Facing her fears

Ruth Ware explores the “what if ” of a wrongful conviction

Novelist Ruth Ware writes books that are rife with flawed characters who make for complicated portraits. The murderer and even the victim in her new thriller, The It Girl, are not the nicest people. But not the worst either.

“I’m not super interested in people who are complete saints,” the British author tells the Connection during a Zoom interview. “They’re not very interesting people if someone always does the right thing, and I’m equally not very interested in people who are completely beyond redemption. I’m fundamentally interested in the people in the middle who could be nudged one way or another, as most of us can, and could choose to be a better person than they are, but sometimes choose not to be or make mistakes or act in ways that are less than ideal. I think that’s more true to the way most of us are.”

The It Girl focuses on the aftermath of a murder at Oxford University. Ten years after the death of her upper-crust roommate, April Clarke-Cliveden, at the hands of John Neville, a middle-aged school porter, Hannah de Chastaigne (née Jones) is experiencing doubts about her own testimony that put him away. After Neville’s death, a reporter starts poking around, leading Hannah to wonder if she made a mistake. The book alternates between present-day circumstances and her college life a decade earlier, prior to April’s death.

“My books generally come from some sort of fear or phobia,” explains Ware. “Some sort of ‘what if’ that makes me feel very uncomfortable or gives me chills. The ‘what if’ at the heart of this book [is] Hannah has given evidence against the guy she is convinced killed her friend. Then, 10 years later, she starts to think she was wrong. That’s the crux of the book—it’s her need to find out whether she has made an absolutely horrific mistake.”

Although she became a published author in her mid-30s, Ware had been writing book-length tales since her teenage years that she rarely showed anyone. She studied English at Manchester University, and later worked as a publicist and in the publishing world. After becoming a married mother of two, she realized she needed to take a chance, find an agent and get published. Further, the extra income would allow her to afford child care. Her gamble paid off : The It Girl is her seventh thriller since 2015. She also created the free role-playing murder-mystery game The Detective Club Murder, which can be played in person or virtually. (Fun fact: Ware previously authored five young-adult novels as Ruth Warburton.)

When asked if The It Girl turned out the way she envisioned it, Ware invokes a quote from author Sadie Jones. “She gave this great quote that I always come back to when I’m talking about [one’s] vision versus what ends up on the page,” says Ware. “She said in your head it’s a cathedral, and then in the first draft of the page it’s like a garden shed. That sounds very self-deprecating. I don’t mean it to be that way. I don’t think my books are garden sheds. I think there’s always more in your head than you can possibly ever get onto the page. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.”

---

---