After the success of Dirt Town, in her compelling second novel, Girl Falling, Wollongong author Hayley Scrivenor delves into the complexities of friendship, grief, and identity, exploring the haunting effects of a single moment on the lives of those left behind and the way that an event can shift and distort in our memory.

Photo source: Pan Macmillan Australia

The life of Girl Falling began at the end. “I had this image of a woman standing on the cliff at the end of the book questioning her own story. In that little flash I had the location—the Blue Mountains. I had this idea for a love triangle. And I had this woman who is this young, lost woman trying to figure out what had happened to her life. But there were so many things that I didn’t know about the book at that point,” says Scrivenor.

The novel opens with a tragic rock climbing accident that forces Finn, our main character, to confront the aftermath of her girlfriend Magdu’s death. As Finn navigates her grief, the narrative alternates between past and present, mirroring Scrivenor’s own creative process, which involved writing scenes out of order.

“My theory is that everybody is living in all three tenses at once—we’re always thinking about what happened, what will happen, and what is happening right now. And so having the past to go into when things were heavy or where I needed to explain something more or lay the groundwork was very essential for me,” says Scrivenor.

Girl Falling is written from Finn’s point of view as she tries to dissect that fateful day she was climbing with Magdu and her best friend, Daphne. As the story progresses you learn that Finn and Daphne’s relationship is very strange and readers begin to suspect that there may have been foul play involved. Scrivenor’s choice of a single, unreliable narrator immerses readers in Finn’s internal struggles, compelling them to question the validity of her experiences.

“I think we’ve all had that experience where we’ve known someone who made us question our take on the world and made us wonder if we were in the right or the wrong. And I think it's really interesting to ask that question by having the reader read a book in the first person. You don’t know whether Finn's story is the right one,” says Scrivenor.

This exploration of perspective is further illustrated through the idea of an unreliable narrator and the question of what story is the ‘true’ story, which is threaded throughout the novel. 

Scrivenor says she’s always been the type of person who will listen to a story from one perspective and agree with that person, only to then listen to the same story from another perspective and agree with the absolute opposite.

We see these ideas not only in Finn’s retelling of stories from her life and the central crime of the book but also in Finn’s shifting persona around both Magdu and Daphne, which underscores the novel’s exploration of identity and the influence of friendships.

“I was interested in showing a complicated female friendship and showing the way that people—not just those we’re in romantic relationships with, but others—can bring out parts of us that we like or don't like. And I think we’ve all had that experience of meeting someone who makes us feel like a different sort of person,” says Scrivenor.

The novel, as is natural for the crime genre, has many twists and turns, forcing readers to reckon with who the characters are and what they are capable of. Scrivenor’s narrative not only entertains but prompts readers to reflect on the unpredictable nature of human behavior.

“Often what I’m trying to do in my fiction is show people that all of us are capable of almost anything if enough things line up in the right sort of order. I’ll start with an end and a final twist that I know is extreme but isn’t believable. And then my challenge as a writer is to bring you into that story world and make you care about the characters and then slowly, structurally build towards that so that it’s kind of inevitable in hindsight,” says Scrivenor.

Scrivenor manages to use the crime genre and narrative structure as an outline to a picture that is then filled in with all of her deeper ideas and beautiful similes. She says that her first drafts are often overflowing with similes, which are whittled down by the final edit to only 1%.

In that 1% in Girl Falling, there are lines like: “There was something unnatural about a girl dying, something that made you want to be still and small, so the universe didn’t notice you and start getting ideas.”

Her writing often yields unexpected gems, as she describes: “So much of that stuff is subconscious... I often talk about the book being smarter than me. I write to know what I think and to know what I might come up with because I’m genuinely surprised by what comes out,” says Scrivenor.

The ending of Girl Falling is one of those endings where you go back and read the whole last chapter again just to make sure you didn’t read it wrong. It makes you wonder whether it is possible to alter history from inside your mind as though the truth was just a bad dream you woke from.

The novel is out now, and Scrivenor will be a speaker at the Berry Writers Festival from October 25-27.