HIDING BEHIND PERFECTION
Harding's latest novel explores the dark side of family dysfunction
I’m fascinated by the facades that everyone is presenting, especially in this era of social media. It’s interesting how we reach out to the world and try to make our lives look so shiny and perfect. Robyn Harding
For West Coast novelist Robyn Harding and her family, it was a frightening experience when they found themselves under assault from nameless, faceless hooligans. But it yielded one benefit: it would eventually provide the seed for her latest thriller, a book which a jubilant Publisher's Weekly reviewer says will further expand her already devoted fan base.
“We used to live across from a big park,” Harding remembers. “A lot of teenagers would hang out there drinking beer and smoking pot, and they started targeting a few specific houses in our neighbourhood. Unfortunately, we were one of them.”
This unpleasantness would later serve as “the jumping-off point” for her new novel, The Perfect Family, which deals with a household under siege from unidentifiable enemies.
“Our experience never escalated to anything like what happens in the novel where it gets very serious and very deadly,” she says. “But it was very unnerving and frankly kind of scary because we never knew why we were being targeted.”
Harding may have started her fictional career with a successful foray into the chick lit romance genre but more recently she has established herself as a mistress of menace. But it's a specific kind of menace — the kind that can infect ordinary lives and threaten to destroy them.
In conversation from her home in Vancouver, she uses the term “domestic thriller” to describe bestselling novels like The Swap, The Arrangement and this latest one, The Perfect Family, published by Simon & Schuster. She's quietly self-effacing when she says she's not that concerned with delivering a “message” with her books. “I really hope that I'm writing genre fiction that entertains and offers an escape,” she says simply.
But she also admits to a fascination with how today's society works and how it's prone to dangerous fault lines when it comes to human behaviour.
“I'm fascinated by the facades that everyone is presenting, especially in this era of social media,” Harding says. “It's interesting how we reach out to the world and try to make our lives look so shiny and perfect. We're all painting these pictures now — I feel like there's a lot of pressure on us to look a certain way and not show the authentic messiness of our lives.”
The suburban Oregon family we meet in her new novel provides an unsettling case in point. The Adlers seem to be blessed with the perfect life — yet they are being subjected to nocturnal harassment in which the throwing of eggs and rotten vegetables soon graduates to more alarming levels.
Harding 's new thriller enters the world of “a family with secrets — secrets that might be causing these faceless nighttime attacks.”
It soon becomes clear that a severely dysfunctional household lurks beneath the Adlers' carefully cultivated aura of perfection. Thomas Adler, a slick but shallow real-estate broker, is — in Harding 's words — “invested in appearances (money, cars, watches) and relentlessly trying to keep up with other realtors.”
But then Thomas attends a bachelor party that ends up in disaster for him, and threatens his livelihood and marriage.
Then there's wife Liz — “the mother of the family who has invested her life in creating a beautiful home and a beautiful family. Then suddenly the perfect picture she has so carefully curated begins to fall apart. She doesn't know how to deal with it and responds in a very inappropriate way.”
Harding finds son Eli to be the novel's most sympathetic character — a troubled youth so haunted by being witness to a brutal hazing that he drops out of college and refuses to tell his parents why. Meanwhile, teenage sister Karyn, lonely and doubting her own self-worth, is pursuing a secret nocturnal life in her basement bedroom where she offers her scantily clad body for money in a private online chat room.
This is not the first time that the darker side of the internet has figured in a Robyn Harding novel. It's there in The Swap, in which an evening of partner-swapping in a Gulf Island community has creepy consequences. And it's front and centre in Harding's bestselling The Arrangement, about a “sugar daddy” hook-up that goes disastrously wrong. For the latter book, Hardy's researches led her into a murky online world when she boldly created a seductive profile of her central character and posted it on an actual dating site. The feedback astonished her.
“Within 15 minutes I probably had 12 messages. I was getting offers of $400 to go live. It was a crazy eye-opener to go on there and see what that world was really like.”
She also tracked down some Vancouver “sugar babies” and arranged to meet for coffee.
“I got their perspective on why they do it, what it's like and what the risks are. I ended up having to go back and rewrite some of the story now that I had this inside knowledge!”
As a successful author, Harding maintains her own informative website. She's fully aware of the advantages the online universe offers her. But that doesn't mean she's totally accepting. She's wary, particularly when it comes to the social media and its far-reaching impact.
“We're all infiltrated,” she says. And this doesn't necessarily lead to “a calm and sharing ” environment. Instead, it's a world which seems to demand excess. “Now we even have `crying ' videos where kids cry online and talk about their deepest, saddest moments.”
Harding clearly feels compassion for Karyn, the bright but conflicted young daughter who displays her body to an online chat room. “I've always been fascinated about why people do the things they do,” she reiterates. So she did research the kind of online chat world that Karyn has entered. “Access to that world is so easy,” she says uneasily. “Karyn thinks she has found attention and validation — but it's a very risky place.”
Harding is left thinking of her own family.
“I feel for my kids. They've never grown up without social media. The pressure has always been there.”
Despite her insistence that she's not really a message person, Harding concedes that her latest novel may have something important to say.
“There's no such thing as perfection,” she says bluntly. “If there's any kind of take-away with this book, it's just that people should be comfortable about being who they are. Sometimes households that appear perfect and the families that appear perfect have a lot to hide.”