We chat with author Sophie Green about The Frock Shop, which is a sparkling story about the beauty of the second-hand, the power of second chances, and becoming who you were always meant to be (with a little help from your friends).
Hi, Sophie! Give us the elevator pitch for your new book?
One frock shop in a harbourside Sydney suburb holds a multitude of stories, and not only from the women who work there but the clothes on the racks. This is the place for secondhand clothes and second chances – because it’s never too late for a transformation.
There are five main women in this novel – Daphne, who grew up in Mosman and still lives in the family home with her ailing husband – she works at the ‘Frock Shop’. Christina a young LA actress who is forced to come back home to Mosman after a horrific incident. Lucy, a school kid whose parents own the dry cleaners and who wants to work in fashion. Adelaide, Daphne’s best friend and retired Cellist, who had once been famous. And Margot, who lives in the family home with her aunt and is struggling in work, health and purpose.
How did you decide on the five main characters? And why five stories to tell this time?
They came to me from the ether, the way characters always do! It’s an odd process, writing fiction, when characters appear and take residence in your mind for a while. But that’s what they do.
For this novel I started out with four and as I was writing felt quite distinctly that there were meant to be five. For a while I thought the fifth was Lavinia, Margot’s aunt, but that didn’t quite stick. Then I realised it was a teenager, and her name was Lucy. I then remembered that I had introduced a teenager named Lucy in an early chapter, as she’s visiting the shop from her high school across the road. So Lucy was, it seems, always meant to be a main character.
This one is interspersed with lovely vignettes, that tell the backstory on how some of the key op-shop pieces came to be there. Why include those?
When I started writing the novel the publisher, Rebecca Saunders, sent me a message suggesting that I write short pieces about clothing that is in the shop. I immediately knew it was the right idea, and wrote the first frock story (as I call them), ‘The Houndstooth Suit’, straightaway. Then they kept coming. Some of them were for pieces of clothing in my imagination. Some were inspired by clothes I found by trawling Pinterest, when I had an idea of a decade and a colour and material used, such as ‘1980s midnight blue velvet’. If I could ‘see’ a story as soon as I looked at a photo of the clothes, I knew it was the right piece to write about.
How do you keep the balance in your book? Like all your novels, it is overall very uplifting, hopeful and warm, but still tackles some very big and serious themes for these women.
I like to think my stories are realistic, and I’ve had feedback from readers that they appreciate that I don’t tie everything up neatly. So this balance is, I believe, reflective of how women manage their lives: they can have something heartbreaking happen to them and still make their kids’ lunches and call their best friend to check on her. I hope, in these novels, to honour the very big stories that are in all of our lives, no matter what it looks like to the outside eye.
How have female friendships changed your own life?
I know what it’s like to not be able to make friends, and also to lose friends, but I am lucky to have some close friends who are wonderful people to know – people I just don’t want to be without – who are kind and warm and interesting. There are adventures I’ve had, things I’ve done and seen, that these friends have made possible.
