“Yes. I can almost hear the thoughts of every single girl in my year level. We’re all scared, of almost everything.” (The Gaps)
Leanne Hall is such a star writer. If her debut YA novel, This is Shyness, was her only book, she would still go into the annals of Australian YA literature.
But Leanne has written other wonderful books as well, including Iris and the Tiger – which won the Patricia Wrightson Prize in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
And now she has the incredible The Gaps (Text Publishing), a thought-provoking story about Yin who is abducted and the subsequent impact of this on the girls at her prestigious private school.
Thank you for speaking to PaperbarkWords, Leanne.
The Gaps is a superb title. Could you please give us a hint of its significance?
I chose The Gaps as a title because it’s slippery and capable of holding lots of different meanings. I took my initial inspiration from the alternate ending to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the way my character Natalia holds onto this idea of there being fissures in the world that lost girls can slip through. But I also think about the gaps between people, the way space can open up between previously close friends, or the widening gaps between you and your parents as you grow into teenage-hood. The gaps in our society where some people aren’t as valued as others.
What genre/s is The Gaps?
Oh gosh, I wish I knew! I’ve been marching around telling people: I’m writing a realist novel – there’s absolutely no magic in it at all. I would say it’s a contemporary realist YA novel about a crime, rather than being a crime novel, if that makes sense.
What was the impetus for writing this novel?
Around seven years ago a young woman went missing very close to where I was living at the time. I, along with the whole community, became very invested in her safety. And I also felt irrationally scared to leave the house. It made me reflect on why I was experiencing that level of fear – I couldn’t help but think of my teenage years, when a crime similar to the one in The Gaps happened at my school. And unfortunately, my impetus hasn’t waned, because there have been a series of awful crimes against women in Melbourne over the years that have received a lot of publicity. I think a lot of people are haunted by this fact, that you can be a woman going about your daily business, moving through the world freely, working, socialising, exercising, and have something terrible happen to you.
The novel has taken you a while to write. Is this because you are reading so many wonderful books in your role as a children’s and YA specialist at a bookshop or for other reasons?
I’m quite a slow writer, I think! But I also chose to write Iris and the Tiger and The Gaps at the same time, alternating back and forth between projects. Emotionally The Gaps was a difficult book to write, so it helped me when I could dip into the magical innocence of Iris’s world for a while, before returning to The Gaps. I also think it’s worth saying, that real life just often gets in the way. Trying to maintain a stable financial position, stable relationships, good health, everything! But I DO spend a lot of time reading books for my day job at a bookshop. It’s such a pleasure, I feel very lucky I get to read lots of other people’s stories, and I’m sure it helps me become a better writer anyway.
Why have you used two narrative voices? Could you please introduce your protagonists?
I think I’m quite addicted to presenting different perspectives and narratives. My narrators are Chloe, a scholarship student who is new to Balmoral Ladies College, and who is having trouble finding her people there, and Natalia, who is a much more comfortable and established student. The crime ripples out in the school community and affects everyone. I wanted to show how one crime can affect many girls in a myriad of ways. I originally had three narrators – Petra featured as well – but I took it down to two so I could really delve deep into Chloe and Natalia’s inner worlds. They are very different girls, but still somehow they form a strong connection.
Could you briefly describe the school setting of the novel and explain why you’ve set much of the novel here?
When I think of my teenage years, school was such a dominating force. I mean, it takes up so much time in your life! And your school friends are everything at that age, they’re your world. The school setting did let me explore a lot of things I felt keenly as a teen: academic pressure, fitting in, being squished into a box by adults, trying to find a direction in life, trying to find my voice and individuality.
You include a vignette of Year Seven student Posy which I found fascinating. What is so disturbing about her?
Posy is on the verge of losing her innocence and becoming something more problematic. I guess the implication is she’s about to catapult from sweetness into something closer to where Natalia is at. A lot of changes go on in the high school years, and I often think adults and maybe society like it when girls are cute, soft, helpless, earnest, compliant, and less so when they become loud, big, emotional and opinionated.
Chloe described her mum at a school meeting: “the rich blondes huddled on one side of the room and the rich Asians on the other side, and she hadn’t fit into either group.”
How important are Chloe and Yin’s racial backgrounds to the story?
I think they’re pretty important, especially to me, as I didn’t get to read about people with families similar to mine when I was a teenager. Actually, I still don’t get to consume many stories that deal with biracial characters in a deep and meaningful way! I guess, tangentially, because of how Chloe and Natalia experience being in the world as individuals, and how their friendship develops, issues of power, race and privilege bubble to the surface quite regularly. I tried to make it true to how young people experience the world. It’s a shock when you realise that who you are means you are operating under restrictions, assumptions and prejudices, just as it’s a shock when you realise your friends are being held back as well, often for different reasons from your own.
You have created a strong atmosphere of suspense. How have you crafted this?
I read a lot about crimes against women, even though it was difficult to read the details. I studied the facts of many cases of disappearances, kidnappings, assault and homicide, over time. I wanted to know as much as possible about all the different ways that events can unfold when someone goes missing. And then I drafted and re-drafted. I changed the course of events so many times, moved around the timeline and perspectives over and over again until it felt like the pace was right. It’s a hard thing to do on your own, so I was lucky to have some thoughtful early readers and a very switched-on editor to help me build the suspense.
Art is a feature of your novels. Why does art flow through your books? Could you outline some of the art styles you incorporate, particularly in The Gaps?
I am not skilled or talented at all when it comes to art, but I have been a long-term appreciator of the visual arts. I often rely on visual tools to feel inspired, to spark a certain mood or atmosphere. The photographers or artists that Chloe comes across are ones that I also admire, especially Bill Henson. Basically I was trying to capture the mood of a Bill Henson photograph in book form. Another photographer that was really important to me was Atong Atem. When I describe Adut’s work in The Gaps, I am thinking of Atem. Chloe’s journey in exploring art and photography stood in for some of my own experiences trying to write creatively.
Why have you alluded to Picnic at Hanging Rock and Grimm’s fairytales?
They both contain darkness and lost girls. Places you shouldn’t go. Repressed feelings. I read a lot of fairytales as a child and I think they sank deep into my subconscious, so that they inform all my storytelling. And Picnic is such an iconic Australian book, it’s still on high school reading lists to this day, and I find it such an intriguing story, but not an unproblematic one.
The cover of The Gaps reflects its contents and mood perfectly. What do you particularly appreciate about the cover?
I love the cover! I had a colour palette in mind when writing The Gaps, and it was very bruised and purply and shadowy, so it’s amazing that Imogen Stubbs designed a cover exactly like that.
What advice would you give girls and young women to keep them safe?
I don’t really have any advice about this – the lives of girls and young women are so broad and varied, it’s so hard to generalise. I wanted to make sure in The Gaps that at least Chloe was aware that it wasn’t always about being female, that in fact danger lies in being anyone that isn’t a cis, het, white, economically advantaged man. Lots of different sorts of people feel unsafe on the streets and in their homes.
What are you writing now or next?
I’m writing a YA and a middle grade at the same time again! Or at least, alternating between them. The YA is a historical fiction set in Melbourne’s Chinese-Australian community during WWII (called The Celestials), and the middle grade is a fantasy novel called Little Heart, which spun out of a short story I wrote over a decade ago.
What have you read recently that you would like to recommend?
I have just finished reading The Boy from the Mish by Gary Lonesborough, which has everything I love in a YA book – it’s a coming of age tale with such sweetness and honesty – and Girl of the Southern Sea by Michelle Kadarusman, a middle grade story set in Indonesia, with just the best protagonist, a young girl with grit and imagination.
How would you prefer your readers contact you?
I’m probably easiest to contact on Twitter! I’m not terribly good or prolific on any other forms of social media.
Thank you for your enlightening and generous responses, Leanne. As well as receiving critical acclaim, The Gaps will no doubt become a favourite of many young readers.
My review in the Weekend Australian April 16, 2021
The Gap, Tiger Daughter and When We Are Invisible harness a powerful anger in our girls
THE GAPS
By Leanne Hall
Text Publishing, 368pp, $19.99
TIGER DAUGHTER
By Rebecca Lim
Allen & Unwin, 224pp, $16.99
WHEN WE ARE INVISIBLE
By Claire Zorn
UQP, 315pp, $19.99
Joy Lawn
Mirroring the furore of young women frightened, threatened and controlled by predatory, or even unaware males, three new novels for teens highlight these issues to claim female safety and empowerment. Each novel has a young female protagonist, two are Asian-Australians, and each balances the violent male character with an empathetic, gentle young man or female ally. Two are Own Voices works by Asian-Australian writers.
Leanne Hall is a Chinese-Australian author, renowned for her outstanding novel This is Shyness. Her new book, The Gaps, may well be the best Australian YA of 2021.
Gaps may be multifaceted and can allow the imagination to wander. In literature and the arts, a gap is what is not referred to, or what is missing. Gaps can be as significant as the content and characters that are overtly visible.
Who is missing in this story?
Asian-Australian Yin has disappeared. She is the second girl from prestigious Balmoral Ladies College to be taken from their home. Her schoolmates react differently but all are fearful, caught in the limbo of not knowing what has happened to Yin and how they may be at risk themselves.
New scholarship girl, biracial Chloe is almost uncool enough to be cool. She muses that she might “hear the thoughts of every single girl in my year level. We’re all scared, of almost everything.” Chloe knows that others may find her too big and too quiet. She is finding her voice through art: experimenting with light and mood in photography and mixed media to portray missing women. She draws on the work of Bill Henson, Aboriginal photographer Tracey Moffatt, Ai Weiwei, Hannah Höch and a South-Sudanese character, Adut (a reimagining of Atong Atem).
Chloe photographs Natalia from the popular “Blondes” group as an otherworldly victim in a tableau that suggests a Grimm’s fairytale or crime scene. The work is subtle yet unsettling and shocking.
Natalia is a contrasting, and sometimes misleading, dual narrator. She has the face of an angel, which others think masks a devil. She searches for the novel Picnic at Hanging Rock when it is abruptly removed from their English reading list because of its analogous lost girls.
In both literature and life females may become invisible or trapped in liminal, in-between places. Like Yin they fall through cracks, holes and gaps in their ordinary lives. Hall has crafted a deep, disturbing tale, perfectly composed and paced, and styled like the atmospheric works of art she emulates.
The girls eventually realise that their lives are valuable and that they have control about how they show themselves to the world. Natalia articulates, “I’ve been thinking about not wasting my life,” … how we have to make it count. Maybe that’s how we win.”
When young teen Wen Zhou is stalked by two men at night in Tiger Daughter by author and lawyer Rebecca Lim, she is caught between fear and rage. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and has been given a boy’s name because “it’s bad to have daughters”. Her controlling, violent father tells her she is not good enough.
She helps her friend, smart, neglected Henry Xiao, with his English and he reciprocates in Maths. Their teacher has encouraged them to apply for scholarships at a selective school. When Henry’s depressed mother suicides, Wen forces her own submissive mother to deliver food to Henry and his father.
Much of the story then becomes Wen’s observations of her mother, who speaks four languages but “scurries” and is diminished by her husband’s unreasonable expectations. She tells Wen, “We are all sad … Some of us just hide it better.” Wen could become like her mother but, instead, they find joy in their shared subterfuge, speak out and take control of their lives.
Tiger Daughter is told with authenticity and gives insight into the lives of some Asian-Australian families to elicit understanding, empathy and solidarity. It is full of rage and could be bleak but symbols of comets, wings and flight show that escape and infinite possibilities, particularly through education, can lie ahead. Wen and Henry are urged to never give up and that their “difference is important”.
Claire Zorn’s young adult novels have won prestigious literary awards. Her new book, When We Are Invisible, is the sequel to The Sky So Heavy, her dystopian debut set in a nuclear winter. The first book was narrated by Fin. The second continues the story of Fin, Max and Lucy’s escape from Sydney to a bush compound from Asian-Australian Lucy’s feminist perspective.
18-year-old Lucy is haunted by her own act of violence to save Fin. This scene plays on a recurring loop in her head. As a small female she feels she has few defences apart from her tough demeanour, quick wit and arsenal of jokes, as well as a large horse to ride. She knows teenage girls may lack power and are likely to be sexually and otherwise harassed. She doesn’t feel safe. “I’m sick of being on guard, not just since the winter but from years before. From the years of being a girl. It’s like one brick on top of another until, before you notice it’s happened, there’s a great wall between what you want to be and what you feel you have to be. I want to go walking outside at night.”
Jaxon has control of the compound. He is charming but manipulates and intimidates women with his aggressive male energy and dominating body language. Lucy suggests that Jaxon is not a monster, “He’s a human who knows his actions are invisible.”
Fin loves and tries to protect Lucy and his brother Max. He is allocated male gender roles of hunting and security while, until her courage and riding ability are recognised, Lucy is sent to the laundry and kitchen.
Zorn brings relief from the weighty emotions of life under threat with superb comic timing through Lucy’s deadpan comments and descriptions of her 1970s hand-me-down clothes, as well as hints of recovery and survival. The thawing snow and approach of Spring are symbols of the hope and change that also reflect Lucy’s growing strength.
These books are bursting with anger. They warn females to be aware, find ways to speak out, protect themselves and seek safety if threatened. They acknowledge that there are good men, as well as bad, but advocate that women eschew victimhood and thrive.
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