I read The Furies in October and loved this book about friendship, witchcraft, social warfare amongst girls, and most importantly, the legend of the furies! I connected with Katie Lowe, the author of this fantastic read, on Twitter and she agreed to talk to me more about the book, her inspiration for it, and lots more!
Katie is a writer living in Worcester, UK, and The Furies is her debut novel. She is currently working on her PhD in English literature, focusing on female rage in literary modernism and the #MeToo era. You will learn so much from this conversation, and maybe even get spooked out at one point. Nothing too scary I promise!
What was the moment when the idea of the book first came to be? What made you pursue it?
I was actually very lucky – I had the first chapter, almost fully formed, before I had anything else. It came out in one afternoon, and stayed pretty much the same as it is now. But at that point, I wasn’t really sure where I was going with it – only that I had a crime scene, and a murderer looking back without much remorse – so I put it aside for a month, while I was busy with work. But over that month, I started thinking about writing a book about four girls in a secret society – and all at once, it all clicked into place. Seven months later, I had a book! It was a once-in-a-lifetime perfectly lovely writing experience I’m sure I’ll never have again.
I absolutely love your style of writing. It is vivid and thoughtful, conjuring images in the mind. What are some works or writing exercises that helped you develop such imagery using words?
Ahhh – thank you so much! You know, I don’t have much in the way of writing exercises – but I do have a notebook I carry around with me at all times, and it’s full of random words and imagery that I’ve picked up here and there, like some kind of magpie. I’m also a compulsive rewriter – I think it’s so important not to worry about getting the perfect word or phrase when you’re drafting (I genuinely put [SOMETHING] when I can’t think of the right word, sometimes) but just get something on the page… And then once I have a structure to work with, I print it out with my notebook of better words beside me, and rewrite it line by line. It means I can shift out of the high gear required for plot, and focus on the language – because for me, personally, they’re very different kinds of writing.
George R R Martin is one of my favourite authors and he describes his writing process as one where he lets his characters tell him the story. Do you have a similar writing process for The Furies? Did Violet and Robin speak to you and tell their stories?
I absolutely think once you get to a point in a novel when you know your characters well enough, that’s true, for me, at least. It’s less a matter of them telling the story and more the sense that in the situations you put them in, they could only possibly react in certain ways, because that’s who they are – and at that point, it feels gorgeous and easy, because all you have to do is make those situations happen. I remember that happening with The Furies, when Robin and Violet go to the fair – that was the point at which I stopped having to think about what they’d say or do, and just let them go ahead and do it.
Of course, once you get to that point, you usually have to go back and rewrite the parts of the book you wrote when you didn’t know them quite so well – but for me, that’s the fun part. That’s when it feels like it works.
Annabel is an amazing teacher, challenging the girls’ ideas and thinking, and preparing them for the world. Did you have a teacher like her in your life?
There’s not one single teacher that I’d pinpoint as being her, exactly – but I did have a lot of really great teachers who made a point of drawing the connections between whatever we were studying, and “real life.” I always think it’s funny, now, that I’m so interested in politics and history, and even science – because my fifteen-year-old self would never have imagined that. The thing that’s made me interested in those things is not learning them in the abstract, but understanding why I should learn them, and how they’re connected to things that matter. So I wanted to write a teacher who did that – who helped the girls make those connections, for instance, between Artemesia Gentileschi, painting Judith Slaying Holofernes in 1610, and rape culture, now.
What research did you have to pursue to write this novel? Were there parts of the folklore that you found spooky?
The folklore was almost one of the last things to come, because when I first started the novel I thought I’d focus mostly on art and literature as the “source material” for the girls’ classes – but I kept stumbling upon references to witchcraft, poppet magic, and the like, and it seemed to weave its way in fairly organically.
There was definitely one part that was very spooky, though – which I’d forgotten about until your question reminded me! It’s a bit of a spoiler, so I won’t go into too much detail – but essentially, I wrote one key scene in the middle of the book, and shortly after, my flat started going a bit haywire. Doors open at random, things not where they were supposed to be, lights flickering off and on, bumps in the night. It was so unnerving I started tweeting about it – in no small part because I lived alone so I needed to prove I wasn’t losing my tether to reality.
But then, I stumbled upon an unsolved mystery, which was – almost to the letter – very much like the one I’d written in that scene. I looked it up, and it turned out to have happened not too far from my flat. Shudder. I’m sure it was a coincidence – but I have to admit I was definitely spooked at the time (and looking back at those tweets now… I realise I still am!)
Were you yourself part of a secret society at some point during your education, or knew of them?
Oh, I wish I had been… Unfortunately, if there were secret societies at any of the schools I went to, I wasn’t cool enough to hear about them. But I was a member of a few different groups of passionate, engaged, bookish kids who’d hang out and talk feminism and politics and music, usually over coffee or wine – which I think, when you’re that age, can be kind of formative. It’s certainly shaped who I’ve turned out to be, in my thirties – so while our little gatherings weren’t exactly official, I still look back on them with the same kind of fondness.
Did you bring some of your own life experiences in The Furies, through Violet, Robin and the other girls?
Well, I didn’t do too much of the bad stuff – no murders, fortunately. But I did join a school mid-year when I was 14, so the experience of being a new girl is one I know well. And the clock tower, which is pretty central to the campus in the novel – that’s inspired by Old Joe at University of Birmingham, where I studied for my undergrad (and learned a lot of the history and theory that made its way into the book…!)
Do you have another novel in the works? Will it also be a spooky read?
I do! I’ve just submitted a new book to my lovely editors in the UK and US, which is due to be published in 2021. It’s about a widow whose husband’s murder becomes the subject of a true crime podcast, and it’s about trauma, memory… And ghosts. So it’s definitely going to be a spooky read!
What would you tell your younger self when it comes to writing?
Keep going! I have failed so, so many times – I wanted to do a PhD, but that didn’t work out, so I tried to write a non-fiction book, but that didn’t work out either, and then I wrote a (really bad) novel, and then I wrote The Furies. And now I’m back, at Birmingham, doing a PhD, having submitted another novel to boot. So I guess I’d say: failure’s only the end of the world if you don’t pick yourself up and move on – and every time you do fail, you’ll learn something that’ll make you a better writer, or a better person.
