I vividly remember the first time I spoke with Katherine Firkin. It was a little over a year ago, on a bitterly cold late autumn day in Melbourne amid our first lockdown. It was the first in-person (sort of) interview I’d done for The Nerd Daily, because she’s requested the interview be live. I had her on speakerphone while my tablet recorded the conversation. A US-based reporter, she’d just returned home to Australia and completed the mandatory hotel quarantine to promote her debut novel Sticks and Stones, which I loved. We’re both a bit more refined now; I’m speaking to her via Zoom (and using transcription software) while she completes yet another round of hotel quarantine. She confesses, “I keep hoping for, like, a woman in the window moment where I’ll see something and be able to write a novel based on that. But that’s not going to happen at all, I don’t think.” She was in quarantine because she returned to the US in November last year to cover the American Presidential Election, where she describes the environment as “just this constant tension. You would wake up every morning with this almost anxiety thinking what is going to happen today?” While hotel quarantine might not yield a creative spark, she admits, “it’s nice to be here to be able to take a breath and start to write again.”
One of the reasons she’s back in Australia is to promote her second book, The Girl Remains. Moving away from the urban setting of Sticks and Stones to Blairgowrie, a small town on the coast of Victoria (which I noted in my review has the perfect eeriness for a grisly mystery and a quick glance at some photos of the coast reveals why), The Girl Remains charts the investigation into a set of bones that suddenly appear on the beach and are believed to be the remains of fifteen-year-old Cecilia May who disappeared twenty years earlier after she and her friends snuck out one evening. Although Firkin clearly views her central character, Emmett, “as a city detective,” offering the additional tantalising snippet that “the Third Emmett [book] …will be back in Melbourne,” she had a specific reason for the change in setting. Whilst she admits she was “actually bit nervous about such a dramatic shift in the setting because I was really proud to write a book that was very urban and very gritty,” her reason for the plot unfolding by the sea is because “I had this story in my head quite for quite a while and that’s where it needed to be told”. Although she was by no means lacking in a clarity of purpose or competence when we spoke last year, I get the sense that she’s settling in more firmly to having the title of ‘author’ sitting alongside that of ‘journalist’. She has a firmer appreciation for the writing process, for future projects, and for the way she controls the differing stories she’s created.
That much is evident when she elaborates on the setting, revealing “Blairgowrie was a place I used to go with my school friends, when we were young”, describing it as “kind of our escape when we were adolescents.” She goes on to reflect on how that personal experience informs a broader theme of the book: “I think when you’re that age, and you finally get that freedom from your parents, there is that sense of like, anything can happen, there’s that real kind of excitement, and also a bit of fear.” Of course, in The Girl Remains, that kind of fear is justified, because something does indeed go wrong.
Much as with Sticks and Stones in which Firkin explored “how trauma affects generations, and how it can infiltrate through the years,” The Girl Remains shows how the trauma of a childhood friend suddenly disappearing on what should have been a trivial night of rebellion trickles down through the years, while paying homage to the manner in which “cold cases are horrendous for family of victims.” This story also has a tight focus on how we don’t necessarily grow with our trauma, or acquire the capacity to see it with a different, more mature framing. Firkin’s pace speeds up when she talks about the characters of the two surviving girls—a clear signal that this is perhaps the part of the story in which she’s most interested: “I also think teenagers are interesting, because they hide a lot. They keep a lot from their parents, they keep a lot from each other […] I think it’s an interesting age to write from because in The Girl Remains, they’re all keeping secrets. And some of these secrets are not actually that big. But to them, at that age, they can’t tell anyone that, you know, it ruins their perception of themselves, it might ruin what other people think of them. So they don’t ever give the police a really true account of what’s happened. And that actually really hampers the investigation.”
One of the other roadblocks that Firkin throws in front of the investigation snags my interest, as I wonder aloud how much of her personal experience she is drawing on in the crafting of Emmett’s wife, Cindy, who herself is embarking on a career in journalism and in so doing, makes some questionable decisions. My comment comes alongside the blunt admission that I found the character very unsympathetic. Like all good authors, rather than bridle, Firkin’s head tilts and she asks why, curiosity at how the words she’s crafted find new meaning in the head of a reader shining through her expression. It’s one of the reasons I not only enjoy speaking with her, but find I really like her as an individual, too. She pauses once I offer an explanation for my feelings about Cindy. “Working in media, I know how consuming it gets,” she admits. She elaborates: “It’s not something I like to admit, but all journalists have had a moment, I think, where you’ve crossed a line. […] Because there is a rush of a nice sense of victory when you get something, and something you do does contribute to a case being solved or to a bigger picture.” Her candour is impressive, as is the reflectiveness that she turns on herself and what she’s witnessed. My ears prick up when she concludes by saying, “but it does mean you cross some lines that you probably shouldn’t,” because I vividly recall the discussion about crossing lines which she and I had last year.
This is where the development of Firkin’s thematic nuance really shines, as last year, she also raised the matter of the lines people crossed, and the way people can justify their own behaviour. I point out that this seems to be an ongoing point of interest for her. This year, she’s able to identify with even more incisiveness not only how this manifests in the everyday world, but how this point of focus intersects with the story she’s created. “I suppose there’s a part of human psychology where once you do cross a line, whatever that line is, you have to go on living. So you do have to find a way to justify or forgive yourself, or, you know, I suppose there is that element of it. But I do find it really interesting how lines get blurred in our lives,” she muses. Drawing on her time as a court reporter on criminal cases, she goes on to point out, “quite often people are able to justify what to do […] they can kind of put it in a box and not feel anything. And for me, it’s such an interesting character trait, it’s a little bit scary, because it makes you wonder, where does that line end?”
I wonder how witnessing dark actions and battered pasts being brought before a court would affect someone. Surely, they’d become desensitised, especially if they have to sift through everything they hear to determine not necessarily what is most important, but what is going to grab the attention of an audience the most effectively. Perhaps that’s what prompted Firkin to pursue her childhood interest in writing as thrillers provided the space for her to reflect upon what she’s seen across her career. I make the observation to her and she pauses again. “I don’t necessarily stop and reflect on how much I see that maybe the general public don’t get to see. But there are definitely moments, particularly in court, but even just general reporting, where I come across people, and I think, how can you be like that? How can you do that? How can you go home and think this is fine?” She references Adrian Bailey, who raped and killed Melbourne woman Jill Meagher in 2012, saying, “I just remember looking at him and just thinking, you know, he went to the gym, you know, you bought a kebab, afterward, you talk to your girlfriend, you warned her to be safe on the street? How, how do you do that? And then look yourself in the mirror?”
It’s a sombre thought, but what Firkin does through her writing is to emphasise the underlying complexity to her readership—a complexity that a news report can’t convey. It’s one of the reasons I’m looking forward to whatever she has in store for readers next. I ask her what and when we can expect from her, and she offers brief insight into the manuscript she’s currently working on, which she describes as “very, very different to the first two books,” revealing that “it’s not a police procedural [or] even set in Australia.” All going well, it will be out in 2022.
It’s a challenging thing to move to a different format of book (I can attest to that from my own writing experiences), but it’s a testament to the fact that Firkin is intent on refining her craft. “I was talking to Benjamin Stevenson about this actually […] I really don’t like five star reviews,” she notes. “I feel like a five star review is like, Yay, books. Awesome, cool. Whereas a four star, someone has thought about this, thought about what they don’t like. And there are very few books, I think, where you’re going to think there’s nothing that couldn’t be improved.” She adds, “I think you always think you can do better […] you’ve got to keep wanting to push yourself.” It’s an attitude and approach that I understand completely—I firmly believe that each book you write is about doing better than the one before, about making sure you aren’t resting on your laurels. It leaves me imbued with a genuine excitement about what Firkin has in store for readers, and also with the firm belief that Firkin will make her mark upon the literary scene for years to come.
