I began to think about her lifeâthe Irish Midlands town she came from, her family, their troubles. I had a few friends from that part of the country, and I remembered their stories from homeâa bee that flew into a bride's veil, a car business that went under, the busybodies who monitored every coming and going. They all found their way into the novel that was gradually taking shape before me, braided with newer stories, things that were showing up on my daily news feed: the rise of extremism, the enslavement of young minds by tech, the ongoing desolation of our planet.
After about three months of writing about a disenfranchised teenage poet, I realized that the book wasn't just about Cass. I couldn't make sense of her without bringing in the rest of her family, too - her little brother, her mother and father. Each of them has their own problem to deal with, and what they can't see - though the reader can - is that all of those problems are connected.
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