National Post (National Edition)
IN DARK WATERS
AUTHOR DELVES INTO MURKY DEPTHS OF TOXIC FRIENDSHIPS AND SEXUAL DOUBLE STANDARDS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
There are times when the very act of writing scares rising Canadian novelist Laurie Elizabeth Flynn. And the source of that fear is — herself.
It happened when she was writing books for young adults. And it happened again with her debut work of adult fiction, The Girls Are All So Nice Here, a psychological thriller about a toxic female friendship.
“There's always a time writing a book when it's easier not to write it and easier to give up,” she confesses. She may discover that she's entering risky fictional territory or leading the reader and herself into uncomfortably dark places. “But I think that when you feel that way, that you still need to continue.”
She knew she was pushing the envelope with her young adult novel, Firsts, published in 2016 under the name of L.E. Flynn. Some parents may have thought so too, given that the central character is Mercedes, a sexually active 17-year-old young woman who sleeps only with virgin males, her purpose being to prepare them for better sex with their girlfriends.
“I knew the material was going to be boundary-pressing,” she says from her home in London, Ont. “But I wanted to follow where the characters were going and not worry too much about dialing it down in order to get it published.”
She would encounter more scary moments as she forged ahead with this new novel, The Girls Are All So Nice Here. Indeed, she scared herself into an accomplishment that triggered a fierce bidding war for the finished book — one that has resulted in publication deals in 11 territories at last count and landed its 36-year-old author a television option with AMC, the producers of Breaking Bad and Mad Men.
“When I started writing this book, I didn't know what was going to happen,” says this mother of three who enjoyed a globe-trotting career as a model before returning to her hometown of London. “I knew that I wanted to delve into friendship dynamics and peer pressure, and see where that might lead people. I definitely didn't know the depth of what I was getting into at first, but that was sort of the way it went.”
The novel's central focus is on a malignant college friendship that eventually leads to the destruction of a decent human being. Although it has the structure and momentum of a thriller, it's the work of an author fascinated by how today's society works — in particular the place of young women within it — and she finds an ideal venue for her concerns in the claustrophobic setting of a small liberal arts university.
The theme here is a familiar one — how the past returns to haunt the present — so Flynn has the task of ensuring it a fresh immediacy and relevance. The reader first meets Ambrosia Wellington as a 31-year-old Manhattan PR type, settled in a comfortable marriage to a warm-hearted guy named Adrian and intent on suppressing bad memories of her youth. When she starts getting invitations to attend a reunion of her freshman class, she keeps disregarding them, until there's an anonymous one too alarming to ignore: “You need to come. We need to talk about what we did that night.”
The novel moves between the present, with Ambrosia reluctantly deciding to attend the reunion, and the traumas of the past, particularly the catastrophic events that had occurred 14 years before in her freshman year. And this brings into focus the insecure Ambrosia's devastating friendship with Sully, a sexually voracious young woman of magnetic personality and sociopathic disposition.
Flynn isn't surprised that some readers see parallels between this novel and Mean Girls, the 2004 Lindsay Lohan movie that lifted the lid off the toxic undercurrent of high school life. “I've heard it described as a darker, more disturbing Mean Girls, and I definitely think that holds some weight,” she says. “My intention here was to delve into girl-group dynamics and female friendships and the ways they can change a person.”
But Flynn strongly believes that if readers want to understand why Ambrosia, Sully and other characters behave as they do, their actions must be perceived against the larger tapestry of a society that still pursues a double standard when it comes to men and women.
“Expectations placed on women are a lot different from men and boys. People make excuses for boys and young men a lot more often — the `boys will be boys' thing — whereas women are demonized for doing the same things.”
This is especially true when it comes to sexual activity. When her YA novel, Firsts, was published, Flynn made it clear in interviews that such double standards were unfair and that “slut-shaming” was an insidious way of belittling a girl for exercising her right to have sex.
Although her new novel moves in darker waters, the same concerns surface. Flynn bluntly says a teenage boy or a man with multiple partners is far less likely to be ostracized than a female who follows similar behaviour.
Flynn's academic setting is not fictional. Instead, she chose the real-life Wesleyan University, a famous Connecticut institution of Methodist origin that may not take kindly to the book's sweaty depiction of after-hour activities that include group sex and cocaine-snorting.
Flynn is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario, but she needed a campus less large and anonymous.
She wanted a smaller liberal arts school with the kind of “claustrophobic setting” that would serve her need to portray at close quarters a more intimate and dangerous world.
“The more I found out about Wesleyan, the more I felt it had to be set there,” she said.
As for her writing style, Flynn is not one to map out a plot.
“I write and things unfold as I write them. You trust your subconscious and your instincts to tell the story you want to tell.”
And if her subconscious leads her to a very dark place?
“You have to go on that journey with a character to make it feel genuine,” Flynn says. “The challenge is to be able to separate fiction from reality, so when you've done your writing for the day, you're able to click out of it, go back to real life, and leave it behind on the page.”