The Author of Finding Grace on Love, Grief and Moral Grey Areas
Interviewed by Katie Barr
Finding Grace has been described as a novel that feels both intimate and cinematic. When the idea first came to you, did you see it as a quiet emotional story, a thriller, a family drama, or something that blurred all three?
I don’t think I ever saw it as fitting neatly into one category. It always felt like a story about people first. The emotional relationships were the thing that interested me most, but I also wanted there to be a sense of momentum, that feeling that you’re constantly being pulled forwards.
I’ve always loved stories where genre is almost secondary. The suspense only really matters if you care about the people at the centre of it. For me, the thriller elements were never there simply to create twists, they were there to put emotional pressure on the characters. So it naturally became something that sat somewhere between family drama, love story and psychological suspense.
Your debut has such a strong sense of atmosphere and momentum. Did you always know the shape of the story, or did its secrets reveal themselves to you as you wrote?
I knew certain moments very clearly. There were scenes I could see almost frame by frame long before I’d worked out how to get there. But everything in between was discovered through writing.
I don’t plan in enormous detail because I like being surprised. If I know absolutely everything that’s going to happen, I tend to lose interest. The characters often revealed things to me that I hadn’t expected, and those moments usually turned out to be more truthful than anything I could have plotted in advance.
Honor’s perspective is one of the most striking parts of the novel. What made her the right person through whom to tell this story?
Honor was always the emotional heart of the novel. She notices things that other people overlook, and because she’s carrying so much herself, she’s constantly trying to make sense of everyone around her.
I liked the idea of seeing events through someone who isn’t entirely certain of herself. She isn’t the loudest person in the room, but she’s incredibly observant. That felt much more interesting than having someone who always knew exactly what they thought. She also has a real capacity for empathy, even when people don’t necessarily deserve it. That allowed me to explore the moral grey areas without telling the reader what they should think.
Tom is a character who can be loved, understood, questioned and condemned all at once. How did you approach writing someone whose choices are so emotionally complicated?
I never wanted to write a villain. I’m much more interested in people who make terrible decisions for reasons that feel understandable, even if those decisions have devastating consequences. I think if you’re writing someone like Tom, you have to love them enough to understand them, but not so much that you excuse them. Those are two very different
The novel asks whether grief can distort love as much as it deepens it. What interested you about grief as a force that can both connect and damage people?
Grief fascinates me because it’s so contradictory. It can bring people together in a way almost nothing else can, but it can also isolate them completely. Two people can experience the same loss and come away with entirely different versions of what happened, and that gap between them can become enormous.
I wasn’t really interested in grief as something to overcome. I was more interested in how it changes the way people see themselves and each other. Sometimes love becomes protective, sometimes it becomes possessive, and sometimes people mistake one for the other. That felt like a very human place to explore.
Motherhood in the novel is tender, fierce, flawed and sometimes painful. Did you set out to challenge idealised ideas of what a “good mother” looks like?
I think I wanted to write mothers as people first. We often expect mothers to be endlessly selfless or instinctively know the right thing to do, but real people are far more complicated than that.
The characters in Finding Grace all love in different ways, and sometimes that love leads them to make mistakes. I don’t think being a good parent means never getting things wrong. It’s about intention, resilience and the choices you make when you do get things wrong.
Your writing allows room for pain without neatly erasing it. How important was it to you that the ending offered emotional resolution without making everything feel easily forgiven?
That was incredibly important. I don’t think life gives us neat endings very often, and I didn’t want the novel to pretend otherwise. I’m not especially interested in stories where everyone is suddenly healed by the final chapter. Some things can’t be undone, and forgiveness isn’t something that can simply be switched on because the plot requires it.
What interested me more was the possibility of acceptance. People can begin to understand one another without everything being fixed. To me, that’s a much more hopeful—and truthful—kind of ending.
Readers who connect with Finding Grace will no doubt be eager to know what comes next. Are there particular themes, relationships or moral grey areas you feel drawn to exploring in future work?
Definitely. I seem to be drawn to people who are trying to do the right thing but don’t always know what that is. Those moral grey areas are where the most interesting stories live because that’s where most of us spend our lives. I’m also interested in family dynamics, the stories people tell themselves, and the gap between who we think we are and who we actually become under pressure. Those themes seem to keep finding their way into everything I write.
Whatever I write next will probably still be centred on relationships, but I suspect it’ll continue to blur genres in the same way Finding Grace does. I’m always looking for stories that combine emotional depth with the feeling that you simply have to keep turning the page.
All content is original to The Literary Lounge.
Questions asked and original to Katie Barr. Answers provided by Loretta Rothschild with minor proofreading edits. Featured Image provided by Brand Hive PR.
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