“I’d had what I thought was pretty good success. I really felt wow, now I know why old people are grumpy, because I felt like I in a way never had more to give and never more to offer, and nobody wanted it.<\/p>\n
“It was proper heart break. I had to go to a therapist and say why is this happening to me? And she rather helpfully said what an idiot I was expecting the world to be a fair place, so I should get over that to begin wit. Not helpful – but not bad advice.”<\/p>\n
Lynch was forced to unpick her own expectation that she would have more agency over when she would stop working. <\/p>\n
“Also I didn’t know what to do with myself – I’ve been a writer since I was 18, so I just didn’t know what to do. My fingers are used to typing and my brain is used to thinking that way.”<\/p>\n
At the same time, friends in their early 60s were going through similar experiences in other professions, she says.<\/p>\n
“It’s not really the letting go that counts, it’s the moving on from there. I’d been let go from jobs before, but I was younger and so I just went out and got another job. But it’s a horrible shock to be let go from something and then find out that well, there’s no place for you out there in the world anymore.<\/p>\n
“I felt sidelined from my own life, and part of my anger was that ‘well, somebody should have asked me if that was okay, because I would have said no’.”<\/p>\n
That feeling of heartbreak changed to rage: “I thought ‘well, you know what, I can write a book’ and I don’t care if nobody wants it, but I can do it.”<\/p>\n
The resolve was oddly freeing, she says. It was the first time she set out to write a book without a publisher, and all of the expectations and direction that go along with that.<\/p>\n
“And with the rage actually came a point of view, so it ended up being helpful.”<\/p>\n
The novel’s lead character Detective Sergeant Claudia Russo is not a people pleaser. She’s spiky and difficult, and Lynch says she brings to mind the well-known saying that: \u2018It’s not actually very hard to be considered a difficult woman, that’s why there’s so many of us\u2019.<\/p>\n
“She is a detective, so she doesn’t have my exact experience – but that feeling of life not being fair and wanting to do something about it definitely comes straight from me.<\/p>\n
“I guess that being sidelined made me feel like I didn’t have a voice. So that was what I was trying to get back, and trying to give it to Claudia by saying ‘well, this isn’t right, and I want to do something about it\u2019.”<\/p>\n
Russo is searching for an 18-year-old girl missing in Melbourne, the daughter of a former prominent All Black who has been living a double life.<\/p>\n
But the initial scenario was inspired by a real life road rage incident that Lynch experienced in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
In 2021, living in Melbourne – a city wired tightly amid Covid-19 lockdowns, Lynch’s husband had just picked her up after a stay of several days in hospital.<\/p>\n
“I was in a very strange frame of mind\u2026 I felt very fragile… and a guy in a high vis vest driving like a flatdeck ute-type thing with road cones in the back pulled out without looking, and so we almost collided and we both got stuck on the median strip on the road.”<\/p>\n
The driver gave them the fingers and mouthed a curse at them, Lynch says, and as her husband checked the car for damage, she went over.<\/p>\n
“I got out of the car in a very calm for some reason frame of mind, and I went over to his window and I said ‘of all the things in the world you could have done then, why did you have to do that, with the fingers?\u2019 Which was bizarre in itself.”<\/p>\n
In that moment, she says she read in his face that he “didn’t want to be that guy”, he was embarrassed and felt cornered by the situation.<\/p>\n
“And I saw all this in his eyes, and I said to him ‘well maybe next time you can do something different, like be kind’. And then I went and got back in the car and off we drove.”<\/p>\n
It left her mulling the what ifs, what those words and that moment could lead to for both parties. “What if what I said to him actually had an impact on him, and made him improve his life? And what if the person that he collided with, what if it had an impact on their life, but in the opposite direction?”<\/p>\n
That question, and thoughts about rage, toxicity, and women\u2019s agency, were the fuel for her story, Lynch says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I’d had what I thought was pretty good success. I really felt wow, now I know why old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":626936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-626935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/626936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}