We chat with author Gabrielle St. George about her debut novel How To Murder A Marriage, along with inspiration, writing, and more!
When did you first discover your love for writing?
When I wrote an illustrated book about personified blobs in Grade 2 and my sweet teacher told me she loved it. It felt so good, I heard my calling. I couldn’t not write. It comes as naturally to me as breathing, although it feels more like an itch I need to scratch. What I most love to do is create. I write, I paint, I dance, I garden, I cook, I design and build houses. The mandate I give myself for my creations is to make people feel good, to make them feel better. If I accomplish that then my work is successful.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
- First book I remember reading on my own: Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (It was absolutely thrilling to me).
- First book that made me want to become an author: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (which was the first book I ever bought for myself).
- The book I can’t stop thinking about: Wuthering Heights never really leaves me. Also, I can never get Toni Morrison’s Beloved out of my system.
Describe your novel in five words.
Janet Evanovich meets Bridget Jones.
What can readers expect when they read HOW TO MURDER A MARRIAGE?
They can expect suspense with a side of humor and also meet a really real new friend, warts and all. Gina Malone is cringingly relatable. She’s irreverent, funny, and brave. She’s also divorced, an empty nester, and turning 50. Gina pushes the reset button on a whole new life chapter and she’s doing all the things many of us wish we were, she’s succeeding at some, failing at others, and we get to go along for the wild ride.
Where did the inspiration for HOW TO MURDER A MARRIAGE come from?
Sad but true, my own rocky relationships are the inspiration and fodder for this book. I use loads of my own real-life experiences and I also steal indiscriminately from people close to me. Fair warning, as Anne Lamott said, “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.” I exact revenge on the villains in my life through the pages in my novels. Much cheaper than therapy and equally effective for me.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
I was afraid to tell the truth, even though I hold that as my highest value, along with being kind. Being truthful is always what I strive for in my writing and my life. Because I was drawing on intimate personal experience and I knew that people from my past would recognize themselves in some of the characters in my book I felt a huge amount of fear around telling my truth, and almost choked and backtracked countless times. Also, reliving traumatic events and writing about them (even though I fictionalized the accounts by toning them down, turning them up, combining, and morphing them) was challenging, and even debilitating at times. I really just had to force myself to push through. The other coping mechanism that works for me is humor. I can’t write about the difficult things in my life while I am experiencing them but once I’m through to the other side I’m usually able to laugh about them even when they were horrific. Laughter is my medicine.
What was your writing and process like?
I’m a coffee addict and I love getting up early enough to watch the sunrise. I live on a farm in the country and the views out every window and from my porch are amazing. So I start my writing day with about two hours of drinking, and thinking, and lots of staring. It’s extremely indulgent but a sort of meditation for me. I didn’t have this luxury when my four children were at home but often I would get up an hour or more before my babies just so I could steal this time for myself. When I get to my computer I write extremely fast. Sometimes my typing speed can’t keep up with the flow of words. I’ve always been a huge outliner but I’m surprised that with this mystery series I am flying a little more from the seat of my pants. The characters have sort of taken over and I feel a little bit like a stenographer. I’m finding that quite fascinating and just going with it for now.
What about the research of the book?
Since much of the background in the novel comes from my own lived experience I had a stash of personal stories that didn’t require traditional research. However, my main character is a relationship advice columnist and self-help book author who goes by the name of The Ex-Whisperer, so I researched those sorts of books a lot. I went on to write three of my own self-help relationship advice manuals called THE GAL GUIDES, which will be published in tandem with the first mystery novel in the series starting with HOW TO MURDER A MARRIAGE. The relationship advice books are actually written by the main character in my mystery novel under the pen name The Ex-Whisperer. Two more Gal Guides will be published alongside books 2 and 3 in the mystery series.
Were there any favorite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I fell head over heels in love with the setting. The town I set the book in is a real place that I gave a fictional name to. I messed with the geography somewhat in order to suit the story’s needs, like adding or deleting certain shops from the high street and moving a lighthouse onto a different beach. It’s a place I took my children to for summer vacation for years and we made wonderful memories there so it held a special place in my heart. I had no intention of leaving the greater Toronto Area but a year or so after I finished writing the mystery novel I began yearning for the town in my book more and more. I then shocked my family and myself by spontaneously pulling up stakes and moving three hours north to the place I based my fictional town on along the shores of gorgeous Lake Huron. I’m happy to say I absolutely love it here and still cannot get used to the astounding natural beauty of the area. We even have magnificent shows from the Aurora Borealis eight months of the year!
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The best advice I ever received was don’t get it right, get it written. You really do have to keep slogging along even when it’s painful and you’re certain that your creative well is dry. Sometimes there are days when I just type rather than create and I am sure that my output is utter crap. When I go back over it usually I find the work wasn’t as bad as I expected and there is often much to salvage. At the very least I have pages to rewrite and that is a million times better than having blank pages staring at me. The worst advice I ever received was make sure all your story points are believable. Life is unbelievable. Truth is stranger than fiction. Surely of all the big lessons the global citizenry has learned over the past nearly two years of the pandemic, that is the truest one of all.
