In my new thriller, Reputation, my protagonist, Emma Webster, fears she is being followed as she cycles home from work one night. Her apparent stalker is a teenage boy who loops behind her, leering, then cycles past while bestowing a dead-eyed stare.
The boy’s fourteen at most, but the sense of threat is so acute that Emma panics as she races up the steps to her front door and fumbles to get in. Once inside, she fears he’s listening outside; that he’s primed to post something unwelcome through the box; and – when her phone pings – that he’s sent an abusive text. Of course, she suspects – as many a protagonist of a psychological thriller does – that she’s being irrational. How would a stranger – still less a child – have her number? But as someone who is starting to doubt her judgment, this reasoning doesn’t cut through her intense fear.
Emma’s anxiety she is being stalked continues as she imagines the breath of a stranger on her neck; that footsteps in a crowd are encroaching on her; and, at a point of the book that has dramatic repercussions, that someone has broken into her home. But though she keeps telling herself not to be fearful, she has good reason to be vigilant and to see jeopardy all around.
Because Emma is a British politician who has dared to take a principled stand over sexual violence, in particular the uncomfortable issue of revenge porn. As a result, she is menaced on many levels: physically, in print, online – through excessive, obscene trolling – and through anonymous texts. Assailed by threat, and increasingly conscious of the need to be vigilant, her judgment becomes distorted, even as she is conscious of this, and she risks overreacting. It’s the perfect set-up for a psychological thriller – and the perfect storm for a crime.
My inspiration for Reputation came from reading a newspaper interview in the spring of 2019 with a female British politician in which she described the level of threat she experienced as being so intense she had a panic alarm by her bed and nine locks on her front door. At the same time, a handful of other women MPs were speaking out about the rape and death threats they received: threats that, in some cases, led to restraining orders and, in the most extreme, to the perpetrators being sent to jail.
I started to think about how a character might react if they had to live under this sustained level of abuse. (One MP spoke of receiving 600 twitter rape threats in a single night.) Having just written a thriller, Little Disasters, about a mother with maternal OCD who effectively gaslights herself, I could imagine how my protagonist’s thoughts might become disordered, or at least heightened, in this environment and how she might subsequently behave erratically.
And then, as I wrote about my female MP, I realised that what I was describing – in a more heightened form – reflected many if not most women’s experiences. Who among us hasn’t felt their heart ricocheting as they walk down a dark street at night, while telling themselves not to be stupid? Who hasn’t questioned if they were overreacting as they’ve felt discomfited by a man’s behaviour – or been told they were overreacting, in a classic gaslighter’s move? Who hasn’t tried to second-guess how to respond to someone who exudes menace: clocking, as Emma does, the physiological tells that predict an eruption of anger? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most authors of psychological suspense – from du Maurier, Highsmith and Barbara Vine on – are female. And the gender bias makes perfect sense. Because being a woman is the perfect preparation for writing psychological suspense.
On a fundamental level, the female experience of being alert to threat is an obvious advantage to writing this fiction. As Emma notes of another woman, hoping she’ll empathise through virtue of shared experience, “As a middle-aged woman, she’ll have known what it’s like to be followed down a dimly lit path; will recognise that whisper of terror; can imagine it multiplied ten-fold in her own home.”
That became blinding clear as I finished this, in late March 2021, and a young woman called Sarah Everard was abducted and murdered. Blonde, Caucasian, and snatched from a middle-class, urban area, her story caught the media’s attention and became a focal point for women’s anger and pain. Just as women had shared their #metoo experiences of sexual harassment, so they relayed their experiences in a virtual outpouring, hashtagged #shewaswalkinghome. Keys splayed between knuckles; avoiding dark streets; wearing trainers to facilitate running; calculating how to respond if someone called good evening; pretending to take a call – or walking with 911 keyed into their phones. Sensible, everyday precautions – many taken by my protagonist, Emma Webster – and none taken by men.
The female tendency to assess if we’re being rational in reading a situation – particularly involving sexual harassment and predation – is also great preparation for writing this genre. As Harriet Tyce, bestselling author of Blood Orange and It Ends at Midnight, notes, the ambiguity of such situations is key to psychological suspense, in which nothing is as it seems. “There is something very insidious about the plausible deniability of the covert offender,” Tyce says. “The physiotherapist, say…whose hands wander too close for comfort in a way that feels wrong, but he says is right. At gut level, we know what’s happening shouldn’t be happening but we’re too polite, too conditioned, to punch the man in the face and stride from the room. It’s a short step from that unease to the unsettling horror and creeping dread…of…good psychological suspense.”
Even without such threat, and the gaslighting which often goes with it, I’d argue that women are more prone to self-doubt than men: perfect for psychological suspense, in which protagonists are often viewed as unstable, though they may be far from this, and often prove unreliable as they seek to extricate themselves from increasingly threatening situations which – as with Emma – invariably lead them to lie.
Finally, on a societal level, women constantly come against threat – as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, which strips women of autonomy of their own bodies; and by the levels of violence against women and girls, forty-seven thousand of whom were killed by members of their family in 2020 – or one every 11 minutes – according to the UN.
Back in 1990, Margaret Atwood told The Paris Review: “Men often ask me, ‘Why are your female characters so paranoid?’ It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.”
Over 30 years on, the threat inherent in being a woman still rings true. As another female MP says in Reputation, of the misogyny she experiences: “It wears you down. And if you’re not careful, you can start to doubt yourself to question your sanity.”
Perfect preparation for a writer of psychological suspense.
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