Bookwild - Things Don't Break on Their Own by Sarah Easter Collins: A Missing Sister, A Dysfunctional Family, and the Power of Found Family

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

This week, I got to chat with Sarah Easter Collins about her exceptionally emotional debut novel Things Don't Break on Their Own.   She shares how the shifting nature of memory, sibling differences and the first dog in space inspired her book.Things Don't Break on Their Own SynopsisA heart-wrenching mystery about sisters, lovers, and a dinner party gone wrong.Twenty-five years ago, a young girl left home to walk to school. Her younger sister soon followed. But one of them arrived, and one of them didn’t. Her sister’s disappearance has defined Willa’s life. Everyone thinks her sister is dead, but Willa knows she isn’t. Because there are some things that only sisters know about each other—and some bonds only sisters can break.Willa sees fragments of her sister everywhere — the way that woman on the train turns her head, the gait of that woman in Paris. If there’s the slightest resemblance, Willa drops everything, and everyone, and tries to see if it is her.When Willa is invited to a dinner party thrown by her first love, she has no reason to expect it will be anything other than an ordinary evening. Both of them have moved on, ancient history. But nothing about Willa’s life has been ordinary since the day her sister disappeared, and that’s not about to change tonight.Sarah Easter Collins has written an extraordinary novel about memory, lost love, and long-buried secrets that sometimes see the light of day.  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 

I have taken a family who to some extent look like they've got it all. But that is not their real situation. And what the family know from inside that family and what they present to the world are actually two very different things. I'm telling a story through the lens of memory. And memory is a slippery thing. It's not accurate. And I think it is very possible to talk.

to adult or see adult siblings actually disgusting and disagreeing on things that happened in their childhood. This week I got to talk with Sarah Easter Collins about her debut literary mystery drama. Things don't break on their own. I loved this book so much. I was so connected to the characters. It's such a well-fleshed-out character study that has some really mysterious elements. as well as a lot of really deeply connected relationships, and it was just so great. Here's the synopsis. 25 years ago, a young girl left home to walk to school.

Her younger sister soon followed, but one of them arrived and one of them didn't. Her sister's disappearance has defined Willa's life. Everyone thinks her sister is dead, but Willa knows she isn't, because there are some things that only sisters know about each other, and some bonds only sisters can break. Willa sees fragments of her sister everywhere.

The way that woman on the train turns her head, the gate of that woman in Paris. If there's the slightest resemblance, Willa drops everything and everyone and tries to see if it is her. When Willa is invited to a dinner party thrown by her first love, she has no reason to expect

it will be anything other than an ordinary evening. Both of them have moved on. It's ancient history. But nothing about Willa's life has been ordinary since the day her sister disappeared and that's not about to change tonight. I could not put this book down when I got to the final 40%. I was glued to every single character's perspective. We get multiple perspectives and Sarah Ester Collins really worked in elements of how memory can be slippery and can differ

from people who experience the same event. So there's a lot of looking at memory and perspective, which we all know is something I really love in books and movies. So that being said, let's hear from Sarah. Before we dive into the book, I did want to get to know a little bit about you. So what was the moment when you were like, I want to be an author or when you were like, I want to write a book? Well, we have a magazine in England. Or we did. It's not being published now called Jackie. It's for young teens. And I first wrote a short story for Jackie when I was probably, I don't know, 11, 12, and I sent it off. And I can tell you it would have been absolutely awful. It would have been handwritten.

It would have been full of spelling mistakes. In fact, I still can't spell now. And the whole story would have been absolutely dreadful. And so not surprisingly, fairly soon afterwards, I got my very first rejection. Oh, gosh. And trust me there, and a lot more to follow. But then years later in 2018, fairly recently, I did a 10-week course at Oxford University called Getting Started in Creative Writing. And I absolutely loved it.

It really lit a flame for me, this secret desire to write, which I'd harboured ever since, really sort of came through and I thought this is absolutely what I want to do and I think I really knew at that moment and I would say that courses like that are fantastic for giving you permission and it gave me permission it made me realize that I wanted to do it and I think also really made me think I actually I'm allowed to do this and yeah and then in 2000 I did the Curtis Brown, that's a literary agent in London. I took their three-month novel writing course. And that was absolutely life-changing for me.

First of all, because it introduced me to a group of the most talented, spirited writers of writer friends that I could ever want to meet. And we are still very good friends now and busy celebrating each other's successes and enjoying each other's writing. And that has been wonderful to have that group who are supporting and cheerleading for each other. And also at the end of the course, I was offered representation by probably the best agent

I could ever possibly have imagined. And it was really a dream come true. So these things have gradually led me on this journey. That is so cool. you kind of had like a class of authors that you kind of came up with then in that case. Were you guys writing novels in that three month course? Like is that how you ended up getting representation then? Exactly that.

Yes. That's how it works. So we were all individually writing our own novels whilst the course was happening. And looking at each other's work in detail and feeding back on it in detail. And it was wonderful. It was a really, really creative time. very buzzy time. I think we're all really excited about each other's work. And it was, it was good. It was really useful thing to do. That is so cool. So it sounds like probably from those classes, that

probably influenced your writing process. But what is your writing process like? Well, I don't plot. I think I begin with a situation and maybe two or three key characters. And then I found with things don't break on their own, I was actually thinking about those characters a lot and thinking also very much about their relationships to each other. So how one character's relationship with one, another character might be this and with another character might be that. And I was really bashing those sort of ideas around quite a bit. And then I have a vague idea where I'm going. I'm really open to the idea of characters surprising me. I like the idea that, and I think if they can surprise me with their actions,

they can probably surprise a reader too, and I quite like the idea of that happening. There's a really fantastic quote by E.L. Doctor-Roe. I don't know if you know it is on writing. It goes, writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights. but you can make the whole trip that way. And I think that really, yeah, I love that.

And that's how it feels to me. I can just see so far ahead. And then I like to see what is happening to guide what is going to happen next. Yeah, that's really cool. I've started to quite a few authors just over the years. And it does, it fascinates me. It sounds like you kind of do like a hybrid approach is what people have said. like it's they're like I don't call myself a plotter and I don't call myself a pancer but like what you're

saying like I kind of know where I'm headed and then I like take it bit by bit so it is kind of cool that you can kind of do both things somebody that described that to me as the tent pole method so you have this start and you have the finish and if you imagine some giant tent with several major poles holding that up and I like that that's that's that's what I think it works for me to have a vague sense in several key scenes or key things that are going to happen. Yeah, I like that word for it too. So with this one, you mentioned you really spent a lot of time thinking about the characters, which was like so apparent.

It's such a character study within a mystery. How did you like approach creating them? Was it just kind of like thinking about them or did you like write scenes? with them before you started writing? Yes, I think so. They begin to feel very real to me as I start writing them. And in fact, to the extent that I have wept for them when I've been putting them through horrid things.

I bet. And I was, I think, very driven by the idea of sisterhood and female friendships in writing, things don't break on their own. And for me, that is at the heart. part of the novel. And although, although I know there are, there are dark things that happen in that story, there's also a lot of love and a lot of tenderness and bone deep loyalty to each other. And I think those are the sort of relationships, those are sort of characters and relationships that I was exploring and which meant the most to me to some extent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that really

came across. I, I cried when I was reading it as well. was right there with you. Can I say thank you for that? Yeah, you can. Every now and then we need books that wreck us emotionally a little bit. But to your point, I also loved, without giving any spoilers,

the way it ended still. And to your point, there still was a lot of love between everyone, even though there was a lot of painful stuff that happened, which I feel like is a lot like life. So I loved it. Was there something that drew you to writing, I would call it like a literary mystery?

Or did you just kind of have an idea and it turned out to be a literary mystery? Yes, I think it was the second I had an idea and it turned out to be a literary mystery. I should say that I was brought up on a diet of the famous five. So as a child, I mean. So my, you know, mysteries are maybe in my blood. You know, I think you read as a child and they go deep that sort of idea of what is it? I'm wanting to explore. And actually that's quite fun to write too.

I quite enjoyed this idea. I'm able to throw in some clues and some red herrings and sort of to guide the reader. on a journey. And of course, the big reveal at the end or at the end of any sort of story like that, it's got to be surprising, but I think it's got to be feasible. I mean, I hate the idea of getting to the end of a book and wanting to throw it across the room because I was so, because the ending felt so outlandish. So, you know, I think for me it matters also to. to keep it somehow grounded. Yeah, that's something I've talked about with endings is like they sit right with me

typically if it feels like it was inevitable almost. So it's like everything leading up to it made it seem like that was a natural conclusion versus like just having something out of left field for the sake of being surprising. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. And I also don't think all questions need to be answered. I think it's okay to leave the first. few things which are, well, did this happen or did that? I like they're leaving somebody

with a few questions. Yeah. Yeah. Typically when they, when there are a couple of questions too, kind of back to what I're saying about endings, if I feel like the book gave me enough information to like make an opinion that seems like that's probably what happened, then I kind of like it in that case too, because you're kind of like, I think I know what happened though. Yeah. So I read, before I read the book, that you, that Laca, who is the first dog in space, was part of what inspired the character Laca in this book. So how did you like go from the inspiration there to like crafting a story around it? Well, I explain in the story that she's called Lika because she's born on the same.

same day that that little dog was shot up into space. And that's sort of the explanation behind her name that she's born on the anniversary of that day. But what I wanted to convey by using that name and that association was that I think we are capable of holding highly contradictory information in our head sometimes and probably particularly with regard to animals. And that we are somehow capable of knowing the truth of something and something that is maybe unpalatable and yet also presenting that information to ourselves and to others as being somehow acceptable.

So if you Google Leica, the little dog, who is shot up in space, you can find plenty of cartoon images of her smiling, apparently driving a rocket. You can see this, you know, happy little dog. And actually you can even buy little plastic rockets with little plastic dogs in them for your children to enact this little dog shooting up happily into space. And I am not going to go into the details of it here, but that is not. We'll start crying. Yeah, exactly. And so would I.

So I wanted to use that sense that we hold this contradictory information. Information we know is not true, and yet we somehow repackage in a more acceptable way to ourselves. And so in terms of exploring that from my story, I have taken a family who to some extent look like they've got it all. but that is not their real situation. And what the family know from inside that family and what they present to the world are actually two very different things. So I was kind of linking those ideas together,

how I feel about Laika the little dog and how I feel about that family. Yeah. Yeah. There are, it was cool, again, not giving spoilers, but there were some other like physical parallels to her story as well that I thought was really cool just bringing that theme through the whole story. I hope you're enjoying this episode of Book Wild and if you are, could I ask you a favor? Could you go and rate and review this podcast and whatever platform you're listening?

Ratings and reviews make the biggest difference in discoverability of the podcast and I definitely want to find all of our fellow. thriller readers out there. So if you could go rate the podcast and leave a short review, that would make a huge difference. Thank you. And let's get back to the show. The other part that you were kind of exploring with the family, Lika and Willis family, who really presents one way on the outside and is like very different on the inside is that they as sisters have really different reactions and kind of like their personalities are shaped in very different ways, even though they were growing up around the same trauma. So what was so interesting to you about writing about siblings that have such different reactions to their childhood? I think this is something that really happens.

I think as children are growing up, they can within a family and within a school be labeled. So you have the academic child and you have the sporty child and you have the artie child. and you can have kids who are labelled the naughty child, the difficult one. And actually those labels don't just stick, but I think they actually form a part of who children can become and actually then almost become self-fulfilling. So I wanted to explore that idea how different, how siblings could grow up and actually be,

different. And actually, I mean, even in a very good way, that is absolutely true. I'm one of three and we all have such different strengths. We're all very close. We're also very different people. And also, I think that actually I'm telling a story through the lens of memory. And memory is a slippery thing. It's not accurate. And I think it is very possible to talk to adult or see adult siblings actually disgusting and disagreeing on things that happened in their childhood. And I think it's absolutely true. But of course, our memories are slippery. We don't always remember things in the correct way.

And our retelling of them through language is also slippery because we have to choose words and one word may lend a story a totally different weight to another word. So, I mean, sometimes we have to borrow words from other languages so that, because we don't even have the right word in our own language to describe an emotion or something. So I think with the slippery idea of both memory and also language, when you combine those and retell things that happened in our childhoods, we're all going to have, we're all going to have, we're all going to be essentially unreliable narrators we can't be anything else right so so i kind of use those ideas in in in in the story yeah yeah yeah that has been a fun thing that i've i've talked with um my friends and authors liz and gregg they've talked about that too how like even in our own lives we're all unreliable narrators so it's kind of like i'm always so drawn to it in a book but then like you can't

always reliably narrate what's going on because you will never get out of your own perspective, like ever. So I think that's, I think it's really cool when stories explore it, even on like, kind of what you're talking about, a very like not, um, not an unreliable narrator in a thriller way. It was just like how they were remembering normal events differently. Um, I also talk a lot on this podcast about how much I loved the affair, um, because, they do these conflicting points of views really well. And so you, you,

you, experience a scene with, a couple scenes with one character, and then you experience it with another, and there are these details that are really different. So I was, obviously I said at the beginning, so excited when I,

when, um, I saw that your book was going to deal with that. So how did you approach writing some of the like key scenes and like changing things, depending on the perspective we were in? Oh, one of the key scenes. scenes that I've repeated in the story, as you know, is the dinner party scene. And actually, for me,

that was actually the most fun part of the book to write, because I often had several different tabs open, maybe three or four at once, so I could look back and see what I'd say in previous versions of that scene. And I don't know if you've heard of the Russian Man effect. The Russian Man effect is from a 1950s film called Rashman. And it's actually it's the subjectivity of perception by recollection. In other words, when we remember things,

we're going to remember it differently or wrongly, as we've said before, but we're unreliable narrators. So I use that within the story because obviously if I was going to repeat scenes, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't the same scene. So if I use the Rashaman effect where we all remember things slightly different, I could put totally different words, sentences in somebody's mouth and have the same character say something completely different in each scene.

And I had a lot of fun with that. I really enjoyed the idea of making them say different. things at different times, yeah. But I also think when you are writing from multiple points of view, to some extent, you're inviting a reader to understand how that character sees the world. And that character's view may be different from that character's view, but actually both are valid to who they are and true to who they are. So there's a sort of a serious side to it too.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It was fun reading it and like knowing when we would shift into someone else's perspective. I was like, ooh, I wonder what's going to be different this time. It makes it fun to read. So there's also a lot of imagery about both things, well, about things breaking. Like that different objects break throughout the book as well. And at the kind of at the beginning of it, you talk about Kentsugi, which is like the,

the Japanese art of repairing broken objects with like gold essentially and how that kind of ends up making them more beautiful. But then amidst all of that imagery with literal objects, the characters are like enduring these really heartbreaking moments at different points in their lives. and so it was so cool seeing the focus of like how we can fall apart and how we can put ourselves back together. Was that like a through line that was in your mind when you first started, that that was what you were going to kind of want to focus on? Again, it's something that really evolved throughout the story and became, you know, a key part as the story, as I was right, writing, but I really love that idea behind the idea of mending pottery with gold.

And it is really this concept that you can make something more beautiful by mending it. And I think that really can apply to human relationships too, that there's this idea that, okay, we're human, we're fallible, we will get things wrong. But by acknowledging that and wanting to make things better and working to make things better and healing, that actually it doesn't mean that it's going to be broken forever, but it can be stronger and better. And so healing really is quite a strong theme throughout the story. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And since it spans so much of their lives, I think. think that's where like you can show since healing takes time. That's why you're able to show like them breaking at different points and healing again and just all of just how long that whole process

can take. Yeah. The other thing that really stood out is so like a and Willa's family is like all about appearances and everything seems great but it's not really. And then Robin's family is like like they're like kind of loud and fun and like not concerned with appearances um and so how did you approach like making these really highly contrasted families in the story well i i really love how you put that by the way um thanks so again this is somehow how the story evolved but actually i began with robin's family and oh nice for a long time i had had in my head that the opening scenes of her family, I had the painting of the cupboards and the, the everything that happened, the sort of her breaking her arm, the tattoo review, all of that.

Yes. All in my head for a long time. And then I got stuck because I was, I knew that I wanted a missing person in there. And when I first, first started or had the idea, I, had a sense it was going to be her brother who disappeared and that created a problem for me and I realized the problem was that a child from that family

would never go missing or if they were they would be found and that actually they were not the sort of family where this was going to happen so then what happened was I went to a dinner

party and at the dinner party there was a man there who dominated the entire conversation throughout the whole night he spoke about himself and he spoke to i think one other man that he felt was clearly in his own social class and right um he basically ignored absolutely everybody else And because he was speaking so loudly and so forcefully, everybody else was sort of forced into silence. We just had to listen to this man talking about himself. And suddenly I realized that the missing girl was not from Robin's family at all, but actually probably from a family of someone like this man. And I went home and I sort of scribbled that down.

And suddenly I realized I had a whole story that at that point on, I could not stop writing. I was getting up at 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and creeping downstairs with my dog for company. And I was writing so fast. You know, I just couldn't stop. It was so exciting for me at that point to realize that. And I kept thinking, I must sit down at some point and plot this story out. And then it didn't happen because I was writing so fast. That is so cool.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it kind of broke the story open. Yes. Yeah. So I was, you know, I really enjoyed that process of writing that story. So the first draft happened, in fact, very, very quickly. But then at that point, after I had.

had this fabulous agent and then two amazing editors to work with, one in the States and one in the UK. And they were so generous and so wise. So the storytelling slowed down a bit more after then in terms of what I was doing. But, you know, I'm so grateful for that insight and that help to make that story the best it could be. Yeah. Well, I loved how it turned out. I was, that's funny that you were saying you were like sneaking down at four or five in the morning. Because the morning I finished it, my dog woke me up at like 4.30 and I was like,

maybe I'll just sit on the couch and finish this book. And I like finished it by like 8.30. So we were kind of having similar experiences. But once I like got to that like back 30, 40 percent, I could not stop reading it. I really loved it. That's so lovely to hear. Thank you. Yeah.

Yes. So also, I've been asking people at the end if they've read anything recently that they've loved. Oh, I've just finished reading The Hearts Invisible Furies by John Boyne. Do you know it? Okay. I don't. I haven't read it. Oh, it's a big, big recommend. I absolutely loved it. Honestly, that is a book I could not put down and could not stop reading. And I also have recently read it. demon copperhead and oh yeah oh Barbara Kingselwich is amazing so I am a huge fan of hers and a huge fan of Anne Patchett and I love American writers too and Canadian writers yeah um Meg Wollitzer

and and um here and Trues I just love them yeah yeah same yeah yeah well cool. Where can people follow you to stay up to date with everything? Oh, I am on Instagram and I'm also on Twitter, more on Instagram these days actually. And

I've also got a website which people can find and they can find pictures of my enormous lurcher on that. It was right by my feet nut right now, taking up the whole rug. My surprising we read it through. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I will put all of that in a show note so people can keep up with everything. Oh, thank you so much for talking about your book with me. Thank you so much, Kate. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.