cost much at all. Is there a particular object in your life that you value in this way?
I have a little box full of bits and pieces I have collected through my children’s lives (they are ten and six years old): a paper Darth Vader made out of a toilet roll and black cardboard, a first scribble, a few locks of baby hair, the little wristbands they wore in the hospital. If my house caught fire, they are the things I would grab before I ran for it.
Several of the protagonists in your books are artists. In Lighthouse Bay, Isabella is a skilled jeweler, and Libby is a painter and graphic designer. What prompted you to make your main characters artists?
Because I am a writer, I find it easier to write about people who express themselves through art. I would be utterly hopeless writing a book about, say, an Olympic athlete. I wouldn’t have a clue of that mindset.
Many of the women in your books struggle with a driving sense of loss. What inspired you to begin writing on this topic?
It was just such a tough time for me, and writing stories is one of the ways I work my feelings out. When I started writing, I knew Isabella was sad, but I didn’t know why. When I realized that she had lost a baby, I cried for two days and wouldn’t write any more. I kept going through all the other possible scenarios: she’d lost a sister, her mother, anybody but a baby. But it had to be a baby. She had to be all but broken for the story to work. Because what I wanted was for her to have to come back from this horrible loss somehow, so that at the end the reader is left with a sense that hope always returns, even in the worst of circumstances. As for Libby and Mark, that was much less straightforward. She was grieving a man who had never been hers, so her grief had to be as secret as the affair had been. So while Isabella was openly broken-hearted, to the point that it annoyed her husband, Libby was covertly broken-hearted and couldn’t ask for comfort.
You are active on social media, particularly on Facebook. What value do these networks provide for you as a writer?
Oh, dear, they stop me writing! I sometimes wonder if there is any value at all because social media are so addictive. But then I get a lovely message from a reader saying, “I stayed up all night to finish your book” (my favorite compliment, by the way), and I’m so grateful that the channel exists for them to be able to tell me that. I write in my pajamas first thing in the morning, while the kids are still asleep and the cats and dogs are playing around my feet. Then I get up and get dressed and get on with my day and it’s almost as though my writing has taken place in a dream, in another world, which has nothing to do with the real world. So being able to receive contact from other people who’ve appreciated those morning dream-sessions is just wonderful.
You’ve provided your readers with glimpses of Isabella and Libby’s lives before we meet them in Lighthouse Bay. Have you considered a prequel for either of them? What’s next for you?
I don’t do prequels or sequels. The reader is free to fill in that backstory with her own imagination! I am one quarter of the way into a new book, tentatively called Ember Island, about a woman who takes a post as the governess to the prison superintendent’s daughter on a prison island in the nineteenth century. Only she is hiding a pretty awful secret, and when she starts to take an interest in one of the female prisoners who manages the superintendent’s garden, it all gets very complicated indeed. There’s also a present-day frame narrative that sets up some interesting business with an old diary to tease the reader: nothing is as it seems! I’m having a wonderful time writing it.
Coming soon from Kimberley Freeman
A capt
ivating new novel about a scandalous attraction, a long-forgotten secret, and a place where two women’s lives are changed forever.
Evergreen Falls
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KIMBERLEY FREEMAN was born in London and grew up in Brisbane, Australia. The bestselling author of Wildflower Hill, she teaches at the University of Queensland and lives in Brisbane with an assortment of pets and children.
www.kimberleyfreeman.com
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COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSANNE DITTRICH/GALLERY STOCK
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © JUSTINE WALPOLE
ALSO BY KIMBERLEY FREEMAN
Wildflower Hill
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Kimberley Freeman
Originally published in 2012 by Hachette Australia Pty. Ltd.
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First Touchstone trade paperback edition April 2013
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Designed by Akasha Archer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4516-7279-4
ISBN 978-1-4516-7280-0 (ebook)