Author R&R with Jessica Moor

 

Jessica Moor studied English at Cambridge before completing a Creative Writing MA at Manchester University where her dissertation was awarded the second Peters Fraser Dunlop-sponsored "Creative Writing Prize for Fiction." Prior to this, she spent a year working in the violence against women and girls sector and this experience inspired her first novel, The Keeper. She currently lives in Berlin.

In Moor's novel, The Keeper, Katie Straw’s body is pulled from the waters of the local suicide spot, and the police are ready to write it off as a standard-issue female suicide. But the residents of the domestic violence shelter where Katie worked disagree. These women have spent weeks or even years waiting for the men they’re running from to catch up with them. They know immediately: This was murder. Still, Detective Dan Whitworth and his team expect an open-and-shut case ... until they discover evidence that suggests Katie wasn’t who she appeared to be.

Jessica Moor stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing her debut novel:

 

THE KEEPER is set in and around a shelter for women fleeing domestic violence. The body of Katie Straw, a young woman who works in the shelter, is found washed up in the local river. The police are inclined to write it off as suicide, but the women in the shelter believe otherwise. The novel follows the investigation, through the eyes of both the investigating officer and the women living in the shelter. We also delve into Katie’s history through flashback, and discover the void between who she seemed to be, and who she was. Really it’s a novel about violence against women, and the social institutions that allow that violence to continue and go unpunished.

I mostly worked in the head office of a charity that supported victims of violence against women (I wasn’t a frontline worker) but I did visit quite a few shelters. A lot of what made it into the book was little details—the kids’ pictures on the walls, the way the heating was always turned way up. But also there’s this unique feeling of entering an underground railroad—a network of secret spaces that exist to keep women safe. You realize that women essentially have to go there because there are men who want to hurt or even kill them—and the police and the courts aren’t stopping them. I think that shook my faith in the social institutions of law and justice.

I found inspiration within anger. There’s a line from Adrienne Rich that I always come back to “my visionary anger cleanses my sight.” I’m interested in the idea that anger can help us to see clearly, rather than clouding our judgement. Anger is often represented as a force that destabilizes women, in particular. I don’t think that’s true. Rebecca Traister’s book Good and Mad expresses this argument beautifully.

I was also inspired by a lot of the true crime narratives that I saw. I started writing this book in 2016, and stories like Serial and Making a Murderer had been very popular in the couple of years preceding. I take issue with the way we deploy female bodies as a narrative hook—I’m sure we can all think of examples of that. So it was a reverse inspiration; I wanted to do the opposite of those lazy depictions of women as silenced victims. I wanted to center women.

I had to work damn hard on the structure—luckily structure is one of those technical things that you can educate yourself on and improve. I took a lot of feedback from the right people to get that balance. I believe that a great story can operate as a sort of Trojan horse; you can sneak whatever themes you like, as long as you get the story right.

I don’t think it was ever particularly difficult to keep the two timelines in balance because they were always informing each other. I wanted every part of Katie’s experience to be in dialogue with the experiences of the women in the refuge. I think they always stayed roughly in balance, because to me they were connected.

The parts that came easiest were the moments of emotion—maybe it’s that visionary anger thing. Those were the bits that had stored up inside me and were just waiting to come spilling out. The tough part was the mechanics of storytelling, particularly because story is essential to crime. There’s nothing more disappointing than a great setup and then a mediocre payoff. In order to subvert some of the crime novel elements, I needed to understand what those elements were and how they work. It was no hardship—I read and studied a bunch of great crime novels.

There was also the challenge of flipping between a number of different narrative voices. My practical solution to that was to assign a certain song to every narrative voice, and listen to that song whenever I was writing that character so I could get into the headspace more easily.

 

You can read more about Jessica and her writing via her website and also follow her on Twitter and Instagram. The Keeper, which The Observer included in its list of "10 Best Debut Novelists of 2020," is now available via all major booksellers.