Q&A: Lyn Yeowart, Author of The Hollow Girl

What inspired the idea for The Hollow Girl?

It all started when I was in a café with a friend. “I need to tell you about something I did a long time ago,” she said, speaking slowly and looking into her coffee. ‘But after I tell you this something, you probably won’t want to be friends with me anymore.” I honestly thought she was going to tell me she’d murdered someone…but instead, she told me that back in the 1960s, when she was 15, she’d given birth in a home for unmarried mothers and had her son adopted out. I waited to hear about the terrible something that would end our friendship – had she murdered the baby’s father, or the people who’d adopted her son? But, no, she’d been told over and over and over (by her family, by society, and the people who ran the home) that getting pregnant when she wasn’t married was proof of her depravity and wickedness  – and she’d been drowning in so much shame that she’d kept  her son’s very existence a secret for decades, terrified that people would hate her if they found out. The only reason she was telling me now was that an agency had found her son and they were in contact. Over the next few weeks, months, and indeed years, Beatrice told me what had happened in that home…and some of those things are far stranger (and more horrifying) than anything I could make up.

So…many years later, when I was tossing around ideas for my second novel, Beatrice’s stories kept rolling around in my head…along with my initial thought that she must have killed someone. And then it hit me…what if I twisted together these two ideas and wrote a story based on Beatrice’s experiences … and threw in a murder?

What was your research process like?

Once I’d decided to base The Hollow Girl on Beatrice’s experiences, I asked her about the specifics of living in the home, what happened before and after the birth of her son, and of course, the emotional aftermath of “giving up” her baby. Then I started digging around for official records and accounts of other people’s stories – and there were so many! Fiction and non-fiction books,  documentaries, newspaper articles, websites, historical documents – and of course, people. And any time I mentioned the premise of the novel, practically everyone knew someone who’d been in one of those homes. Or they’d been banished to one themselves – or been born in one. Many of these people bravely shared their personal stories with me. It was the most rewarding but also the most emotional research I’ve ever done.

Does the creative process get easier for you with each book?

The short answer is “No!” The long answer is that, because I’d written a similarly complex novel of about the same length, when I was working on the second novel, I knew I just had to put in the time and the thinking to get to the end. Sometimes, when I was stuck, or wondering how I could pull together all these multiple ideas and themes, I kept telling myself I’d faced very similar challenges with The Silent Listener, and I knew that I had to trust the process – that if I put in enough thought and work, I would get there eventually. Probably the “easiest” part of having done it before is that I more readily deleted sections that weren’t working. It’s a relief when you do it because you realise you’ve made way – on the page and in your head – for a stronger story and more powerful lines. In fact, I threw out the whole first manuscript of The Hollow Girl and started again. I managed to rescue about 10,000 words of the original manuscript, and the second version is so much better!

Who are some of your favourite authors? Or favourite books?

Such a difficult question! Claire Keegan is a master at writing precise, emotionally charged stories that punch a wallop (particularly Small Things Like These and Foster),and  Fiona McFarlane is a current favourite, and I still love so many of the classics, particularly the great Russian novelists. One of my favourite books (but there are so many!) is Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier because of its extraordinary twist and the way she uses language to cleverly disguise the truth. And most recently, I’ve read Dani Netherclift’s extraordinary Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies. I could go on and on…

If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?

Connect with other writers who are at different stages of their writing careers so that you understand more about the process of starting, polishing and finishing your manuscript – and their editing and publishing journeys. You’ll realise that even the most successful authors have faced the self-doubt, procrastination and other challenges you might be facing. Ask the writers in your network to read your drafts and discuss your ideas with you (in return for you doing the same for them) so you get honest and kind feedback. Even when you don’t agree with them, their feedback and ideas might be the exact prompt you need to take your manuscript to the next level.

Buy a copy of The Hollow Girl here.