Intensity

In my view, romantic relationships can illicit an intensity of emotion that reveals more about the characters than, for example, your average friendship. What happens when we can no longer hide who we are from the person that we love? What happens when old wounds re-open, such as our fears of abandonment, and of being unlovable or in some way broken? While romance doesn’t need to define our lives, the emotions that arise in its presence are often profound in understanding ourselves and others.

The ethical implications

The more intense a bond between two characters, the more significant certain actions between them can become. In other words, heightened emotions can demand more care. After all, our sense of obligation can be greater to people we know than to those we don’t know at all. For this reason, tricky ethical dilemmas often form part of my novels, examining what we owe to those we love. In Disappoint Me, I ask how we may accept that someone has changed. In Bellies, I ask what we owe to the people we write about. These questions are difficult to answer when two people have an entangled and complex history. A stranger you write about likely won’t even know how they feature in your fiction. Your partner, or ex-partner? Not so much.

The power of grey areas

I don’t have neat answers to the questions I ask – maybe I should – but one of my greatest joys in reading and writing is the feeling of being led into the grey, and in turn having compassion for people or actions we may not have otherwise had (of course, with limits). This partly explains why my first two novels are written from the perspective of two characters. Moral positions are often muddied by the inclusion of more than one viewpoint, offering both more clarity and doubt with respect to a particular situation. Something which was once objectionable becomes understandable once we have access to another person’s mind. How much richer than real life, where we’re often limited to roaming within our own.