Briefly tell us about your book.
In A Caravan Like a Canary, Tara Button takes a road trip she never wanted to take again.
Her mother is gravely ill and asks Tara and her brother Zac to bring the old canary-yellow family caravan to a town named Elsewhere. Never predictable, Zac decides to invite his best friend, Danh. But there’s something weird going on … something that involves the bikies who are trailing them up the coast of WA.
Tara and Zac took this same trip back when they were kids – and it had dire consequences. But this time, there are even more surprises in store. As they revisit the highways, towns and beaches of their childhood, Tara finds herself uncovering secrets and half-truths that she’d thought were long buried – and she’s reminded that, no matter how far or fast you run, you can’t escape your past.
But with Danh’s help – and by reconnecting with the wild, ever-changing ocean – can Tara find faith in transformation and seize her chance at happiness?
What inspired the idea behind this book?
For A Caravan Like a Canary, I had been thinking I wanted to write a story where a young woman was trying to live with an old, old trauma – something that involved a past crime or troubled family life. I’d been rolling the idea around in my head for a few weeks, and Tara and Zac had come into being – then I drove past a vintage caravan painted to look like a ladybird. I found myself wondering about the past of that caravan and whether its happy exterior hid something darker.
Suddenly I had the thought of a canary-yellow caravan with a heavy past. Tara and Zac’s old family caravan. The road trip came to life and all the things that went wrong in their childhood. Their family. The wonderful Nan who held everything together for them. Zac’s friend with his lifelong crush on Zac’s big sister. A mission. An escape. And the way trouble has a knack for finding certain people, no matter how well they hide.
What are you hoping the reader will take away from reading your book?
My books always hold a certain amount of the passion for change. It’s not deliberate – these are the stories I need to write. I would love to think that readers will enjoy the contrast between the personalities and opinions of my characters, and recognise their quirks and foibles in people they know. In reading A Caravan Like a Canary, I hope my readers will find moments when they catch their breath in surprise, when tears come to their eyes, when they laugh out loud and finally when they can smile and enjoy the warmth of a hopeful ending.
How does it feel to hold your book in your hands?
At the time of writing, I haven’t received my final printed copies of A Caravan Like a Canary yet, but I can tell you it never gets old. Seeing something you have strained your brain over, something you’ve invented and manipulated and cut and added to and fixed – something-that probably started as a semi-coherent puddle of words – turned into a story with structure, with logical bends and meaningful connections, well, that’s magical. Then to see it transformed into a beautifully printed swathe of paper and clothed in a stunning cover with your own name on it? Well, that’s unbeatable.
Do you write about people you know? Or yourself?
Yes and yes! I write about people I know all the time – but I don’t pick one person and write about them. My characters are a hodge-podge of features, memories, mannerisms and ways of thinking that I observe (or think I observe) in many other people. I watch people constantly and try to understand them – their motivations, goals and emotions. Writing is probably me playing out this attempt to understand others, in print.
I doubt it’s possible to avoid writing about yourself, even if you don’t mean to. Everything I see in others is through the lens of my own experiences and values, so there’s a bit of me in every character, I suppose – good and bad.
One thing I do is borrow people’s stories – all the time! There’s nothing quite as weird or funny as real life. When people tell me an interesting story of something that happened to them, it goes into the filing cabinet of my brain and often makes it out onto the page!
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