Get to know our author of our book of the month for June, Jennifer Trevelyan. With a background in photography and children’s publishing, Jennifer is now a full-time writer living in Wellington, New Zealand, with her husband, son, daughter, dog and cat. When not at her writing desk Jennifer can be found in the garden.
- To begin with why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself. Where you born, raised, schooled?
I was born in Wellington where I have lived all my life apart from a 4-year stint in London after I got married. I grew up close to the botanical gardens and I walked and explored there a lot in my youth. When I first left school I did a photography apprenticeship and worked in wedding photography before studying English Literature at Victoria University, which is also in Wellington. In London I worked in children’s publishing and then on our return I had two lovely children and worked a variety of part-time jobs while renovating houses with my architect husband. Eventually I went back to university and got an MA in Creative Writing. Now I live close to the suburb where I grew up and I write full-time in a little office in the botanical gardens, so I feel I have come full circle!
2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen, and thirty. And why?
When I was twelve I absolutely wanted to be an actor. But around that time I had a teacher who read a story I had written and said, ‘You’ll be an author when you grow up.’ I remember being disappointed because I wanted to act. However, I don’t like being the centre of attention at all, so I don’t think that would have worked out!
By the time I was eighteen I was exploring photography but really, deep down, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I still felt this way at thirty.
I think the impulse to act is the same in many ways as the impulse to write, because it comes from a desire to escape into other lives. When I’m writing a book I have a whole other world in my head and different people I can be.
3. What were three works of art – book or painting or piece of music, etc – you can now say had a great effect on you and influenced your own development as a writer?
One of my favourite songs of all time is Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush, and this is deeply connected to my experience of reading the book by Emily Brontë. I adore gothic literature. The idea that this book I so enjoyed had then inspired a song that I loved – and the fact that both were written by very young women – was and is still very inspiring to me.
I’m also very influenced by film. My favourite movie of all time is probably Jaws. I think it’s a masterful piece of storytelling. I actually thought about Jaws when I was writing A Beautiful Family because Steven Spielberg said the shark was scarier the less you saw of it. So I tried to keep the scary things in A Beautiful Family off the page as much as possible, letting the reader’s imagination do the work.
4. Please tell us about your novel (which is also our BOTM!), A Beautiful Family.
First of all, thank you so much for making A Beautiful Family BOTM!
The book is set on a beautiful but quite wild stretch of coastline in New Zealand in 1985. It tells the story of a summer holiday that threatens to tear a family apart. Our narrator is a ten-year-old girl, the youngest in the family. She befriends a boy on the beach and together they set about trying to solve a local mystery. Mostly though she is watching what is happening inside her own family, worrying about it, and at the same time, she’s uncomfortably aware that there’s a creepy guy staying in the house next door, who in turn is watching everything they do.
5. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?
I prefer books that leave a little bit to the imagination. I don’t like things tied up too neatly. So I guess I hope the reader will go away and think a lot about these characters, wondering what they will do next and what it has all meant to them. Ideally I would want the reader to feel that the characters are real; that they are out there somewhere, living out their lives.
6. Whom do you most admire in the realm of writing and why?
There are so many writers I admire. I have been very influenced by American novelists like Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Strout, Joyce Carol Oates, and Carol Shields. But the writer who probably made me want to write in the first place was Daphne du Maurier – especially her book Rebecca. I read that when I was about fourteen and I can honestly say that it blew my mind. Until then, I didn’t know that kind of story was possible.
7. What advice do you give aspiring writers?
I think whatever you are writing should feel like an obsession – you should not be able to stop thinking about it. If you’re dragging yourself to the keyboard to write every day, stop. If you’re not fascinated by what you’re writing, your reader won’t be either. And then I would say that you have to be ruthless. Put the writing first. Or at least second, or third. (If you have kids!) Don’t let anything intrude on the writing and don’t let it get pushed to one side. That is my advice.
A Beautiful Family
In the past we had always spent our summer holidays in remote places. That had always been my mother's preference. This year was different . . .
As the summer holiday stretches ahead, with her older sister more interested in boys, her mother disappearing on long walks and her father, beer in hand, watching the cricket, the youngest in the family often finds herself alone.
At the beach, she meets Kahu, a boy who tells her a tragic story about a little girl who disappeared a couple of years ago, presumed drowned. Suddenly, the summer has purpose-they will find the missing girl and become local heroes.
Between dips in the ocean, afternoon barbecues and lazy sunbaking, their detective work brings to the surface shocking discoveries and dark secrets, even about her own beautiful family . . .
January Book of the Month Wine Club: Naked Wines x Booktopia
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