Una Mannion: Practically Everything Is a Surprise
Una Mannion was born in Philadelphia and now lives in County Sligo, Ireland. Her debut novel was A Crooked Tree. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Una Mannion
In this post, Una shares how her drafting process leads to several surprises, what tool surprised her when weaving two narratives together, and more.
Name: Una Mannion
Literary agent: Peter Straus, RCW
Book title: Tell Me What I Am
Publisher: Harper Books
Release date: August 15, 2023
Genre/category: Literary Fiction/Literary Crime
Previous titles: A Crooked Tree
Elevator pitch for the book: When Deena Garvey goes missing, her estranged partner gets custody of their daughter, Ruby, and takes her hundreds of miles away from her mother’s family. Despite being told her mother abandoned her, Ruby starts to experience fleeting memories and receives a photograph in the mail, forcing her to question everything she’s been told about her past.
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What prompted you to write this book?
I was reading about missing persons. In many of the cases of missing women and mothers, an estranged partner who has gained full custody of the children is mentioned as a person of interest in the disappearance. It made me wonder who helps those children remember their mothers if they are cut off from the mother’s family. That erasure seemed particularly cruel, taking away the memory.
I also teach a Shakespeare course and the trope of absent mothers recurs in many of the plays. In The Tempest, Prospero raises his daughter Miranda on an isolated island and is obsessed with the story of the past. He constantly tells others to shut up and he will tell them their story. He controls history both in terms of his daughter and also the colonial history of the island through Ariel’s and Caliban’s stories. Shakespeare’s text is, in many ways, about memory, how we remember and how we forget, and the violence of forced forgetting.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I had been thinking about this idea for a long time before I started writing it the summer of 2019. I submitted the final draft with edits to my editor Noah Eaker at Harper Books in early autumn 2022.
For me the writing process is completely about refining, recalibrating, and sometimes reimagining what could happen. I love that it’s not fixed. An element of mystery even for the writer is important.
The most significant change happened towards the end of the book. In earlier drafts I hadn’t shown how the child, now a young woman, had actually acted independently and had some level of agency. Adjusting details towards the resolution made me feel so much happier about her overall character arc; we see her act outside the control of her father. This had to happen.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Both Tell Me What I Am and my first novel, A Crooked Tree, have been described as pacy, psychological thrillers. I was genuinely taken aback when people described my work as genre bending or something between literary fiction and literary thriller. Now I totally embrace the terms.
I like page turners and want to hold the reader with me. I think literary thrillers explore the real drama of mysterious or random experiences but are also literary, trying to make sense of it through language, metaphor, and complex characters.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Because I don’t plot extensively in the first draft, practically everything is a surprise. This book has dual narration: the child Ruby as she is growing up and her Aunt Nessa who she hasn’t seen since her mother disappeared.
Ruby’s narrative is chronological, Nessa’s loops around Ruby’s moving backward and forward in time. This took considerable engineering and by the third draft I was diagramming their scenes using colored Post-Its and planning and plotting to work out what scenes should be juxtaposed. I surprised myself at the intensive structuring. The colored Post-Its were my daughter’s idea and I took up a wall in my house and started moving them around to visually map the shape of the book.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
While there are very dark undercurrents of domestic violence and the coercive control in Tell Me What I Am, I hope that readers will finish this book and feel affirmation about human resilience and how memory persists despite attempts to wipe it.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
I have to remind myself every time I sit at the desk to trust the process, something will come. For me the process is often fraught and full of anxiety. I worry will I ever be able to have an idea or write anything again, but I arrive at the desk and try and something always comes. It might not be very good, but I am in. And part of this is also to remember that first drafts are a clunky mess.
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