Sara Flannery Murphy’s Girl One is out now from Raven Books, the story of The Homestead Girls – nine women who raised nine ‘miracle babies’ on an experimental commune. The author chatted with Paul Simpson about parthenogenesis and the challenges of telling a story in two time periods…

Where did the initial idea come from for Girl One?

This book has a long origin story. It was an idea I had before I ever wrote my first book. I was taking a course about the history of the body which covered all aspects of the ways that humans interact with our bodies, like diet, fashion, religion and of course reproduction. I was able to take a more wide ranging view of the history of how we’ve understood reproduction. I was lucky to grow up in a time when we have a pretty thorough understanding of that, enough so that you can have the birds and the bees talk with your parents when you’re fairly young and grasp the fundamentals of it, but this was definitely not the level of understanding that we had for many years.

I ran across this idea from thousands of years ago, that the father was the one who bestowed the soul of the child and that if a woman conceived without a man, which was considered possible, then she would essentially give birth to a child without a soul, a monstrous child.

That was very striking to me. This was probably around 2008. I’ve always loved the horror genre and fairy tales like Angela Carter’s, and at the time I was super into movies like Ginger Snaps, a werewolf movie that centred on girls, which I had never thought about before. I thought it was so refreshing and cool.

I had the idea for an origin story for people with supernatural abilities or monstrous qualities but I wasn’t quite sure how to approach the story for a really long time. I had all these false starts and would start and stop or give up and feel like there wasn’t an easy way to make this into a compelling story.

I had tried telling this story from the perspective of the mothers and in a more private and smaller way, but then I landed on the idea of parthenogenesis happening on a bigger scale. It wasn’t something secretive, it was something in the public eye. For better or for worse, people knew about these parthenogenetic births, they were drawn to it and had all kinds of opinions, some great and some not so great. From there the story started taking much more shape as what is recognisably the book today.

One of the first things that jumped out at me reading it was the timeframe. We flash back to the 1970s but the present is 1994. Why choose then? I wondered if it was purely because the real life first IVF baby, Louise Brown was born in 1978 so it had to be earlier than that.

I did not really encounter Louise Brown specifically early on in the process. I did read her autobiography of her life as the first IVF baby and it was really fascinating because some of it intersected with things that I’d hoped to bring to Girl One. People were so scared and threatened by her birth at that time that they published hit pieces about how she was throwing her baby toys around with her mind. Her family was harassed even though they were just trying to live this very ordinary life. They had to face this public outcry and be this target for all of people’s anxieties and confusions over what is now a very mainstream and accepted and positive process but which at the time just completely blew people’s minds.

I didn’t encounter her book until I’d already set Girl One in the 70s. I think originally I wanted to set it in the 70s in part because that just felt, to me, like a time when feasibly it could have happened. There were interests in shaking up old patterns and these old rhythms. There were a lot of communities and there was the Back-to-the-Land movement so it felt like if it was going to happen, it probably would have happened in the 70s when women would have felt like this was something that they could pursue, when it felt like there was a certain level of possibility in the air.

So the 1990s followed from that because that’s when Josie would have been going through her own process of discovering herself on the cusp of young adulthood. I don’t know if it happens for everyone but it definitely happened for me: in my late teens and early twenties I was taking stock of a lot of things that I had believed up until then, and looking at them through a more critical eye. I was thinking more honestly or just with a wider range of perspectives that I had encountered by going out into the world, and so I was questioning some of my core beliefs.

I thought that was a really good time for Josie’s journey to begin. She is striking out on her own and hoping to pursue Dr Bellanger’s footsteps and take on this path, but then she has this catalyst that moves her in a different direction, and now she has to question whether the path she was on was the one that’s right for her.

One of the things I thought you did extremely well and I really enjoyed was the parcelling out of the revisions of history. How close is what I’ve read to the original plotline? Or has it had a lot of reworking along the way?

It’s definitely had a lot of reworking. I am trying to become more of a plotter because I think I’ve accepted that that’s how I work as a writer. It’s kind of funny because I’ve always really wanted to be, for lack of a better word, a pantser, writing by the seat of my pants. It’s only now in my writing career that I’m starting to recognise that as much as I want to be that type of writer it might not be as efficient or as ideal for me. When I create plots and outlines it actually helps me a lot.

As much as I admire the freedom and flexibility and the way that pansters seem to be able to just sit down and create this amazing story and trust themselves and find these surprises along the way, that might not be how I’m going to write my best work.

So for Girl One I did a hybrid because I would write a draft and often the draft would be a little bit too flat, there wasn’t quite as much happening. Then I would come back and think, ‘Well, I need this character to be different, I need this moment to have something interesting happening.’ And if along the way I discovered some twist that I hadn’t been expecting at the beginning then I would want to thread it in more carefully and at least have a bit of foreshadowing.

The chronicling of what happens at the commune that we get in the excerpts from Time magazine and other journals – were they always part of your idea for it or at any stage did you have a running 1970s narrative thread as well?

They were always part of it. I always centred it through Josie’s lens. Although I didn’t have a 1970s storyline, I wrote it out as a backstory for myself, but it wasn’t anything I could have used in a story I intended other people to read without very heavy editing.

I wanted to include those excerpts because I felt like this was a story that had a lot of explanation required. Creating those excerpts, and letting people experience the world throughout these little snippets that Josie herself would have been looking at, was a way to help readers get on board without having Josie carry the burden of too much explanation.

Josie has been cut off from her past for a long time and [what she knows] she only got through secondhand sources and through looking at media reports so she had this very cobbled together idea of who she was. I felt like if I included those excerpts for the reader they would also get this sense, along the way, of how Josie had understood herself. It would deepen Josie’s realisation of the true story that she was learning, not from secondhand sources, not from media reports that had been filtered through a lot of different, sometimes inaccurate opinions. It was directly from the women themselves, and that would create a contrast to these excerpts so that readers could go along with her and feel that shift in her understanding of her own story at the same time.

Those reports hint at developments that Josie or the reader discover. Did you have to move some of them around as you were working?

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Yes I did. I had to move some of them around, and I definitely took some out because I wrote too many, which is fine: I would rather overwrite and pull back. Some of them I had to look at and be like, ‘You know what? This is a fun piece but…’

At some point I had included a poem that somebody had written in honour of the Miracle Babies (right), which was really fun to write. But in the end there were points in the narrative where these excerpts were serving more as interruptions than actually complementing and bringing out the best qualities in the narrative, which is what I had really wanted for them.

I didn’t write the excerpts and then write the story. I wrote them alongside the narrative, which was really nice for my writing process because it was a break. Sometimes I would get burned out on Josie’s voice or just reach a sticking point, and when I did that I was able to write a newspaper article. That change of pace was enough to let me stay connected to the story but also come back with a fresher mindset and fresh eyes, which I always find really important as a writer. When you feel that the process is tedious, it can leak into the story or onto the page.

For the most part the articles were always pretty well tied to the points where they needed to be. I don’t think I had too many spoilery ones – at the beginning for example, I think I had already been writing with the overall story in mind.

Did you go back and immerse yourself in the writing of the period?

I did try to go back, especially for the 1970s. If it was from Time or a tabloid I would try to look for real examples of the writing from that time. There’s a book, Spiritual Midwifery, by Ina May Gaskin which my mom had given me when I was pregnant myself. There was a community called The Farm – there was nothing supernatural going on there at all, it was more for women who were moving away from the medical industry at the time and becoming more interested in home births and midwives. It was really helpful to read firsthand accounts from women in the 1970s who were enough on the fringes or just curious about alternate methods that they would come to The Farm and have their baby in a school bus accompanied by midwives. Some of the lingo that they used was really helpful.

With the 1990s sections, did the fact that Josie doesn’t have access to the technology we have today help in the story? At times it really feels like the fact they’ve got to find a payphone leans into some of the incidents.

I did really appreciate that about writing it set in the 1990s. I think it created a lot more suspense than I could have had it if had been set ten or possibly even five years later. I feel like that was a tipping point: a fair amount of people probably had personal home computers back then but it was nothing like now when I feel like we have so many answers right here with us.

It was fun to let it just be a more analogue adventure, to let them drive along and use roadmaps or try to call people from payphones and not be able to get to them. They have to use newspapers. They don’t have as much easy access to Josie’s whole origin story right there. It’s something they very much have to actively put in the work to piece together which was challenging in some ways but really worked for the road trip aspect of it.

There were times when there was almost an Orphan Black feel to it, but every time I felt like that was the case, the story swerved in a different direction. Is that a show that you know, or one that you were consciously avoiding?

No. I have watched it now, after I already had a complete draft. My editor is a huge fan of Orphan Black and she was the person who from my first phone call with her was very much like, ‘Oh yes, this has an Orphan Black aspect to it or it could be in conversation with Orphan Black.’ She’s really the one who introduced me to it.

I was aware of the show before then but I wasn’t really consciously writing against it or towards it in any sense. It’s an absolutely amazing show so it’s very flattering to be compared to it.

There were a couple of times I was almost imagining Tatiana Maslany as Josie!

Oh wow, that’s cool!

What did you find the biggest challenge writing this?

Probably the biggest challenge was just finding an entry point that worked. I love speculative premises and I love finding a big weird idea but I can almost get intimidated by my own ideas, which sounds very strange because you’d want to think that if you had an idea then of course you’re the right person to write it but I’m not always convinced of that. There’s that internal pressure: I love this idea so much and what I want as a writer more than anything is to bring this to life in a way that does it justice.

I think I struggled a little bit to find a way to tell this story, to be able to commit to it and not let the alternate version of this general idea take over and be too much of a haunting presence. I think there are some story ideas that from the very beginning lay out their own ground rules, and then there are other ideas like this one where if you take the idea that parthenogenesis can lead to supernatural abilities, you can imagine so many different ways to approach it. If you gave this idea to a dozen different writers I’m sure it would result in a dozen different books that were wildly different.

Learning how to commit to it and to find the best way for me to tell the story was a challenge and I think it’s why it took quite a long time for me to write this book, why it was one of those ideas that lived on the backburner of my mind and I would just tell myself ‘This might be a little too tricky, it’s a little too difficult,’ and talk myself out of it. But the fact that my brain came back to it again and again and again, there was a sense that that has to mean something and I needed to write this book or else I was going to write other books and always have this one at the back of my mind tugging on my shirtsleeve asking for attention. I think I needed to honour that.

Finding a way to commit to that original concept and figure out the best way to tell it was a really big challenge for me at first. And, really, all throughout the process: it was a challenge the entire time.

 

Girl One is available now from Raven Books

Click here to read our review

Thanks to Philippa Cotton for assistance in arranging this interview.