(typewriter dings) (upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Ruth Ware and I'm the author of "The It Girl."

The main character is Hannah, who is a book seller, living in Edinburgh and she's working for this cute, little independent bookshop called Tall Tales.

She's expecting her first baby.

She's married to her college sweetheart, Will.

So, on the surface everything is great but then Hannah gets a bolt from the past.

She hears that John Neville has died in prison and what we don't know at the beginning of the book is that John Neville is the man who was convicted of killing her college roommate, April, largely on Hannah's evidence.

But what John Neville's death forces Hannah to do is admit some doubts that she has always had about his conviction and to cast her mind back to the fact that the evidence she gave, while truthful, may not have been the whole picture.

So, Hannah's forced to ask herself, not only whether she condemned an innocent man to die in prison, but if John Neville didn't kill April, whether somebody else did.

(gentle music) - I read that you were on jury duty when you kind of conceptualized this.

Can you tell us about that?

- Yeah, It was, I mean, at the time, I didn't come up with the idea in the jury room or anything like that.

It was only afterwards that I sort of thought, "Huh."

I think I was processing some of the same feelings that came up in that experience and you know, I was really glad to do my kind of civic duty inverted comas and I felt really privileged to be part of the system.

But, I found it really surprisingly traumatic, actually.

I went home and I wasn't sleeping and I was kind of worrying about my part in the proceedings and just feeling the real weight of responsibility of deciding somebody else's fate in that way and weighing out what was quite murky evidence and thankfully the case I was involved with wasn't in any way as serious as the case in the book; but I think it made me realize how traumatizing even my kind of little brush with the justice system had been and to really think about what that would be like to have that experience in a much more bruising, intimate way if you were a victim or a defendant in a case, how profoundly that would change your life.

And that's what happens to Hannah and obviously because I'm a mystery writer, I think what we all do is take a situation to the Nth degree and so for me, that personal nightmare would be, not just being involved in a case, but being involved in a potential miscarriage of justice.

So, that was where my imagination went and that is what I put poor Hannah through.

- Was it a conviction on your case?

- I'm not sure if we're allowed to talk about it in the UK.

Our rules are very different.

You can't speak about the case that you were involved in.

You can't talk about how anything went.

So, I probably can't say.

(upbeat music) - Did you have any "It Girl" friends at school that you used to model April on?

- Oh, no one quite like April, you know, who is the sort of quintessential, beautiful, intelligent, wealthy person.

I went to a much less fancy school and didn't have anyone quite in that league.

But, I think we've all, most people, most women maybe, particularly, have had the experience of having a friend who's, I guess, a bit of a frenemy, someone that we're fascinated by, but who we know maybe doesn't always have our best interests at heart, doesn't always bring out the best in us and I think what Hannah loves about April is the fact that she embodies so many qualities that Hannah herself doesn't have.

You know, she's full of boldness and kind of joie de vivre and confidence and carelessness all of which qualities that Hannah doesn't herself possess.

So she really admires that in April.

But she is also aware that April is kind of irresponsible.

She's careless about other people's feelings.

She can be pretty cruel and she has no illusions about that.

She sees April for who she really is.

And I definitely, I think, you know, I, as a writer I keep returning to the whole dynamic of female friendship and particularly that kind of maybe toxic friendship is a bit unkind but that sort of friendship that's right on the cusp of being something great but also something potentially a bit destructive.

And that's certainly the case for the friendship between April and Hannah.

- This is a dual timeline story, which can be very challenging.

We have Hannah in the past at Oxford, we have Hannah now as a young mother, how did you build this story?

What was the thought process that went into how you were going to do the dual narratives?

- To kind of balance the two timelines?

- Yeah.

- Well, it's not the first book that I've done with two timelines.

My very first novel, "In A Dark, Dark Wood" is set over two timelines, although much closer together, it's set over a 48 hour period.

And then "The Lying Game" is also set over two timelines in the sense of, it's about a group of friends who are harking back to their school days.

But in that novel, I deliberately made the border between the two timelines quite porous.

There's a lot of sort of fading from one into the other in the form of memories and kind of, I really wanted that sense that the past is sort of creeping into the present and the echoes are really sort of present in the current timeline.

With "The It Girl", I made a very deliberate decision not to do that and to divide it into two really sharply differentiated timelines.

I was very aware that I was writing about an event that's completely shaped and fractured Hannah's life.

The person she is before April dies is completely different to the person that she is afterwards and it's an event that has defined the rest of her life.

So making the book fractured into two very sharply defined before and after periods was a way of just sort of delineating that and showing what a sharp divide there is in Hannah's own life.

- Hannah doubts everything in the modern portions of the book, everything that she's known about her time at Oxford, she is now questioning.

Do you feel like she's an unreliable narrator?

- I think we're all unreliable narrators of our own lives, really.

I think that's the, that's the big secret.

And actually, you know, I think books that ask us to believe that people remember things perfectly 10 years later and are completely unbiased and reliable about every aspect of their lives, I think those are the more unrealistic books actually.

So, I think Hannah is unreliable but only to the extent that all of us are.

And you know, there's been lots of interesting work done on memory and the way that when we're asked to recall events over and over again, which of course is a big part of the justice system, you know, you're taken through your story by the police and then by the lawyers and then again in the courtroom, and you are cross examined and you are asked to fill in gaps.

And there's lots of academic research showing that that process is actually, while it feels like it should be getting us closer to the truth in terms of how our memory work, it's often really counterproductive because every time we recall a story, effectively what happens is we erase the previous version and re-remember the version that we brought out this time.

So when we tell a story again and again, it's sort of like a game of telephone.

It gets a little bit further away from the original version.

We are not very good at remembering things.

We're not very good at truthfully holding onto memories you know, our brains change them and fill in the gaps in ways that might be accurate, but might not.

So I think Hannah is just a victim of that as we all are.

And I think, you know, to your other point, which is that Hannah is very self doubting in the current, in the sort of modern day part of the narrative.

I feel like that is a, probably a truthful representation of what it would be like to suffer a really traumatic event and to have your judgment on so many things called into question.

You know, when something happens that upends everything that we feel we have a right to expect, like, you know have roommate being there when we get home at the end of the night, that does make you call everything into question and to start doubting your own judgment.

- Trauma is certainly a theme in almost all of your books.

How do you explore the ripple effects of trauma in your stories?

- Ripple effects is exactly what I'm getting at.

And I, in spite of being very firmly a crime writer, I'm very proud to call myself a crime writer.

I'm actually not super interested in the crime itself very often, you know, I don't spend a lot of time on the page dwelling on the murder or the, you know, the violence or whatever incident it is that has kind of triggered the plot.

What I'm more interested in, I sort of see the crime as this pebble thrown into a pond.

And what I'm, my job is to write about the ripples rather than the pebble itself.

The pebble is fundamentally quite uninteresting to me.

What's interesting to me is the, the ripples and the effect on the pond and all the mud that's stirred up at the bottom when the rock goes in and stuff.

So that is how I see it.

The other big theme of the novel is very much how we as a society and how the media and how social media treats women and in particular treats women who are the victims of crime and the way that we are obsessed with a certain type of victim.

And April very much fits that mold.

You know, she's young, she's white, she's beautiful, she's wealthy, she's a particular kind of person and there are other crimes that we simply just add to a pile of statistics.

And as a society we don't spend much time on.

But April is the kind of victim that we see picked over again and again and again in, you know true crime podcasts and documentaries and exactly.

But the flip side of that is that we love to box up our victims in particular but women in general into certain boxes.

And you know, we either want to have victims to be these kind of perfect golden girls who never put a foot wrong, never said an unkind word, academically perfect, you know never had any unsuitable boyfriends or anything like that.

Or conversely, we want them to be a cautionary tale, you know, if only she hadn't worn that skirt or if only she hadn't walked home that particular route or had a few too many drinks, almost so that we can feel better about what happened and say, "Well, I wouldn't have done that, so I wouldn't be in that situation."

And we get quite angry when people refuse to fit the roles that we have assigned them and sort of fit uneasy into two or three different boxes.

And April is certainly someone who is quite hard to categorize.

You know, she is in many ways the kind of the golden girl, but she's also quite unlikable.

She makes a lot of mistakes, she makes a lot of enemies.

And so I deliberately wanted her to be someone who it was sort of uneasy to fit into boxes.

- [J.T.]

What makes the school setting so perfect for a thriller?

- I think it's a really vulnerable time in your life.

You know, you're spreading your wings as a young adult.

You are going out there, you are taking risks as you should, you know, you are doing crazy things and hopefully relatively fearlessly.

But I know looking back at myself at that age and some of the choices that I made and some of the adventures that I launched myself on, which I'm so happy I did.

But I just think, you know, where did I find the courage?

I was interested in exploring that point in your life where you're relatively fearless and perhaps more vulnerable than you realize.

- It's the intimacy of the setting.

And, and I would even take it a step further in, into the claustrophobia.

That's what turns it from something fun and sexy and cool into a thriller.

- Yeah, yeah and I think that is something that a lot of you know, I didn't go to Oxford, but I, a lot of my friends did, and I spoke to them quite extensively about their college days.

And that was a theme that kept popping up.

You know, the fact that if you went out with someone and then broke up with them, you were going to see that person at breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next three years.

And also I think, you know, just the, they can be quite a febrile atmosphere, Oxford Colleges, I think because everybody there is there because they were the best and the brightest in their class, and they've probably been top of their class their whole life.

And suddenly they get to an institution where that is true of everybody.

And I think that can be a huge shock to the system.

So... - You said you wanted to be a writer when you were in school.

How did it happen?

- Well, I guess I'd always written really, I'd always been a storyteller, right from when, you know, I think I was probably telling my sister about, you know, the love lives of my Barbie dolls when I was kind of sort of six and seven.

And once I started, you know writing little stories at school and then they got longer and longer.

And then by the time I was a teenager, I guess I was writing sort of, you know book length things, really.

But I don't think I ever thought I would be a published writer.

I think I wanted to be, but I didn't know any writers.

It didn't seem like a thing that a regular person could do.

So yeah, I just kept writing and writing and sliding these not terribly good manuscripts under the bed.

And having children made me realize that if I didn't buckle down and try to monetize this, I was going to lose it because I, you know I didn't have time to do anything.

I wasn't, couldn't go to the gym, couldn't, you know, barely wash my hair some days.

And I thought if I don't make a space for this in my life, I'm not going to have time for this, for the, you know for the next sort of five years or so.

So that, yeah, that was what really made me kind of crack on and start sending out to agents and editors and good thing I did.

Here we are.

- Here we are.

Ruth, thank you so much for being here.

This was an absolute delight and so, so cool to have you.

- Oh, it was such a pleasure to be here, J.T.

Thank you for having me.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(gentle music) - [Ruth] In spite of being very firmly a crime writer, I'm very proud to call myself a crime writer.

I'm actually not super interested in the crime itself.