Bookwild - Eye of the Beholder by Emma Bamford: A Vertigo Retelling from the Female Gaze

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

This week, I talk with Emma Bamford about her thriller Eye of the Beholder, a feminist retelling of Hitchcock's Vertigo.  We dive into what inspired her to write a Vertigo-inspired thriller, and how well the story of controlling image still fits modern times.Eye of the Beholder SynopsisWhen Maddy Wight is hired to ghostwrite the memoir of world-renowned cosmetic surgeon Dr. Angela Reynolds, she thinks it might just be her chance to get her career back on track. She travels to Angela’s remote estate in the Scottish Highlands to hunker down and learn everything she can. But the deeper she digs, the more elusive the doctor becomes. Is there more hidden beneath the surface of the kaleidoscopic beauty industry than Angela wants to reveal?Sharing the estate is Angela’s enigmatic business partner, Scott, whose mercurial moods change as quickly as the conditions on the darkening moors outside. Confined to the glass-walled house, Maddy can’t shake the feeling of being watched. As objects go missing, handprints appear on the windows, and a stranger lurks in the grounds, she finds herself drawn ever closer to Scott. Returning to London once the book is finished, Maddy is excited for their future together. But her dreams are shattered at the book launch when Angela learns that Scott has leapt to his death from the Scottish cliffs.Which is why, months later and lost in a fog of grief, Maddy is completely blindsided when she sees Scott entering the Tube station just in front of her. It can’t be him, can it? After all, Scott is dead...or is he?In exploring the differences between looking and seeing, surface and depth, and the power of the female gaze, this tribute to Hitchcock’s 1958 film masterpiece asks: If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how much can you trust what you see?Follow Emma on InstagramFollow Kate on Instagram  Get Bookwild MerchCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackCheck Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck out the Imposter Hour Podcast with Liz and GregFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrian 

There's a lot in the book that's about control of image and a big part of that is the beauty industry. And, you know, I'd be picking up my phone and open up social media and I'm getting hit with ads for all the time, everything to perfect my face and body and my health. And it's constantly bam, bam, bam, bam. That's exactly why there's the beauty industry element in there. This week, I'm talking with Emma Bamford about her new thriller, Eye of the Beholder. which is an Alfred Hitchcock-inspired thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Here's what it's about. When Maddie White is hired to go straight the memoir of world-renowned cosmetic surgeon Dr. Angela Reynolds, she thinks it might just be her chance to get her career back on track.

She travels to Angela's remote estate in the Scottish Highlands to hunker down and learn everything she can. But the deeper she digs, the more elusive the doctor becomes. Is there more hidden beneath the surface of the kaleidoscopic beauty industry than Angela wants to reveal. Sharing the estate is Angela's enigmatic business partner Scott, whose mercurial moods change as quickly as the conditions on the darkening moors outside. Confined to the glasswalled house, Maddie can't shake the feeling of being watched. As objects go missing, handprints appear on the windows and a stranger lurks in the grounds. She finds herself drawn even closer to Scott. Returning to London once the book is finished, Maddie is excited for their

future together. But her dreams are shattered at the book launch when Angela learns that Scott has leapt to his death from the Scottish cliffs. Which is why, months later, and lost in a fog of grief, Maddie is completely blindsided when she sees Scott entering the tube station just in front of her. It can't be him, can it? After all, Scott is dead. Isn't he? Or is he? In exploring the differences between looking and seeing surface and depth, the power of the female gaze, this tribute to Hitchcock's 1958 film masterpiece, asks, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, how much can you trust what you see? If you're a Hitchcock fan, you're obviously going to love this. If you have stories about obsession, you will definitely love it too.

and the really creepy setting in the Scottish Highlands is just peak gothic vibes. So if any of those sound good to you, you're going to love this book. But for now, let's hear from Emma. Before we dive into Eye of the Beholder, I didn't want to get to know a little bit about you. So what was your moment where you were like, I want to be an author or your moment where you're like, I think I want to write? well do you know what that's not a straightforward answer for me yeah like a lot of authors say oh I always wrote and when I was a child I was writing stories and making my own books and things um and I actually thought that I wanted to be a journalist and so when I finished university that's what I did I went on

and I trained and I went to work for newspapers and magazines then when my parents were moving house about 10 or 15 years ago they were taking like all the old records at the attic And they found this statement, personal statement that I'd written for when I was getting ready to go to university when I was 17. And my memory was that I'd written in that personal statement that I want to be a journalist. When I saw it, like 15 years or so later, I'd written, I want to be an author. And then I'd completely forgotten about that dream. Yeah. About 15 years.

So I guess when I was a teenager, it started. Yeah. That's awesome. So obviously this is fiction, but I did see you did go into, you did write as a journalist, and you also have a memoir. So how did, like, writing as a journalist and writing memoir affect or inform your fiction writing? So writing the memoir is quite a good stepping stone because journalism came first, and then nonfiction when I was writing about myself and my experiences. So it's kind of hard to get things wrong, and you've already done. the research, which is a bit easier than writing fiction.

But a big thing that I learned, my editor with my first non-fiction book, she actually rejected me the first time when I submitted to her. And she said, it just reads like a diary. There's no narrative arc. I was not a narrative arc. That's not something we do when we're writing news stories. They have a new strict structure. So I went away and learned about that.

And then obviously when I then went to start to write fiction, that's, well, it is a fiction writer's tool, the narrative of the hero's journey. So it was, yeah, like a natural progression building. Yeah. Journalism to nonfiction to fiction. So how did you writing process then like develop for fiction? So do you plot it out or do you just kind of start writing and see where it takes you? I have a bit of a mix of like a plotter and you know they call it pantsing so I usually have a rough idea I usually know the beginning and maybe the end

and I know who the characters are and I might know a few key scenes that I want to hit but apart from that it's just one wild ride just stop typing away and see what happens sometimes that leads to absolute nonsense that all has to get ripped out and chucked in the phone right yeah some authors have said like they like writing that way because they can kind of surprise themselves too by like not knowing exactly what happens but i've also heard what you're saying too sometimes it leads to like more revisions since it's not like totally plotted out from the beginning um what about your characters so you said you kind of like know who they are when you start.

Do you do anything to like learn them or learn about them before you start writing? Or do you kind of discover them as you're writing as well? With the main characters, I tend to do like a little character quiz for myself. So, you know, to get an idea of their background and their thoughts and their feelings and what would be their instinctive reactions to certain situations. Yeah. I don't always do that with my second. characters. I probably should actually. But it feels like they, I don't know, when I write,

I kind of feel it like, okay, so I'm not a builder at all. I kind of imagine building a wall is like writing a book. So, you know, you dig out of the foundations and then you just sticks and bricks in. And then it looks like a wall, but it isn't really a wall because if someone pushed it all down and then it needs like the finishing on the top and it needs the mortar to be put in. So when I write each draft, because I do quite a lot of drafts, they're all kind of working towards that. So one is the foundation, one is the bricks, one is the mortar, one is the topping. I don't know, keep going. One is the render. One is the paint. One is the pictures that you hang on in the wall afterwards. Sort of do it that way. That's cool. I saw some people were

sharing a quote a couple weeks ago on bookstagram where like Jordan Peel said that the first draft, he just reminds himself that it's just putting sand in the sandbox so that he can build castles later. It sounds like that's kind of like the same thing that works for you for the most part. Yeah, I like his idea. That sounds great. And also it kind of takes the pressure off as well that when I'm writing this first draft. That is it. I mean, I listened to a writer give a talk once.

And she plots out absolutely everything on a spreadsheet, like down to my new detail of who's going to say, what and what the objects are in the scene, everything. And so she only has to do two drafts of the novel and then it's published. And I find that astonishing. I've got like a lot of respect. I don't think my brain works that way though. Yeah. I mean, it is cool like doing this podcast.

It's, I feel like the biggest thing I've learned is that there's not just one way to write a book. So it is cool seeing everybody's different approaches. Is there something that draws you to writing thrillers? I like those darkest stories. Like when I was a teenager, after I'd read Lord of the Rings trilogy a couple of times

all the way through and then all the way through again. I then discovered Sue Grafton's detective novels. And I became, I mean, do you know her book? I feel like I read, I know I read something from her years ago, but I don't think it was a series. Right, okay. Well, she started writing this series called The Alphabet series and that she was going to write A, A is for Alibi,

B is for Burglar, C, S for Cork, and go all the way through to Z. So she wrote 25 of those in the end, and I read all of them, and it all had the same female detective in them. And I just loved them, and I've read several of them multiple times. And, yeah, I just thought that she was such a brilliant writer. I mean, I don't write private eye fiction. Right. But she's a really big influence on me, I would say.

Yeah. And then she's kind of like, it's like noir, you know, like she's writing hard-boiled detectives, but in 1980s, California, with a female PI. So a bit of a twist on it. So I love reading those kinds of books, and I suppose that's why I write things. Yeah.

A bit of a twist and a bit of a sort of darker or more noirish side. to them. Yeah. For me, it's reading them is so engaging because you're so interested in figuring out like what the big question is or what the big mystery is. So it just keeps me so engaged in the story. I'd imagine it's probably the same way of writing. But with I of the Beholder, it is loosely based off vertigo. Have you always been a Hitchcock fan? And then second part of that, like, what inspired you to do kind of a new take on Vertigo? I think I discovered Hitchcock when I was doing film studies at university for my bachelor's degree. And that's actually when we saw Vertigo and had a big impact on me.

And then since I have seen quite a lot of his other films, I haven't seen Psycho. I've kind of been saving it. But then the moment's not right because it's like, oh, I could watch it now, but no, I'm home alone on my own and it's dark. and I think it's good. Right. But I absolutely love Rebecca as well and rear window. I think that they're such good.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So with this one, the characters, you kind of, like, some of the names are a nod to some of the characters in Vertigo as well. What, how did you decide, like, which characters you did kind of want to give that name or have, like, separate. names as well. Well, when I decided that I wanted to do like a modern imagining or my take on Vertigo, I always knew that I wanted to flip the genders because in Vertigo, you have a male character. He's a retired policeman and he's hired to follow a woman and he's kind of always

looking at her and we see him looking at her in the shots that we see in the movie. And I thought when I wanted to come to write back what would happen if it was the other way around if it was a woman who was following a man and she was looking at him and we the readers going through her perspective were looking at a man and to turn it on its head that way

so that's why Maddie is technically the Jimmy Stewart character from Vertigo right and Scott is like the Kim Novak character yeah Yeah. When I was just looking at stuff about Vertigo, there were a reporter or a critic named Susan White in 1999. She said about Vertigo that it was a tale of male aggression and visual control as a map of female edible trajectory, as a deconstruction of the male construction of femininity and of masculinity itself, as a stripping bear of the mechanisms of directorial, Hollywood studio and colonial oppression and as a place where textual meanings play out in an infinite regress of self-reflexivity. So did you choose to have the story also kind of revolve around

a plastic surgeon to play at some of those same themes of like beauty and how it's seen differently through genders? Exactly. There's a lot in the book that's about control of image and a big part of that is the beauty industry. And, you know, I'd be picking up my phone and open up social media and I'm getting hit with ads for all the time, everything to perfect my face and body and my health and all, like, it's constantly bam, bam, bam, bam.

So I thought it would really, was really interesting because Hitchcock made Vertico in 1958 and now we're in 2024. But those themes and ideas, ideas of how we control how we look and how other people want to control how we look in order to achieve certain goals, I guess, whether that's, you know, selling their products and making money, which is what the cosmetic surgeon Angela Reynolds in the book is doing. You know, she's been very, very successful at doing that and she's made a lot of money and

become a powerful woman. Yeah, so that's exactly why there's the beauty industry element in there. Yeah, totally. And the other another theme or not even necessarily theme, but another big thing, like you said, is Maddie gets obsessed with a man in this instance and is really intrigued by him. How did you approach like making her obsession, but like making it seem like realistic and believable? Well, I'm glad that you think it is believable, so that's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, when I was first writing earlier drafts, she was much more extreme in the lengths that she went to.

And I thought that that interested me, but it kind of didn't really fit the story that I wanted to do. and I think it was maybe going too far down the Hitchcock lines and actually I wanted to think about the way a woman looks at a man in a different way to the way that Hitchcock had a man looking at a woman. Yeah. Yeah, so she was a lot meaner. Yeah, she was in the final one. Yeah, that's awesome that this is actually her tone down.

It also, it takes place kind of, in this like almost like gothic moody setting in the scottish highlands what drew you to having that setting be like a main part for the book um i wanted a big part of it to be set in nature um because a lot of it was about artifice um yeah you know changing the way that people look and and changing i sort of like curating your own identity so not being maybe natural or true to yourself. And the beauty of setting it somewhere like a really remote Scotland is that when you go up there, it feels really ancient.

You know, if you're in a place with no buildings and you look at this landscape around you with like mountains and heather and hard granite rock and big open skies and like it's spongy wet ground underneath your feet. And you think, God, I could have been here a thousand, If somebody stood here a thousand years ago, it would have felt exactly the same for them as it does for me now. So, yeah, I wanted to like compare and contrast those two things. It is cool kind of contrasting those two things with each other.

It also kept reminding me, I don't know if you ever watched Ex Machina. It's a, like a sci-fi thriller, but there's like this awesome house that was like very similar to that one. So I kept like picturing it happening in that. that space as well. But for, for the, so Maddie is writing a book about a cosmetic surgeon as well, as we kind of discussed. Did you have to do any research into that to be able to kind of write that part? Into the ghost writing or into the cosmetic surgery?

Oh, sorry, the surgery part. Yeah, loads. I watched an awful lot of videos on YouTube of cosmetic surgeons like demonstrating their procedures and there's a bit in the book where she references a facelift operation that she's watched and she says you know like the person's face

has been cut and then peeled back and I did see one like that honestly I'm so squeamish it was really really hard to deal with Yeah. I can't imagine. Yeah. But even, you know, watching videos of people having fillers and different doctors talking through their techniques and why they're doing this and why they're putting it here and not here. Yeah. So quite a bit of research into that. Yeah. That's what I figured. That stuff is just like wild because even when you see people when they are like healing, it still can look so brutal.

I can only imagine how intense it is like when you're actually in the middle of the surgery, basically. Did you know mostly, you said you sometimes know specific scenes when you're going into it. Did you know mostly where you wanted it to end up or did that surprise you at all as you were writing it? It surprised me actually. I was, I knew that I was sort of approaching the end of the book, but I didn't know how I was

going to end it. So I booked myself on a writing retreat to Scotland for a week. Nice. It was so cool. It was in December. So there's only a few hours of daylight and the sunlight was really low and there was nowhere else to go because we were in the middle of nowhere. I was like with a bunch of other writers. So we'd have lunch together and dinner and a bit of a chat after dinner. But apart from that, it was like locked in my small room with my laptop like writing away. It came out of that, actually, like the setting that I was in. And I was like, yeah, I want to, the book opened in a certain place, and I'd like it to end in a certain place as well.

Yeah, that's really cool. So at the end, I've been asking authors what they've been reading, if they've read anything that they've loved recently. And some people say they don't read while they're writing. So if that's the case, that's fine too. But have you read anything recently that you've loved? I have and I have brought some examples of sharing well

so the first one I've read as this one in Memorium by Alice Wynne so that is doing really well here in the UK it's her first novel I think and it's a story set in the First World War and it's two

childhood friends from school two boys and they both join and go and fight in the First World War and it's absolutely devastating. So really it's funny and I cried like I was only about a quarter of the way through and I was already

crying. Oh wow. A really really humane book with all the feelings. It's got all the feels that one. Yeah. And the second one is Stephen King's misery. Oh yeah. That's always a good one. I saw the film years ago. I'd never actually read the

book. So I read it and I raced through it and it was so strange because I got to the end. Normally when I read a book and I get to the end I forget about it. But with this one, I was like, oh, I wonder what Paul and Annie are doing now. And it was like I imagined I was watching a TV show and it was just going to be another episode of the two of them in her house and the cat and mouse gave that they're playing. I really, yeah, I really enjoyed it. That cover was really really cool. I hadn't seen that version of it too. Yeah, I think it's a new one. I can't remember. I just heard someone else

talking about it recently. So it's crazy that you brought it up. It's like twice in one week for me. But yeah. I know it spotted this really weird thing in it. There's just, and he obviously did it on purpose. I don't know what order he wrote the books. But there's a very, very brief mention

or reference to the hotel weather shining. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, so it's like a tiny little bit of meta, flicker of mettaism. So cool. Yeah. Yeah, I was just reading Marjan Kamali's The Lion Women of Tehran.

And she did kind of the same thing where she referenced something from her previous book, just like the stationary shop that was the first book was about. It was like mentioned in the book too. I was like, that's so cool when authors can kind of fit that all together. It's nice, isn't it? It's like a little recognition for fans. Because if you haven't read the author's other work at that, point you're not like you know,

won't feel like you're missing out, you won't even notice it. But if you have, you're like, oh yeah, you've seen me. And I'm in your little world now. That's great. Yeah, I love the little crossover. Yeah, totally. Well, where can people follow you to stay up to date with everything you're working on?

Okay. Well, I am on Instagram. I'm at Emma V. Bamford. I'm on Twitter, but X, but I don't know how much longer for. I'm on Facebook as at Emma Balford writes, and my website is emma banford.com. Awesome. I'll put those links in the show notes, and thank you so much for talking with me today. Thanks, Kate. Thanks for having me on.