About The Author
Pip Drysdale is a writer, actor and musician who grew up in Africa and Australia. At 20 she moved to New York to study acting, worked in indie films and off-off Broadway theatre, started writing songs and made four records. After graduating with a BA in English, Pip moved to London where she dated some interesting men and played shows across Europe. The Sunday Girl is her first novel and she is working on a second.
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On your author page, you state that your philosophy is to ‘throw yourself into the fire and then write about it’. Does this mean that much of your writing is inspired by personal events and experiences in your life? If so, what inspired The Sunday Girl?
There’s a famous Camus quote: fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. And I agree with that. Because personal experience is how I gather truths in the first place; how I figure out what I want to say. But once I have them, I write whatever story I feel expresses them best. The Sunday Girl was inspired by heartbreak and pent-up frustration. The plot answers the question: what would happen if a good girl snapped?
From reading your author page, it’s clear that you’re very well travelled and have had a host of interesting experiences over the course of your life. Do you think, as a writer, that it is important to collect stories from different people and places?
I think for me it has been invaluable. I’d write very different books if I’d lived another life because I would have been exposed to different stimuli. And living in a lot of places has taught me vast amounts about not only myself – the sorts of things you can only learn when pushed far beyond your comfort zone – but about how similar we all are, no matter where we live. Both of those things are useful as a writer because it means that once you understanding your own dark and dusty corners, you’re halfway to understanding other people too.
The Sunday Girl is a fiction thriller, a genre that consistently ranks highly in Australian book-selling lists. Why do you think people love to read thrillers? What’s the appeal?
Well I can’t answer for everyone else, but know why I like them: they’re like doing mental acrobatics. I enjoy trying to guess what will happen next. Trying to figure out the hidden meanings behind things.
Who do you think will enjoy this book?
Any woman who has dated, or knows someone who has dated, a toxic man. Because those relationships usually leave you shattered and diminished; a shell of who you once were. And while many of us consider revenge we rarely live it out in the real world. The Sunday Girl provides the opportunity to do that vicariously.
What are you currently reading?
About 500 million copies of The New Yorker that have been gathering unread while I wrote my second manuscript. But in terms of books, I’ve just finished ‘Our House’ (great ending), and am about the start ‘Something in the Water’.
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