Bookwild - The Other Mothers by Katherine Faulkner: The Psychological Turmoil of Motherhood, Class Warfare, And Oh So Many Twists

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

This week I talk with Katherine Faulkner about her new thriller The Other Mothers!Follow Katherine here on InstagramThe Other Mothers SynopsisWhen a young nanny dies under mysterious circumstances near new mom Tash’s home, she is certain that this could be the story to relaunch her journalism career.Meanwhile, she also needs to find a local playgroup for her son. Nearby is the gorgeous neighborhood filled with wealthy and friendly families, stunning houses, and lavish playdates. But when another young woman is found dead, it’s clear there’s much more to the community than meets the eye and the more Tash investigates, the more she’s led uncomfortably close to the mothers in her son’s playgroup.Are these women really her friends? Or is there another, more dangerous reason why she has been accepted into their exclusive world? Who, exactly, is investigating who? 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 

This week I got to talk with Catherine Faulkner, and I was so excited about it because I read her book Greenwich Park last year, and I could not put it down. It was so, it was such a fun read. I loved the characters in it. I blew through that book. And then this year, she came out with the other mothers, which any of my big little lies fans out there, you are going to love this one. It is so fun. And it follows Tash, who is a newly freelance journalist. and a new mom.

And when a young nanny is found dead near where she lives, she thinks there might be a story there that could possibly relaunch her career. At the same time, she finds herself swept up in a playgroup friendship of three wealthy mothers. And when another body is found, she questions everything she thinks she's figured out about the nanny's death. Wondering who she can trust, Tash's world starts crumbling in on itself. And she's forced to decide how much discovering and telling the truth. is really worth. I really enjoyed all of the characters, even though there were some, like, pretty terrible characters in this book, but it was so much fun following Tash as she

navigated new motherhood, her new job, new friends, while trying to ultimately figure out what happened to this nanny. I have a really fun conversation with Catherine about why she feels like motherhood is a perfect thing to explore and thrillers and kind of how her past in journalism influenced the idea of this book and how she went about writing it. So let's get into it. I kind of wanted to get to know a little about you and writing. So did you always know that you wanted to be an author or where did that come from for you? I, from quite a young age, I knew that stories were my thing. I was really into writing stories

when I was in about the third grade, year three, we'd call it here. I would write books. I liked making them into books. Like, that was quite important to me. I would, like, staple them together and make them look official.

And I liked sharing them with people. And I remember my teacher saying that she would take my stories home and read them to her own children. and I think I was really excited about that. So it kind of spurred me on. She was a really good teacher. And then,

but I think it's a funny thing about writing creatively is that you kind of feel like it's a something that is for younger children. And as you go on with your academic career, you're not encouraged to write creatively so much. And you don't necessarily see it as this, as a career path. Like I never for a million.

And I think I thought sometimes in my kind of wild moments like, oh, how nice it would be to be just an author. And that was all I did. And I just had this like desk by a beautiful window. And I just wrote, but, you know, but I never seriously thought that would be my life. I thought you had to look for other sensible options, right? So, and I was very interested in, in the world and in current affairs and history and politics. So I ended up studying history as my degree. And then I, and I was really, I got really interested in the idea of being a journalist. I studied some student journalists. And so after university, I trained to be a journalist.

And I had, yeah, that's what I did. That's what I've been for most of my career. I was a news journalist working on national papers. Did some investigative journalism, some undercover journalism, and some news editing as well. So I was head of news at the Times of London. And then latterly, head of news projects at the Sunday Times, newspaper, also based in London.

And, yeah, but I, but it was when I was, was on maternity leave with my first daughter that, well, when I was pregnant with her, I had this idea for Greenwich Park, had a kind of this idea of this kind of creepy group of mothers and an antenatal class setting. And I had this, I had written bits on and off kind of secretly never telling anybody about them. But this idea felt different to me and it felt like something I really wanted to pursue and also you know we're so lucky in england we get proper maternity leave so i was off for a year with my daughter and um and so i kind of had had some time away from my very demanding job where i could um in evenings and sometimes when she was just napping i would i would write and my word count was kind of

going up and then when she was about six months old i said to my husband i really would love to do this but i feel like i need some structure and i'd heard about a novel writing course that you could do in the evening with a place called the Faber Academy and he said, yeah, go for it. So I would leave my daughter one night a week, which was just heaven. It was kind of a nice thing to get part of myself back

and I wasn't really, I didn't have a lot of expectation around, you know, I was going to finish a novel and it was going to get published and all of that, really. But I thought, I'll be really proud if I do finish this story and I have a manuscript. and also it is a lovely thing to do for myself, my mental health and my creativity, you know. So for all of those reasons, I loved it.

But then at the end of the course, you have this day where you get to read out a little bit of your manuscript that you've been working on. And the Faber Academy organized for some agents to be there who want to hear, you know, what the students have been writing, see if there's any talent or whatever, among them that they might be interested in. And at the end of that day, after I read out a little bit of what then became Greenwich Park,

I had quite a few agents come up to me afterwards and say, you know, I'd really love to read the full manuscript of that when you finished it. So I was kind of really excited after that. It was so cool. This could be a real, yeah, I know, it was amazing. I actually had like a little gang of them kind of come to me. And I thought, oh, wow, you know, maybe I really have something here. So I went back to work, but I took, and I ended up taking, like, annual leave.

leave to finish this book, you know, and I was saying to my husband, sorry, we can't go on holiday this year because I actually need to do like two weeks of edits on my manuscript. He's like, okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then when I just couldn't even look at it anymore, I sent it off to the agents who'd approached me and had said, you know, we want to see it when it's finished. And then also, just because I'd had that interest, I had the kind of cheek to be like, oh, maybe I'll send off to my like dream agents as well. Yeah. If they like it.

And then, yeah, I just had offer after offer of representation. It was kind of wild. And so I ended up signing with my amazing agent, Madeline Milburn, and just kind of all went from there. So no, I mean, it was definitely, yeah, it was definitely not something that I ever thought. I didn't know how you would become a novelist. I didn't know what like the process would be. it didn't feel formal enough to me.

I'm the daughter of two academics who were very kind of like, you do this and then you do this and then you do this. You know, I was brought up in that kind of family. So I think I would have only ever done it as a kind of side hustle with no expectation. But I'm glad I did. Yeah, I think if you had to taken that course, like it would have been so different. That's so cool. Yeah, for sure.

And I really encourage anyone who's thinking about that sort of thing to just do it because it was such some, if you're like me, I kind of needed the structure around it, almost to give me the permission to call myself a writer. For me, that was quite psychologically important because it'd always been something that I'd secretly done. Like I'd written like bits and bob, but I would have been so embarrassed for anyone to read my work or to tell any of my friends that I was writing a book because then what if it didn't get published and then I just looked stupid, you know? I mean, actually, I worried about stuff like that a lot more in my 20s. For the time, you've got kids and you've just, like, been through the humiliation of childbirth. You're like, I have no, I have no shame anymore. I don't count. Yeah.

I have bigger things to worry about. You do. For sure. It was helpful in me getting over that mental hurdle, for sure. Yeah. So you have motherhood, though. You really, like, really right about the kind of just the inner workings and the whole. experience of motherhood is like very closely related to both of your books.

Um, was there anything about writing about that experience in the thriller genre that was interested to you, interesting to you? Or was it kind of like, that's just where you are in life. So like that's kind of what's there for you in your, yeah, I think a bit of both probably. I mean, for me, thrillers work best when they're about what our real deepest, darkest fears are. and I find it really interesting to explore those. And I think if you're a mother, your deepest darkest fears are not like out there somewhere, some bogeyman or some psycho killer.

Those things feel very abstract, I think. And so I've never been interested in that kind of story. What I'm really interested in is, like, what happens if it turns out your life that you think is, that you've constructed so carefully around yourself, turns out to not to be a lie, or if somebody really close to you turns out to be hiding something that you didn't know. Those things feel to me more interesting psychologically.

Yeah. I also think motherhood is such a recipe for sort of psychological turmoil. Yes. I mean, there is so much, I mean, it, it was so having a baby of your own, it kind of makes you very vulnerable because you love it so much and because you want to do right by, this baby but you don't know how because there is no how there is no right way there's no we're all making it up as we go along and that is a recipe for huge neuroses and anxiety yeah all we can do is look around us and and so we look at other women and we think how are they doing it and maybe

they're doing it right and i'm doing it wrong and i think social media now plays into that hugely that anxiety and kind of ramps it up to 11 yes then you've got kind of the other thing in the mix is the kind of physical vulnerability you have when you're pregnant or you've just given birth, you're vulnerable in terms of your partner in a way that you never were before because you might be financially vulnerable if you've taken time off, if you've stored your career because you think that's the right thing for your child, then you're making yourself personally more vulnerable in your relationship. And also I think sometimes your relationship with other women in your life can become more fraught and more complicated when you have children, you know,

especially when you're pregnant, you know, a pregnant woman is quite a potent symbol, whether you like it or not, you start to embody something, you become a symbol of something, something that other people might find unattainable and that might cause them huge pain, or a symbol of something that your other friends are really not ready for and therefore don't kind of want you to be in that place and they feel like they're losing you to something. Also, you become a target for everybody's, you know, opinions on how it should all be. and how you should be as a mother, you know? If you're a kind of single person living your life,

there's this sense that you can kind of, you can dictate your own destiny and you can live your life however you want, but suddenly that's taken away from you when you have a child. In fact, there's a whole set of expectations ever-changing and depending on the last person you talk to, but you're suddenly public property. It's like, no, actually people have a right to have a view

on how you're behaving and how you're living your life because actually now you're the custodian of another person, So the whole thing is so complicated psychologically. And I just think it's endless, to me, it's endlessly fascinating the transition we go through as women as mothers into that new psychological battleground, really. And so for me, it was an absolutely natural starting point for psychological fiction. Yeah. I noticed you talked about how you also did investigative reporting. So did how did like that kind of write?

impact your writing as a fiction writer now? That's a good question. In time of the writing itself, obviously it's very different. The process is totally different. I do think, though, that you take something from being a journalist, which is, I guess, a slight, I hope it's a sense of restraint

and thinking about your reader for first and foremost and not kind of thinking of, I think that you are, because you're trained to write for your reader, for an audience, to take your ego out of it and to actually serve the audience that you're writing for. I think that's a useful skill in any kind of writing. And so I would like to think that that's made me better at, you know, nobody can do it perfectly,

but kind of looking at your own writing and being like, do I really need all this description? Does this chapter really need to be here? You know, is this plot line really going anywhere? Is it serving the reader fundamentally? Or is the reader just tired? And I think, you know, if you're a journalist, you understand what the media landscape is right now.

And that's about, you know, people have a million things competing for their eyeballs via their phones. And, you know, that's everything from Netflix. You know, we used to say in the last, brought cheap newspaper I worked for. You know, our competition isn't the other papers anymore like it was 10 years ago. Our competition is now Netflix and YouTube and TikTok and, you know, so you have all these other different pressures on your attention. Of course, we like to think that people will still

pick up our book and get lost in it. But I think that you have, the bar is high and you have to keep people's attention and keep people's interest. And so I think some of that training for sure has been helpful for me. Yeah. And also in terms of, I don't know, maybe you were more driving at like the subject matter of being an investigative journalist and some of the stories I've covered. That's also good. Yeah, there was that too. I figured that was probably easier. Yeah, like since in the other mother's, her job kind of is as a freelance journalist as well. So it sounds like you're kind of coming a little bit from experience with those plotlines too. Yeah, I've never, I mean, I suppose I'm technically a freelance journalist now. I don't.

I left my job at the Sunday Times about a year ago to become an author full-time. But I still do the odd bit of journalism. But I don't, to be honest, do very much because writing books keeps me pretty busy. I would imagine. And my two kids as well. Yeah. Yeah, quite good at keeping me busy. But I think that in terms of that, like I found it really interesting to run.

about I wanted her to be a freelance. I wanted the character of Tash to be a freelance journalist because it's what so many women that I know who work in journalism kind of end up having to do when they have children. They go freelance because they can't make it work as a staff reporter because the job is so, it can be very, very, very, very unforgiving

if you have a young family, the hours, the commitment, it was really no picnic, the travel. And the money's not very good. So you don't end up, you're usually not the primary earner or if you are, then it's very difficult to carve out a decent home and family life unless you have an amazing employer, which luckily I did it at the Sunday Times. But it's it's traditionally a male dominated industry, particularly above a certain level. So there's an awful lot of female journalists who are brilliantly talented doing what Tash is doing, which is trying to leak out a living as a freelance. journalist and it is no picnic because you suddenly like

the news desk don't really care when you're calling and they're trying to vlog them stories and they're kind of busy and they don't really have that much time for you you don't have the status and the security of being a staff reporter so she's in that and that's also

kind of playing into her anxiety she feels like she really needs to get a story she needs to get a in order to capture people's interest and in order to kind of re-establish herself and she really feels quite lost she feels like she's lost something of herself by having to change the way she works in that way so I think that kind of adds into the kind of tension around the whole investigation for her is that she's desperate to make it work but then it becomes entangled

with other things and kind of personal interest in the case yeah it becomes more and more complicated for her. Very complicated. So you mentioned that you kind of went to a class to learn like how to write or the approaches to it. So how do you approach it? And really the question is like, are you a plotter or a pants or like how do your stories go together? Yeah. I mean, luckily it wasn't very prescriptive the course in that way. But we learn it. I think it was more about learning the component parts of what it is to really what a novel really is and the kind of elements

of good writing, I suppose. And it gives you a kind of mental checklist of things that I didn't consciously know about before. So things like conflict, passage of time, pace, character, just thinking about them a lot more consciously in a more specific way.

And so sometimes I think what I was doing before was I was writing and it would either be good or bad and if it was bad I kind of didn't know how to fix it and it gives you that kind of toolkit so it was great in that way in terms of my personal process I mean it's a bit it's a bit scatter gun to be honest for you I'm a bit of a bad answer

I don't for me like I need plotting is something which doesn't like the way that plotting is the plotting of a book like it being tightly plotted is very important to me Thriller readers are very, very, like, you know, they're not going to, they're not going to accept something that's poorly plotted, whether it's like, you know, they read a lot. They have high standards. I see the, I see the Amazon reviews.

Like, you know, they're a very discerning bunch. I love that, though, you know. They're like, and they suspect everyone. So you can't pull the wool over their eyes. So you have to, you know, you can't get away with rubbish plots. But I don't plot very much at the beginning. And what I do is a lot of redrafting and reverse engineering. Once I kind of understand my characters and I know my story more.

And I only really get there by writing. And for me, the creative process of sitting down and writing is sometimes working out and working out as I go along a bit is really what the joy is. And I think you have to hold on to what the joy you find in the process. For me, if I spent, you know, a few months plotting a book and I had it in a spreadsheet, you know, what was going to happen in every scene and the beginning to end, then writing that book would be quite joyless for me. That's just the way I feel about it. I know people feel really differently. Oh, yeah.

But for me, it's a process of discovery, which is just so joyful and exciting. And so I couldn't, I couldn't do it a different way to that. But what I do do is when I'm, you know, three-quarters. of the way through or halfway through when I feel like I have a clearer idea of where I'm going with it. I quite often either kind of start again

or I'll get rid of a load of words or I'll start rejigging it and then I'll kind of go over it and over it until it's what I want it to be and then I kind of finish it when I know like when I've kind of sort of the beginning bit out. I don't know. It all sounds mad

but I kind of get there. I kind of get there in the end. And I think, like, for example, I've nearly finished my first draft of my third book. Nice. And that one, I thought it was going to be something totally different in the beginning. Oh, wow. I hope my editor's not too horrified when she reads it,

because I pitched it slightly differently. But I kind of, you know, it was slowly heartbreaking because about 50,000 words in, I thought, this whole bit doesn't work. and I had to ditch half the words. But it was fine because I was refining it. I was like, no, I know the thread that does work, and that's the bit we need to turn on to.

And then we go from there. And so it's probably a wildly inefficient way to go about writing a book. I don't know if I'd recommend it to anyone, but I think whatever gets you, your final book is what, like, is efficient for you. So that's probably what works for you. And also what's fun as well. Like, because I can really, it's such a big thing to write a book. takes such a long time. If you're not enjoying it, you're not going to, I don't know, you're not

going to finish it. You're not going to be motivated to continue or not sufficiently motivated. So, so yeah, I think that, that's important to me as well. So what was the first idea that came to you for the other mothers? Well, so I actually had the original idea from an inquest that I went to when I was training to be a journalist. I went, so one of the things that you have to do when you're doing your journalistic training is cover courts. So it was quite regularly I was down at court doing, and it doesn't matter what you're reporting on. You kind of sit there and it's about getting the skills of understanding, you know, the component part. of a news story and how you kind of obtain the information and make it accurate and make it

newsworthy and all of that and so one of the courts that you cover is the coroner's court so you cover inquests and so we were kind of my journalistic class we were like sat down there and south coroner's court which is in south london yet quite a lot gritty cases down there and we were what we were listening into the kind of whatever was on the slate for that day and there just happened to be this one case about two people who had met online and then one of them had died during their first encounter in this apartment. And drugs had been involved. But it was all just kind of like, well, we don't really know what happened.

So that's just an open verdict. You know, accidental, probably, but don't really know. And I just thought, hang on a minute. This guy isn't going to have murdered. Nobody knows what went on in this flat. There were two people there. You know, the other guy who was just like, oh, well, you know, we just both took some stuff

and then I woke up and, oh, sorry, they were dead, you know. And I was just kind of like, is that it? And then I kind of got, I was just really fascinated by this idea of a death being suspicious, but not meeting the, there was just not enough evidence of anything, right? There was not enough evidence of what had happened for it to be a criminal, worth the police's time to bother pursuing a criminal case of any kind

because it was all too inconclusive. And they'd never, even if they had suspicions, they would never get enough to take it to court, right? So it was this death that just existed in this grey area. I'm not saying that the guy was murdered. But I was really fascinating by air. I was just like, well, how do we know? And then I talked, so I interviewed pathologists,

and I interviewed coroners and people involved in the criminal justice system. And I just talked to them about this and about other cases I'd research and they said, yeah, this could happen. A murder could be missed every day of the week the way the system is, because sometimes there's just not enough evidence of anything. And so, and I guess as a journalist, I'd also just become generally interested in this idea of the gap between the truth and what comes out in court and then what gets reported

and what becomes the official version of the truth because a jury's decided, I like that version. Do you know what I mean? Because it's all about a story. It's a construction of different stories. The defense has to construct a story. The prosecution has to construct a story, and the jury has to choose which story they like.

And the truth is just different, is something else entirely. It's another creature. It's something that exists independently of that process. But as a journalist, you're very limited. You have to write down the official version of the truth, and that is what is happening. To the point where when you're a journalist covering a big case,

you know you have two different news stories for the front page when it finishes you've got this is going to be the front page story if the jury say it's this and this is going to be the front page story if the jury says it's that but that doesn't mean the jury have got it right or that it's either of those two stories or that it's not something in between and so all of that just fascinated me as this kind of gray area and so I was just fascinated by the idea of hit of a journalist trying to unpick the truth as I had done many times. about many different stories on the physical and other witness evidence that is actually available. But then giving the reader the chance to hear the real truth, as you do through Sophie. This is what really happened. And bit by bit, you piece together between her and Tash what's happened. Yeah. I loved the way that pacing kind of worked together. Like you'd be in a chapter with Tash and then you'd switch to Sophie.

And so you are like getting information from the past. but it doesn't make it like less suspenseful in the present with Tash. Yeah, because it has to be one continuous story. So that was the hardest thing to get right. So I'm very happy that you liked that bit. I loved it. I was hard to get, yeah,

it was hard to get that right. Because the worst thing, what you don't want with a flashback is for it to feel like it's dragging the pace. It has to all be part of the same puzzle. Yes, totally. Yeah, I loved that part of it.

The other thing it kind of looks at is how we get big power imbalances, with like different socioeconomic classes. Was that like something that you were kind of intentionally wanting to explore or did that just kind of like come about as you wrote the story as well? Oh no, for sure. I think that's really fascinating. And I think a lot of, funnily enough, a lot of writers shy away from it a bit. And I think a lot of books I read.

I read a lot of books this summer actually, which I don't know whether it's just my weird choice in books. But they were all about privileged people. Like there were just no other characters. It was all about. Actually, all about privileged people who live in New York. I'm nothing against New York. I love New York.

But I was like, wow. Like, I feel like I'm reading about, I've read like six books about people who live in the same street almost, you know. Oh my gosh. It felt like, I think class and money and property, particularly in London, we have a very big gap between people. Property is a big thing where I live because. we have this old city where you have beautiful Victorian houses right up next to. You don't like have the good areas and the bad areas. They're all mixed up because of where the bombs fell in the war.

Like wherever the bombs fell, they built social housing, like what you would call project or I guess I don't know if I'm probably using the wrong word. But anyway, so you have the low-income housing right up against incredibly unaffordable. and so you have this incredible kind of mix and people rubbing up against each other but inhabiting totally different worlds in a way like it bubbles from each other and I find that something very interesting about London

and I think as a society in England we're very co-op still on the whole class system and all of that stuff we have all this baggage right as well so all of that is kind of interesting to me and I like the kind of way that it creates friction between people and I find that interesting to explore and to add tension to scenes and I like to have you know I find it interesting how people who have a certain income level or a certain social level find people who are other who are outside of their world very threatening sometimes yeah

and very challenging and they don't quite know how to be around them and don't know quite how to Right. And I think, I don't know, there's something about that dynamic that just fascinates me and, yeah, which I think is very fun to play with. And with Sophie and Tash, yeah, Sophie was fun to write because not only is she from a different background to the rest of the characters, but she's also young. So there's an age, there's a generational gap there too. Yes. So she's kind of naive, which which makes. how vulnerable to the slightly predatory nature of some of these other characters. But she's also plugged into the world in a different way to them. So all of that, yeah, I found that very fun. Yeah. So when you mentioned like sometimes with inquests, you just get a certain amount of information.

And then they're like, well, that's not enough information for this to be suspicious. And in her case, they're like, she was just wild swimming. And so then there's kind of like a description of wild swimming as well. Have you ever wild swam? I don't know if that's the right way to say it or did you just kind of like research and learn about it? It's so funny because a lot like my parents' generation, if you say wild swimming to them, they're like, what, you mean just swimming?

Like my mom, she goes to, there's a ponds in London, like Hampstead ladies' ponds, where it's only for women and you can just go and swim in these great big ponds. And she does that the whole time. It's like her retirement. Yeah, for sure. Like swimming in rivers, in lakes, in the seas. Technically, that's all wild swimming.

But it's been rebranded as this like new cool thing, hasn't it? Oh my gosh. And so the second they find out that she's done that, it's like, oh, she's this kind of weirdo who goes and does that. And that's the ex-examination. some of that is my slight like jaded nature of like how i've quite a lot there's you know when when young women die and it's like oh well you know the police of this view it's like oh were they doing something silly was it their fault so there's a bit with sophie's death i think what happens is

that they they find out oh she'd had a drink that night strike number one for the pretty young girl number two she had a habit of going swimming so then they find her body yeah i know and then they find her body in the water there's no obvious dodgy boyfriend there's no obvious phone they can find they don't really know what's happened looks like misadventure basically you know and there's always so many deaths per year of people who go swimming after alcohol and end up drowning um so they just end up not looking too closely at it. One of the things that the coroners and pathologists said to me is that you've got to understand, you know, to send a body for forensic post-mortem where you look at everything,

like on what would be like CSI or Silent Witness. In the UK, Silent Witness is this big show where they like look over, under every fingernail and like, yeah, hair and like, you know, do the full thing. That costs an absolute fortune. I can't remember how much, but it's like. It's a lot, yeah. It's a lot of money for the criminal justice system. They're not just going to do that to every single body.

they find washed up in a reservoir on a hot night. Like they're going to do that when they have reason to, you know, real reason to believe. Yeah. That something's taken place, you know, if there was an obvious head wound or something. But the other thing about bodies in water is that they tend to mask, the sort of subtle signs of injury tend to be masked by decomposition and discoloration and like what happens to bodies in water. They're notoriously difficult for pathologists to assess. So I kind of got lots of tips from pathologists before I constructed like the exact scenario of what happened to her. But I was glad that the water thing worked because I had the setting in my head of the wetlands, which is near where I live.

Yeah. Which I have always found a kind of creepy place because Sart Parley because of some of the reasons we talked about kind of the rich and poor thing. Because it's a shiny new development, but it's got the social housing right behind. And it's almost like they just put a new face on it right by this pretty new reservoir. but then if you look behind there's all this other kind of unresolved social problems going on. So it's a kind of a strange place anyway. And I think it's like very beautiful but slightly haunting place. Yeah.

So the two things. Yeah, the setting fit the story for those reasons. I kept like Googling it too because I was like, okay, this seems like this is like a really unique setup, even what you were just saying. So I was like Googling it to get a good like visual of what was happening. but it really, it's a really wild place. Like, you can't believe you're still, well, the first time I went there, it's really not far from where I live, but it's kind of hidden by the housing around it.

So when you go there, you just kind of opens up into this nature reserve. You're like, what? Am I still in central London? This is so strange. Yeah. Because it used to just be two ugly old reservoirs, and then they've made it this huge wildlife reserve and you see herons and all this wildlife. My daughter recently had a school trip to there to like look at bugs and frogs and stuff.

Oh my gosh. You know, so it's really, it's a really, it's quite a cool place. But the guy who was the kind of, who had made, who had been the kind of chief campaigner to turn the two reservoirs into a nature reserve. He, I got in touch with him when I was researching the book. He was like, I can't believe you're writing a murder story at my wetlands. That's so cool. He was really excited about it. Oh, I love that.

Yeah. So you said you kind of discover your story as you go, but without spoilers, did you have an idea of how the ending was going to come together, or did you rewrite that a few times? So I had an idea of what would happen in Cornwall in the last kind of denouement. But I didn't know exactly what was going to happen. after that but I did want the kind of double ending so I kind of I knew that that I wanted that almost to be a sense of an ending in Cornwall but I knew that wouldn't be it

like that wouldn't be the final thing yes so yeah I didn't have to think about it with that talk about it without spoilers but yeah I mean the fun part of the the fun part of the book is that Tash always a few times she thinks she's worked it out right yes she's gonezily trying to work it out. She's like, oh, it's this? And then there's a version of events that she kind of finds and she's like, that's it. And that suits and it suits what her feelings about what happened and how she feels about the various characters. Yes. But then inconveniently for her, the truth again ends up being more complicated. So it's about that kind of complicated nature of truth, I guess. And there's always some confounding fact with when you're a journalist, sometimes,

when you're researching a story, all the facts sometimes fit into a nice, neat narrative and you think you're all sewn up. And then something happens and you find out this one inconvenient piece of information. Yeah. And sometimes, I remember my news editor used to say to me sometimes, you've made one too many calls on this story. So in other words, you found out one too many bits of the truth. Because before it was all fitting together into a nice, neat story. And now you found out one too many things.

and you've ruined it because now it's complicated and nuanced and readers don't like that but that's the world that's true you know and that so it was kind of slightly I guess I had that in my head as well yeah I really liked how I liked how it ended in a lot of ways and there were multiple parts where you did think you're like oh I'm at I'm at the ending basically and then you're like oh I'm not it did just keep going on and on um but But to wrap things up, I normally ask people what they've been reading that they loved lately or watching. Okay. I have just actually finished Demon Copperhead, which I loved.

I haven't read a kind of epic story like that in such a long time. It made me realize I was kind of starved of it. That was really, that was amazing. Yeah. I really recommend it. And I think the whole setting, the whole concept is genius, you know, David Copperfield, but with the opioid crisis. Yeah. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

I'm trying to think, I try not to read thrillers when I'm drafting, because I'm still first drafting in case I end up stealing their ideas. Yeah. But I have all, the last thriller I treat myself to just because I love her so much was the latest, Megan Abbott book and it's absolutely brilliant and incredibly creepy and I've totally forgotten what it's called. I think it was beware of the woman. The wear the woman. I need to read that one.

I have it on my list. Somebody sent that to me and I'm very glad they did because it was incredible. And I've just, I would defy anybody to guess how it ends. Yeah. It's so creepy. But it has so much to say, you know, I like thrillers that it was a real thriller with with so much to say about the things that I'm interested in, I guess, which is like your loss of autonomy when you have children and the way that the relationship

dynamic changes between you and your partner that was so expertly done. I think she's an incredible prose writer. Yeah. As well as a great storyteller. So yeah, I really love that one. Yeah, I love her. I need to read that one as well. It's on my list.

Where can people follow you to stay up to date? with stuff. So I am on X or Twitter, X, or whatever we call it now. Yes. I'm at K underscore Faulkner, F-A-U-L-K-N-E-R. And then on Instagram, I'm Catherine Faulkner writes.

So, yeah, you can find me there and lots of exciting updates coming about the other mothers, which is, yeah, coming up very soon in America. I'm so excited. Very soon. Feels like it's been a really long time coming. I bet.

Yeah, I've actually, funnily enough, just got the books today through my tour. And they look so great. So yeah, I can't wait to share them with everybody. Yeah, I have my, I have my arc right here. Yes. Oh, it looks so good. I'm so happy that we've turned out. Yeah.

Yeah, I love the cover. The cover is so cool. But yeah, it comes out on December 5th, for those of us in the U.S., So everybody go pre-order it. And thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you. It's been my absolute pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Between the Lines.

And if you did, the biggest thing you can do to support the podcast is to go rate and review it on whatever platform you listen on. You can also follow me on Instagram at The Girl with the Book on the couch. And if you still need more thrillers in your life, check out Killing the Tea. my other podcast where I talk to my friend Gare about literally everything we read.