The atmosphere, settings and whole feel of this period is wonderfully evoked throughout. Without giving anything away, for me, the ending was not so much about Odalie’s lies or Rose’s lies to other people so much as it was about revealing all the many ways in which Rose has lied to herself.
I wasn’t trying to trick anyone so much as feel my way to a point of resolution. I think it was a result of following the plot through to its unraveling point. The ending was defined by its ambiguity and I appreciate we cannot reveal it here! Was this another ruse to play with the reader`s minds? I knew Odalie I needed to use Odalie as a sort of decoy in order to tease out Rose’s complexities, but that was all. On the surface of things, I wanted Rose and Odalie to be opposites and to have these superficial differences drop away as the novel goes on. I suppose in the beginning, I simply had an image – or impression, really – of these two women in mind. How clearly was this relationship set in your mind before writing or did you just decide during the writing process to make it a good deal more unsettling for us? The sinister undercurrents of Rose`s relationship with and fixation on the divine Odalie drive the plot and keep the readers on the back foot. I thought it would be fun to pit two opposing concepts against one another by putting this emotionally damaged woman in the role of a typist, thereby challenging our assumptions that legal transcription is somehow above the influence of human bias – as Rose proves, it isn’t! Part of the reason I was so keen to write the book and pursue Rose’s story was because right off the bat, I could tell she had a warped sense of the world around her. Rose is a wonderfully formed and multi-faceted character and her loose relationship with the truth makes her a disconcerting and unreliable narrator. The dissertation was meant to be academic in nature, so I really sort of went off the beaten path when I decided to “listen” to Rose and write the novel.
Her life as I imagined it intrigued me, and soon after finding the obituary I began hearing the voice of Rose, my narrator. I was writing a dissertation on literature and culture of the 1920’s and came upon an obituary of a woman who had worked as a typist in a police precinct during Prohibition.
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