When Gill Perdue first started writing The Interview, her 14-year-old protagonist was initially intended to be the star of a children’s book. But the story took her down a darker path and she knew that its audience would need to be more mature than originally intended.
Questioning Jenny, the young assault victim who is found covered in blood after her stepfather goes missing, Detective Laura Shaw is an experienced interviewer with specific techniques designed to make vulnerable people feel safe and secure and eventually with gentle probing, open up to reveal their suffering.
Realising that there was a very specialised skill involved in this type of questioning, the “avid crime reader” knew she would have to engage in extensive research while developing the fictional characters of her book. And over the course of the four years it took to complete, she met several experts, including the leading victim interviewer in Ireland, on a number of occasions to try to “get into the head” of a specialist interviewer and ensure that the story, which had “taken on a mind of its own” was as close to reality as possible.
“In an earlier version of the story, I had considered that the interviewing role might be taken by a psychiatrist and had done a lot of research into these types of interviews,” says Perdue.
“I had watched YouTube videos of interviews with children and young people who were in a ‘fugue’ state, states of dissociative amnesia (a disconnection from thoughts, memories, actions and identify), and psychosis.
“But after a conversation with a senior Garda detective, who told me about the Garda specialist victim interviewer (SVI), I knew this would be crucial to the story, so I was put in touch with D – an experienced SVI working in Dublin -– who I had long talks with about her process and the training they received.
“Plus, having previously worked as a teacher, this gave me some insight into talking to children and encouraging them to share their thoughts and feelings.
“In addition to this, my talks with various gardaí (and other experts) were ongoing over the years while the book came into being. I went from never having heard of SVIs to wishing I could have trained as one when I left school and learned a huge amount about the work they do – and how they interact with state health, social and psychological services to help the victim receive justice and in due course, recover and return to their lives. I was blown away by their dedication and how important it is to them that the victim is given a platform to tell their story.”
The author has written a number of children’s books, trained as a counsellor and was involved in volunteer work for one of the charities dedicated to helping young people in crisis. She believed that all of this, combined with her own experience as a mother, gave her an insight into how teenagers might feel in a traumatic situation.
“For me, the story was propelled by the need for both characters, Jenny and Laura, to break free from the trauma of their past,” she says. “But the only way they could do this is to tell their stories. So I felt a huge sense of urgency when writing it – I wanted the reader to know what Laura knows – that Jenny is withholding information. But I also wanted people to understand that although she still hasn’t accepted it, Laura is also a victim of the past, because of her own silence.
“When I met the real life SVI, I had already written the character of Laura – and while curiously, there were some similarities in terms of age and her having a family at home, Laura is more complex and troubled with trauma in her past, and this is entirely fiction – and definitely not based on the real life SVI I worked with.
“What did help greatly though, was that I learned about how the unit is structured, the timetables SVIs work to, the way they work in pairs, how they record the video evidence and other practical information.”
In The Interview, Jenny is afraid to reveal what she has been through and is silently battling with demons as detectives try to glean some information that might help them to either find and convict her perpetrator or conversely to ascertain if she is a victim at all or is in fact a suspect.
Her story is a work of fiction, but there is no doubt that there are many vulnerable people all over the country who are the victims of a crime or in some cases a lifetime of abuse, and are so psychologically scarred that they find it almost impossible to talk about what has happened.
Without being given any specifics, while doing her research, Gill, who lives in Dublin, learned about young people being groomed online, adults with intellectual difficulties alleging historical abuse and young children who are suspected to be the victims of assault or abuse at the hands of their parents or another “trusted” adult in their lives.
“My book is certainly a timely tale,” she says. “As recently as December 2020, a joint TCD and NUI study for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence drew attention to an ongoing epidemic of sexual, domestic and gender-based violence, where half of young women abused by a partner were minors when abuse began.
“Under-reporting of sexual crime is still a major issue. However, it is heartening that the gardaí have been making major efforts to encourage reporting and [have had success] in prosecuting the perpetrators.
“We need to help those who experience these crimes get justice and the supports that they need. And above all, we need to address the issue of violence, aggression, and consent at the earliest level – in childhood.”
The mother of two, who is also a dance teacher, has written several children’s books and says that after her two daughters had grown up and left home and her father had died, she decided that rather than wallowing in grief and an empty nest syndrome, she would go back to the drawing board with the “dark” children’s book which was unfolding and try to turn it into something different.
“I read a lot of crime and love a good mystery, so as I had begun Jenny’s story and realised that it wasn’t going to be a children’s book, I decided that I just needed to get the nerve to turn it into a book for adults, the type of story I like to read myself,” she says.
“So I hope that readers will get caught up in it and be invested in the outcome for the characters. Also, I hope it will encourage people to be open about past trauma they have experienced and to look for help from the guards, from the health services, from every avenue available to them.
“And I hope that the reader might feel that even in the bleakest of times, friendship, love, and laughter are not too far away.”
The Interview by Gill Perdue is published by Penguin on March 31st
