The Forgotten Hours(96)

KS: I knew that Katie had to go through a fact-finding mission that would release her from the constraints she’s imposed on herself and allow her to live a more authentic and independent adult life. Even though she adopts this just-get-on-with-business approach, in the process she totally loses herself. The accusation and trial come at a pivotal moment for her—right when she’s forming ideas about who she wants to be. As a consequence, she struggles to define herself and ends up making choices that are questionable. She’s looking to adults to show her the way, and they fail her. Ultimately she’s on a lonely journey.

What was hard for me to get right here in terms of storytelling is that she’s an extremely reluctant truth seeker, and when she begins digging in to the case, she hopes (rather desperately) that it will help her reestablish a sense of safety and order. But the information doesn’t give her greater control: quite the opposite. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not a necessary journey.

We all have different ways of coping with trauma. The thing is, we can’t really grow up and heal until we figure out how to face the messy, painful stuff. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. Bessel van der Kolk’s nonfiction book The Body Keeps the Score helped me understand this, as did Roxana Robinson’s incredible novel about PTSD, Sparta.

AML: Katie has this get-on-with-business approach you describe, yet of course she also has this unlikely romantic partner, Zev, who seems to have a much freer approach to life—one that ultimately seems to have a big influence on her, whether she consciously realizes it at the time or not. Why did you decide to give Katie and Zev almost the same age difference as John, Katie’s father, and Lulu, Katie’s best friend, whom John is convicted of raping?

KS: I wanted the reader to think about consent in a more nuanced way. The big age gap isn’t the problem in and of itself. I thought it would be interesting to have Katie fall for a father figure who is nothing like her own father. It’s as though her subconscious won’t allow her to stop growing and learning. Also, for me, the sexual freedom that she feels with Zev is important because she finds it both threatening and liberating, and I think sex and intimacy are often complicated in that way.

AML: This connects to what I think is one of the central themes of the book: what we owe one another. Katie thinks, at one point, that there must be no greater sin than the choice her mother has made to distance herself from the family. But of course that’s a question the events in the book force Katie—and the reader—to think about more deeply: Is she really understanding the size of that sin correctly? Isn’t she ignoring another, greater sin? Is loyalty truly the highest value? What do we owe our loved ones?

KS: I could have written so much more about Charlie! I found her to be a fascinating, if opaque, character. As a mother, she’s really caught between a rock and a hard place. She’s an Englishwoman, mired in an old-fashioned “stiff upper lip” culture in which you don’t whine and you don’t do therapy. How can she protect her children best while also living her own life? She divorces John, even though she knows she’s sacrificing Katie’s love. I wanted the reader to wonder about her motivations and Katie’s reaction. What happens when people can’t talk? In what circumstances should parents hide grown-up truths from their children? Silence leads to all sorts of misconceptions and makes us feel very isolated.

Seeing our parents with clear eyes is exceptionally hard. It’s almost impossible for us to know them fully as human beings, to disentangle ourselves from the emotional bonds that tie us together. They owe us and we owe them, and this can make for a toxic brew.

AML: It also leads to lots of confusion around loyalties. I was really struck by that with the relationship between Lulu and Katie. Katie immediately disbelieves her friend, taking her father’s side, and a lot of the tension in the book comes from the increasingly complicated mental and emotional contortions she must perform to stay loyal to her father.

KS: We become deeply invested in believing that people are who we think they are. When we get it wrong, we see it as a reflection on ourselves, on our own failings, and this can be very disorienting. For Katie, it feels safer to disbelieve her friend and trust the man who raised her so lovingly. Also, I thought the best friend dynamic was especially intriguing, as there’s an intensity and intimacy to those early friendships that’s not entirely dissimilar to a sexual relationship. There’s an enduring loyalty to them, too, and Katie has to struggle with that, because she’s not allowed to feel loyalty toward both her father and her best friend.

I was also interested in exploring this dynamic through Katie’s relationship with Jack, her first love. How much of her memory of him and what they shared is actually real? How does memory change reality? She’s invested in believing Jack is the only person who really knows her and in the belief that through him she might be able to find herself again. These relationships we have as teenagers impact us for the rest of our lives.

AML: It’s riveting to watch the changes in Katie’s loyalty, the slow unspooling of her belief system. To what extent was that trajectory inspired by your personal experience?

KS: I know Katie, because her psychological journey was mine, and not just around issues related to this particular topic but around relationships in general. Being loyal was a trait I highly valued; it defined my way of seeing myself. As I’ve matured, I’ve had to reassess that. I strongly believe in values such as generosity, steadiness, and trustworthiness, but I’ve come to think that loyalty is misunderstood and overrated.