Thursday 6 August 2020

Julia Haeberlin talks about We Are All The Same in The Dark

My thrillers always begin the same way—with a tiny visual in my head that won’t go away. In the case of BLACK-EYED SUSANS, it was the bird’s-eye view of a young woman lying in a field of yellow and black flowers with a bunch of scattered old bones.

A younger, wispier girl began to haunt me for WE ARE ALL THE SAME IN THE DARK. She was wishing on dandelions on the side of a Texas road that yawned with desperate emptiness. I couldn’t see her face. But I knew two things for sure: She only had one eye. And she was lost.

The gritty atmosphere of this cold case thriller overwhelmed me, even sneaking into my dreams. An ominous Texas town had taken an ugly shape down the road, with a mystery of its own. I had already decided not to give it a name to enhance its creepiness and myth.

Even before I wrote the first word, I was warning my one-eyed girl not to go there. 

She didn’t reply. No matter how much I tugged her arm, she stayed in the shadows behind a barbed wire fence. 

This was a big problem for a novelist who is not an outliner. My characters always drive the plot on a twisted road where I can never see around the curve. Every day of writing, I want to be surprised as much as the reader.

I wouldn’t describe myself as someone who struggles with writer’s block, but when I’m typing cliches and blather, I know that I need to do one of two things. Go read poetry. Or research. 

Both open up my brain. As a writer, I need to fly with poetry’s bird of freedom when my words are too straightforward. And as a tactile journalist, I want all of my underlying themes—the Texas death penalty, mitochondrial DNA, or, in this case, prosthetics—to be based on solid ground, on the advice of experts.

I realized that for my character to reveal herself, she wanted my respect. I needed to understand as much as I could what it felt like physically and emotionally to be missing an eye. 

I began with Randy Trawnik, a legendary ocularist in Dallas, Texas, who can create a prosthetic eye so beautiful, so much a perfect twin to a natural eye, that women and men are able to keep them a secret. 

And they do. Beauty queens, actresses, professional athletes, models. Kids trying to navigate through the tribal phase of childhood. The thousands of other people who don’t want to be defined first by what they are missing. What did Shakespeare say? The eyes are the windows of the soul, and by extension the soul itself? Well, he was wrong.

I began to meet some of Randy Trawnik’s patients. An Instagram model whose eye was blown apart by a firecracker set off by a family member on her grandmother’s Oklahoma ranch when she was nine.

A teenager who could not remember a time she did not wear a prosthetic eye—almost since birth—and still only told her closest friends. 

A woman accidentally hit with a ping-pong ball by a boy she had a crush on, who started her freshman year of high school with a crude prosthesis she called her “teddy-bear eye.” 

And Lauren Scruggs, a popular athletic U.S. influencer, whose arm and eye were destroyed by a small plane’s propeller but who can do almost every single thing she did before the accident. 

She posed this question to me: “What do ‘disabled’ and ‘differently abled’ even mean?” 
When I hung up the phone with her, I decided to avoid using those labels for the rest of my life.

I broadened my scope, to a veteran and ex-cop who lost a leg but still trains SWAT teams, and a college student who lost a hand and almost her life when she slammed into the back of a car parked with its lights off on a dark highway. Now she works in the prosthetics industry herself.
Two ferocious female heroines began to take shape instead of one.

My perceptions of physical beauty, so muddled by stereotypes that persist on social media and beyond, were transformed into something deeper, more transcendant. 

I didn’t know what I needed to know. 

I find that I ask myself that a lot these days, as the world explodes in shocking ways around us, as we sort out the kind of humans we want to be.

I hope you will love the thrill ride of this novel but mostly I hope that it makes you think twice—about how we are either all missing pieces, or none of us are.

The two heroines, one without a leg, one without an eye, are no different than any of my other characters.

They are defined by their guts, maneuvering a path to redemption.

And isn’t that how we all want to be defined?

We Are All the Same in The Dark by Julia Haeberlin (Published by Michael Joseph on 6 August 2020)
It's been a decade since the town's sweetheart Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Since her disappearance, Tru's brother, Wyatt, has lived as an outcast, desperate to know what happened to his sister. So when Wyatt finds a lost girl, he believes she is a sign. But for new cop, Odette Tucker, this girl's appearance reopens old wounds. Determined to solve both cases, Odette fights to save a lost girl in the present and in doing so digs up a shocking truth about that fateful night in the past . . . the night her friend disappeared, the night that inspired her to become a cop, the night that wrote them all a role in the town's dark, violent mythology.




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