Harding goes full throttle into thriller genre
Her Pretty Face explores secrets, friendships and killers living next door
In 2016, news broke that Karla Homolka, arguably Canada’s most infamous and vilified female murderer, was living a quiet life under a new name in Châteauguay, Que. The headline not only upturned the Montreal suburb and school that her three children attended, but angered a country unable to forget Homolka’s part in the violent deaths of high school students Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.
As a mom herself, Vancouver author Robyn Harding empathized with the Châteauguay parents discovering that Homolka had integrated herself so stealthily into their neighbourhood. While Harding’s own kids were growing up, their elementary school became the centre of her personal universe, too. “When I heard that someone with that kind of past was free and blending in with the school community, I thought that is such a horrific idea,” she says. “I wanted to explore it through fiction.”
Harding’s new novel, Her Pretty Face, unfolds through multiple narratives and flashbacks. There’s Frances, a fierce ma- ma who enrols her son, Marcus, in a private school after he is diagnosed with ADHD and oppositional defiance disorder. Her hopes for a fresh start are quashed after a disturbing schoolyard incident involving Marcus, and both mother and son find themselves ostracized by the school community; in particular, by the yummy-mommies whom Frances daydreams of harming in creative ways. Frances’s isolation is relieved when she meets new-to-town Kate, who is wealthy, model-beautiful and equally disdainful of the school’s elitism. The two bond quickly, as do their sons.
A parallel storyline involves Kate’s daughter, Daisy. By Grade 9, Daisy is already a cynical old soul who treats high school life like a game, knowing it’s just a matter of time before her family moves again. Their stories are interspersed with flashbacks from a character, DJ, who recounts the horrific murder of his older sister, and the subsequent high-profile criminal trials of her killers, Shane Nelson and Amber Kunik. It’s unclear initially how these storylines intersect, but the hints begin to stack up until they reach Her Pretty Face’s bombdrop of an ending.
Harding is clear that Her Pretty Face is a work of fiction that probes the complexities of women’s friendships, and not a retelling of a violent story. “I don’t want to upset anyone with the Homolka material. It’s not about her crimes, it’s more inspired by her blending into the school population,” Harding says. To her dismay, while researching, she discovered that cases of murdering couples were more common than she thought. Harding amalgamated details into the story from other crimes, like those perpetrated by David and Catherine Birnie, who in 1986, murdered four women in Perth, Australia.
Harding’s background doesn’t foreshadow her new calling as a domestic-thriller writer. She got her start in lighthearted women’s fiction, and also wrote a young adult novel and a memoir about reducing her family’s carbon footprint.
In the late aughts, the chicklit publishing market began to dry up, but Harding’s love of comedic writing did not, and so she turned to film and television. She jokes that out of the “400,000 screenplays” she wrote during that period, only one of them made it through. In 2015, Harding’s feature film, The Steps, starring James Brolin, Jason Ritter and Christine Lahti, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“Writing screenplays taught me a lot about what I love about writing novels, the autonomy and the ownership and the relationship with an editor,” Harding says.
Her shift toward darker material started in 2012 while in Australia, helping take care of her sick mother-in-law. “I don’t know if it was being in that environment where things were sad, but I came up with this dramatic idea.”
Harding wrote about 70 pages of The Party, her 2017 bestselling novel about a sweet-16 sleepover turned tragedy, then put the unfinished manuscript aside. She was still stuck on comedy, but every time she’d pull up this story, Harding realized that she had a gem. She pushed it through and landed a publishing deal with Simon & Schuster.
The manuscript for her next title is due in August, and she is committed to her book-a-year schedule, which leaves little time for film or comedy. Besides, “I have no shortage of ideas for the domestic thriller genre.”
Sue Carter is the editor of Quill and Quire.