Q&A: Louise Milligan, Author of Pheasants Nest

Can you tell us what inspired you to write Pheasants Nest?

My first inspiration was that I had covered the murder of Irish-Australian woman Jill Meagher in Melbourne. I had been the first journalist to interview her husband, Tom. I was incredibly moved by their story. I started thinking about what if Jill had been kidnapped instead of killed? What would have happened? And what if she was a journalist? A journalist being a victim would have a very different and more knowing perspective. She’d know how they would cover her disappearance. She’d know that her boyfriend, left behind, would be blamed. I thought that was a good premise for a book. Kate Delaney is not at all Jill, but from what I know of Jill, I am certain they would have been friends.

But I had also covered a lot of stories of police with PTSD and I really wanted to incorporate that element into my book too – that the cop who is trying to find her is struggling with his own demons. And that’s because he works in the area near the Pheasants Nest bridge – which had been renowned for suicides. I had covered a coronial inquest many years ago when I was a young journalist about a young man who jumped from the Pheasants Nest bridge, and the local police had a terrible PTSD toll from finding suicides/trying to stop people from jumping. I have been driving up and down the Hume Freeway between Melbourne and Sydney for years, and every time I went over that bridge, I thought of them. So I wanted to combine all of these elements in a book.

How hard was it for you to get into the mindset of the perpetrator aka The Guy; when writing this book?

I grew up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and The Guy is really an archetype of a lot of people I knew back then. Guys who had a chip on their shoulder and who dealt with it by harassing women. He’s a pretty simple character in lots of ways, someone who, as I write in the book, “lusts above his station” and doesn’t understand why the women he goes after don’t like him. He fancies himself in a way that is very much bound up in misguided male privilege. He also reminds me of a lot of the men my single girlfriends talk about on dating apps. The sort of guy who would be upset because a woman put up a picture of herself that was flattering. You know, he’d think he had some sort of right under consumer laws to complain that she was fatter than her picture. I’ve also worked on quite a lot of stories over my 24 years in journalism that involve sex offenders and they often destroy people’s lives for the most mundane reasons. Kate knows this too. It annoys her and terrifies her all at once. Also, Kate is a bit of a snob and thinks he’s a stupid bogan, and I think the tension between her perspective and his adds to the drama when she’s in the car. It’s also quite funny, in a way. A combination of funny (in a bleak way) and utterly awful. Imagine being stuck with the sort of person who absolutely makes your skin crawl? I thought that would really work.

The settings described in your novel are so in depth. How many times did you travel the Hume highway to get every detail just right?

I had already travelled it many times over many years. But I did go back on multiple occasions and went back and forth over the Pheasants Nest Bridge many times. And I also went out a few times to check out the undercarriage and the surrounds, and that’s when I found “the cage”. I wandered around with my cameraman colleague and filmed it all on my mobile phone.

You mention quite a few books and TV shows throughout Pheasants Nest. Are any of these personal favourites?

Like Kate, I adored the West Wing. When my husband and I got together we used to sit and watch it with our flatmates on a Saturday. I absolutely loved Tom Stoppard’s play, The Real Thing. I wanted a love story to be at the centre of my book and for it to be a love story between two people who are kind of outsiders, and that absolutely delicious feeling when, as an outsider, you meet the person who just understands. Kate and Liam make a faux The Smiths song about it. I was a complete Morrissey tragic as a teenager. And now they are adults and they are attractive, but also flawed. And they are just mad for one another and it’s so infectious for everyone around them. I also wanted there to be a music soundtrack running through the book – The Smiths, The Stone Roses, The Cure, The Church, The Magnetic Fields. Basically the music I grew up loving. And I thought it would make a cool soundtrack if my book becomes a film or TV series.

Have you always aspired to write fiction? And what was the journey like for you to move into the world of fiction writing?

My Mum, Mary (she shares the same name as Kate’s mother, although they are not really alike as characters) always told me that one day I would write a novel. She said that from when I was a child in primary school. I always loved writing. And one day wanted to do it, but didn’t really know how I would even go about it. But I guess that in my line of work, investigative journalism, you come across so many crazy things. You collect so many fascinating stories and anecdotes. Your world is very rich. You are like a sort of bowerbird, collecting stories everywhere you go. And suddenly, it gets to the point where you can see how you would string them all together. And once I got cracking on this book, I wrote it almost in a fever – I just couldn’t stop. It has been one of the most pleasurable things I have ever done. I just adore writing. I was writing this book for people like me – people who are busy and time-poor, but don’t want to be patronised by a novel. They want it to be smart, but they want levity, too. They don’t want it to be a punish. They get to the end and they don’t want to leave the characters because they love them so much. That’s what I always got out of novels. I remember seeing Barack Obama quoted saying that everything he learned about empathy, he learned from novels. How you can be transported into a world that is so real – the world of Holden Caulfield, or Elizabeth Bennett, or Philip “Pip” Pirrip from Great Expectations. I wanted Kate Delaney and Liam Carroll and Sylvia Estralita and Peter D’Ambrosio to be unforgettable characters.

We think Pheasants Nest would make a thrilling movie! If it ever came to be, be, who do you envision playing Kate Delaney and Liam Carroll?

I deliberately wrote it in a very visual way that I felt could be adapted into a film or a TV series. It’s a very Australian story (or Irish-Australian, at least) so technically Australian actors would be good and of course, we have some brilliant ones who would do a wonderful job. But having said that, I did have a vision of Emma Stone in my head when I was writing (this is before she became the latest it girl in Poor Things). She looks like what I thought Kate would look like and it goes without saying that she’s an incredible actor. And I think Jamie Dornan is totally gorgeous and can see him being Liam. I loved him so much in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. He’d need to be mussed up a bit as Liam is pretty shambolic, but I’m sure that could be arranged.

Buy a copy of Pheasants Nest here.