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| Elisabeth de Mariaffi, photo by Ayelet Tsabari |
Elisabeth de Mariaffi is the author of the new novel The Devil You Know. She also has written a short story collection, How to Get Along with Women. She lives in St. John's, Canada.
Q: You incorporate real events into your novel. Why did you
choose to do that, and what did you see as the right blend of the real and
the fictional?
A: The germ of the novel, way back, was the image of a young
woman in her bachelor apartment and the stalker outside on the fire escape,
looking at each other through the glass, and the continued relationship between
them. This was back before I knew it would be a novel; I thought it might be a
short story.
I had another idea for a short story, too, and this came
from a real news item I'd heard. In 2007, a little girl was abducted in Quebec,
and the day after her abduction a few other girls came forward with the same
story, that they'd all been approached, individually, by a man asking them to
help find his lost dog.
None of those girls got in this man's car, but it is
supposed that the missing girl was approached by this same man, and she did get
in the car. That girl, Cedrika Provencher, has never been found. I often found
myself thinking of those other girls, the ones who were a near-miss, and their
families.
Part of the reason that this story stayed with me is that
when I was nine years old, my own best friend went missing. She was found a few
weeks later, but her murderer has never been caught. So I understand how those
other girls might be really haunted, in a particular way, by what
happened.
In thinking about how to write a novel, I suddenly figured
out that these two stories -- the fictional stalker story, and the real-life
story of the missing girl -- were really part of one large story. So that was
where the novel came from.
I grew up in Toronto during the late '80s and '90s, and I was
a teenager during the crisis of the Scarborough Rapist years, so I remember
that time very keenly. My whole generation of girls grew up very afraid. This
was not a generalized fear. It was fear of one particular villain, later
identified as Paul Bernardo.
He'd been operating as the Scarborough Rapist since the mid-'80s,
but it wasn't until two very high-profile abductions of teenage girls in the
Niagara area that he was finally arrested for murder in 1993.
In the novel, Evie is haunted by the unsolved murder of a
childhood friend, but I wanted to set the story at the very moment of
Bernardo's arrest, because it was such a shock to the whole country to learn
that all of these crimes were committed by one person, and Evie would have felt
that so much more because of her back story.
Q: Can you say more about how you came up with your main
character, Evie?
A: There are bits and pieces of Evie's story that are
similar to my own story, but for the most part I have few really strong or
detailed memories of the time when my friend was missing.
I wanted to make Evie a fighter. It's such an interesting
time in a young woman's life -- a difficult time. Evie is 21, so it's the very
moment where she's being encouraged to go out and make a life for herself.
First real job, first apartment.
It's time to blaze some trails -- only, at the same time,
young women are constantly told to fear on the basic level of personal safety.
So, go out and be independent and powerful, but also be very, very afraid. I
wanted to expose that.
Could I have made Evie a rookie cop instead of a rookie
reporter? I don't think so. I don’t think catching the bad guy is really
what motivates Evie. I think the central question for her is actually
“What happened?” She wants the story. So being a reporter really fits with
that.
Q: Fear is a constant element in the story. How did you
sustain this, and did you know how the story would end before you started
writing, or did you make changes along the way?
A: To be honest, when I first started thinking about this
novel, the idea of the girl and the stalker, I didn't even know it would be a
thriller. But it's a book about fear, and I think that to understand fear, you
have to be made to feel afraid. I learned that while writing.
I don't think I knew exactly how the book would end until I
was more than half way through. I wrote the bulk of the novel in a very intense
period, so every day I'd come home and say, NOW I know how it ends! It felt
very exciting, those constant discoveries.
Q: You've also written short stories. Is your writing
process similar?
A: I was basically terrified of the idea of writing a novel,
so I had to keep fooling myself. A short story is so perfect. You can hold an
entire short story in your hand, and you can see how pulling a little
string over here, in the first few pages, will make the marionette kick her leg
over there, closer to the end of the story.
A novel is I guess also like that, only your hand is now the
size of a blue whale and if you want to see where and how the
marionette kicks her leg, you have to drop the little string you just
pulled and run a half-marathon really quickly.
I kept a list of scenes I knew had to happen in the novel, and if I was stuck writing chronologically, I would just write one of those scenes instead. An easy scene, with lots of dialogue, so the page fills up fast.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I've just started work on a new novel. I've had an idea
for some time of a book I'd like to write, and I thought it would be next, but
I just couldn't seem to settle down to start writing it. I kept putting it
off.
This new idea came up very suddenly, and it's just taken
off. I'm probably sounding vague: I don't want to jinx it! I can tell you there
is definitely an element of fear and mystery to the new book, as well. I can't
imagine writing without it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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