The Truth About Keeping Secrets(82)

And when eternity comes for me, I will not rage.

But I don’t have to worry about that for now. There’s still so much to do.

Now, it’s summer. I’m spending it with her.

We go to the county fair, and I wipe the unnoticed powdered sugar from the corner of her mouth, and that does not remind me of death.

We grab the edges of the world with our fingertips in the early morning, we laugh at constellations, and that does not remind me of death.

We walk the same path Dad and I walked at the River Styx, and some days even that does not remind me of death.

I am still very afraid. I don’t think I’ll ever not be.

Dad never goes away. He’s in the trees, and the inside of my eyelids, and sewn into my flesh. This isn’t something I can change. And I know that she’ll be gone too, probably sooner than I think; it’s only a matter of time before I sew her in too. I worry about not having enough time – and about not being present enough here to spend the time I do have with her fully. And sometimes when I think about that for too long, about Dad for too long, about ends for too long, the fear comes back as fresh and itchy as when it first arrived. But when it does, we talk softly under blankets. June and me.

This will not last forever. I know.

But for now, if you need us, we’ll be here, eking out meaning from the rest of the beautiful days until the lights go out.





Author Interview


Why did you want to tell this story?

A couple of years ago I developed a fear of death that was beginning to affect my everyday life – a lot like Sydney’s. Mine wasn’t initiated by the same event as hers, but the fear was the same, so I wanted to write a story about a girl overcoming that fear (because therapy is expensive). From there, June appeared, and Heath and Olivia and Leo, and then it became about a lot of other things that I thought were important: sexuality and truth and grief and abuse and all kinds of death, not just capital-D Death.

There’s also the whole other dynamic of Sydney not even being able to grieve properly because she’s convinced there’s a killer on the loose, which offered a fun challenge: writing a story where the thriller elements serve as a backdrop to something more grounded in reality.

Were there any parts of the book you particularly loved to write, or scenes that were particularly challenging?

I loved writing Sydney and June’s interactions, to the point where I would sometimes just write scenes of them talking to each other about whatever, knowing that they wouldn’t make the final cut. The second chapter, when Sydney is really in the depths of her grief, was difficult to write because of how dark of a place that is to inhabit for long stretches of time.

Did any particular books, writers or other art forms influence or inspire you whilst writing TTAKS?

I read a lot of YA while I was writing. A foolproof way of unsticking myself whenever I felt stuck was to escape into someone else’s work: Jandy Nelson, particularly in I’ll Give You the Sun, writes with such control and purpose that you can’t help but take notes; Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay, for similar reasons; Alice Oseman, for when my teenagers started to sound like themes dressed as teenagers; E. Lockhart for taut, sophisticated storytelling. Additionally, I’m not sure TTAKS would have been written had I not read Looking for Alaska by John Green in middle school. For bite-sized inspiration I liked to read poetry – mainly Fernando Pessoa and Sylvia Plath.

Do you have any particular writing habits? Are there times or places where you write best?

I usually write in bursts; I’ll have, for example, twenty minutes of uninterrupted ‘on’ time, where I’ll write without stopping, and then ten minutes of ‘off’ time where I can do whatever I want. I’ll do that for a few hours every day.

I get fidgety when I’m in the same environment for too long, so I don’t have one particular spot that I like – there’s five different places in my flat that I cycle between – and I think I write best in the very early morning/very late night; there’s something about feeling like the only person on Earth that helps the words flow.

Is there anything you’ve learned through the novel-writing process that you wish you’d known when you started out writing this book?

I really wish I hadn’t self-edited while writing the first draft! I’d always go back and edit scenes despite the knowledge that they could be moved or changed or cut – and, what d’you know, they often were. I wasted a lot of time that could have been spent just finishing the thing.

In 2016, you published your poetry collection Graffiti. How does writing your novel compare to your experiences writing poetry? Have you been writing poetry whilst working on The Truth About Keeping Secrets?

I love writing both poetry and prose but for the exact opposite reasons; poetry renounces structure and can really be anything at all, whereas a novel relies on structure. I really enjoyed mulling over the anatomy of the story until everything finally clicked into place.

Writing a novel is sort of like being in a really intense relationship where you can’t imagine devoting any of your time or energy or waking thoughts to anything that isn’t it, so any scraps of ideas I had while writing that I’d normally turn into poems were whisked away to be incorporated into the book somehow.

Do you have advice for other young writers starting out on their writing journeys?