My novel was sparked by a true crime, but it refused to become a thriller.
Nearly two decades ago, a friend of mine was raped. In these days, when trending hashtags have empowered women to talk about sexual harassment and assault, this statement may elicit no more than a knowing nod, and a half-raised eyebrow about why a crime that I wasn’t present for would be important to me. It was the stuff of my nightmares: a woman alone; an attack in the night. But it was also my fault.
My friend had come to New York for a life that fell through before she even arrived. She stayed in our guest bedroom for what was supposed to be two weeks while she waited for her promised apartment to be finished. But as a New Yorker will have already guessed, her visit stretched into months, with her move-in always around the corner. We were approaching a year-long “visit” when I suggested that she look into a sublet: a place that could be her own, even for the short time she would need it. Instead, she pressed the developer and he deemed her apartment ready—the only one in an otherwise uninhabited construction site. I told her not to move in.
It was a matter of days later when the phone rang with the news that she had been followed to her building. The shock, and the guilt that it would not have happened if she had stayed with us, were crushing. Of course, she moved back in. We fed her, read her bedtimes stories because she couldn’t sleep, tried to make sure she was never alone. I sat beside her in the back seat of police cars as we drove our nighttime neighborhood to see if she could spot the guy on the sidewalk. Rapists have patterns, it seemed, and generally didn’t bother to go far from home to find their victims. I went with her on trips to the police station to make statements, to search through stacks of red binders full of mug shots. Threaded through all of it, the hope and fear that we would find him: the hope that she could be saved by his arrest, and the fear that, with his existence confirmed, the terrible night she had suffered would have to be relived in court.
I had started writing a new novel, my second. It was historical, literary, domestic, and yet parts of my experience started to appear on the page. It wasn’t an account of the attack on my friend that was worming its way into my novel. What haunted me, and left me in tears, was the reminder of our lack of safety. Even months later, as we returned from a weekend away, I could barely breathe as the New York skyline grew in front of us. I did not trust my home.
But I stayed, and my novel about two sisters—one labeled good, the other bad—took shape in the ravaged, ragged aftermath for another year. After several drafts, I decided it was finished and my agent sent it out and got a bite from a major publishing house. It was deemed “good…but.” The good was the urgency that had kept the editor up all night reading. The but was that she wanted me to rewrite it as a thriller.
***
I grew up on thrillers and science fiction. I grew up in a Hawaii where television was shipped from the mainland on tape, and broadcast through a black and white fuzz from a different island two weeks later. Books were my entertainment. Robert Ludlum accompanied me on two summer vacation trips across the country in the days when you pulled your RV into the gas station and traded the paperbacks (and 8 track tapes!) you had finished for someone else’s.
The beauty of the thriller, to me, is its pyramid structure: You meet the villain and the hero and you know the crime to come. The thrill is in the race to see who wins. The reader hovers like God over both of them, and can see what each character doesn’t know: the trap the hero is about to fall into with his partial information, though rarely the snafu that will ultimately trip the villain up. The old-timey formula where the girl in danger is just a disposable object was never going to work for my story, but there were so many girl-in-the-title suspense novels where women and their experiences took center stage—surely I could write one of those? In order to tempt this editor to buy my book, and satisfy my (former) agent who was now happy to have a name for the je nais se quoi that she had sensed was missing in my novel, I was going to have to.
I tried.
Shadow Child is told in three perspectives, each of which roughly corresponds to a character, place and time. In order to fit the genre, first I had to get rid one of those settings. I needed a great villain, an epic one, and, as regular people, without riches or superpowers, the two sisters would have to know him; what’s more, since they grew up in a tiny town in Hawaii, he would have to have encountered them there. I mined their childhood, sifting through secondary characters, wondering who dunnit?? I wrote my way into some killer scenes; I changed my town to accommodate them; my characters began to develop new personality quirks, artistic talents, dark secrets. Having broadened my genre to domestic suspense and mystery (because of course when this editor gave me books to read as models, they were mysteries, not thrillers though she didn’t seem to notice). I needed to have several candidates for the villain, as well as red herrings, and satisfying revenge. Characters who had not even been granted a line of dialogue in my story up to that point presented themselves, each with their own motivations that required changes to the plot. I played, and tested, and wrote my way so far from my original intentions that after six months, I was completely lost.
My novel went into a drawer, battered and broken.
Shadow Child has a third character: a Japanese American woman from an earlier time. Through her, the reader experiences the World War II incarceration of the Japanese Americans, the bombing of Hiroshima, the American occupation of Japan. She saved me.
In early reviews of my novel, there has been a focus on Lillie’s story. It’s historical, and simple in many ways. The trauma, violence and betrayal she suffers are deeply personal wounds, but the villain is systemic: Lillie’s losses are the incidental fallout of sweeping crimes visited on hundreds of thousands of people, by one nation on another, by people who look a certain way on the outside on people whose appearance doesn’t match theirs. In the name of country, loyalty, and righteousness, Lillie—young girl, young mother, human woman, and also upstanding citizen though no one will acknowledge that—loses everything. And the villain is not a guy approaching with ever faster footsteps ready to choke her from behind, but racist structures that do not care, and are never, well rarely ever, going to be held accountable.
I couldn’t write a thriller because Lillie reminded me that the true culprit isn’t always lurking in the binders. (That is not a spoiler, by the way.) My novel was the anti-thriller: not celebration of revenge, but of survival.
***
Thrillers are satisfying because justice triumphs. They are not generally drawn, as I am, to the wound, the exploration of it, the way it shapes us, challenges us, the way we overcome it and survive it. In some crime fiction, violence acts against women may function as no more than a series of bread crumbs to lead the hero to his victory. Other times, the experience that the woman is having—or the past experience that she suffered—is rendered in detail, but it often still functions as a way to raise the stakes, to get the reader invested in a pain and suffering that, if not on the level of the destruction of a city, feels personally apocalyptic nonetheless. As well-written, as excruciatingly described as it may be, the experience itself is not the point of the story, nor is its aftermath. The more shattered the reader is, the more we need our happy ending.
[S]o many women don’t get that happy ending. In the real world, the villain is everywhere and nowhere…But so many women don’t get that happy ending. In the real world, the villain is everywhere and nowhere: I have seen that again and again, whether in my own life; or through my mother’s family, who were stripped of their citizenship and incarcerated; or through the testimonies of my friends in Hiroshima, who lost family, city, culture, and the belief that anything is ever safe, or can be counted on.
Or in the case of my friend, whose rape kit was finally tested decades later and days before the statute of limitations on her case ran out. They found a DNA match for her rapist, who was in prison for unrelated charges and had been for years. That is not a thriller ending either. The world we live in is not always satisfying, and yet it is the world we live in, so we must find satisfaction in it—the idea that we can go on, survive, heal, and even thrive regardless of whether the villain is caught and punished, is important not for entertainment but for our society and the reader herself. The experience of violence against us—systemic, individual, racialized, in wartime or peace—and the things we feel we must do to survive when we are otherwise powerless, these are what ultimately fascinate me. And so, although I remain an enthusiastic consumer of thrillers, as a writer, it is still literary fiction for me.
