Kate Kemp, author of, The Grapevine, which recently won the Stylist Prize for Feminist Fiction, shares an exclusive interview for our Crime Collective subscribers.
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What inspired you to set The Grapevine in 1979?
The straightforward answer is that I wanted to travel back in time to when I was a child and try to understand what life was like for women then. The more I researched, though, the more I became fascinated by the political and cultural changes taking place in Australia during that period, and how Australia was (and still is) grappling with identity, ownership and belonging. During the 1970s, the Prime Minister was sacked by the Governor General (the British monarchy’s representative in Australia). The White Australia Policy was finally dismantled. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy sat outside Parliament House, drawing media attention to indigenous land rights. Secord-wave feminism gained momentum. I was interested in the relationship between changes at a national level and the attitudes that prevailed on a suburban street. There was also a spell of unusually hot weather in Canberra in 1979, which fitted nicely with the sense of being worn down and wrung out, and gave the characters something else to contend with, poor things.
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Tammy, the 12-year-old protagonist, takes matters into her own hands to investigate the murder. What made you decide to use a child as a central character?
As a 12-year-old, Tammy is on the cusp between childhood and adolescence, moving from primary to secondary school. She encapsulates that sense of being on the verge of change. She’s also at the developmental stage where she’s questioning the beliefs and values she’s picked up from her family, and trying to work out where she fits as an individual. As much as she thinks she’s snooping around the neighbours to look for clues about the murder, she’s also looking to the women on her street for an identity she can claim as her own. There are echoes of Tammy’s character in the other residents. Each of the women has reasons of her own for wanting to reinvent herself. Other characters make assumptions and jump to the wrong conclusions. They wonder if there are spaces they will fit and if they can dare to hope for what they want.
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The novel is filled with tension and suspense. How did you keep that atmosphere building throughout the book?
There’s a big reveal about the murderer in the first chapter, so The Grapevine is not a traditional whodunit. Instead, there is a gradual revealing of why and how the universally-loved Antonio was murdered, as well as the impact of the murder on the small community of residents on Warrah Place. Tension is built around motive, who might be involved, who knows things they’re not letting on, will the murderer get away with it, what if the wrong person gets accused and charged, and whether the community is now safe. I also wanted to build tension around the psychological safety of the characters. For example, are their futures secure or uncertain? Will their relationships endure or crumble? And how much can they trust themselves, let alone each other?
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The novel explores the hidden lives of women—how did you approach portraying those complexities?
I’m curious about how our identities and the choices available to us are constructed socially, and about the way in which our assumptions and prejudices fill in the gaps in what we know about each other and the effect this has. I think a lot about our tendency to coalesce around similarities, thinking we need sameness for belonging rather than acceptance. I wanted to meet the women who live on Warrah Place in the gritty reality of their lives, to tease apart the quagmire of expectations surrounding what it means to be a woman. Things like motherhood and being a wife, reproductive rights, career and purpose, appearances and attractiveness, who you’re allowed to love, how you express your gender identity, what is permissible for girls and women to desire and aspire to be, the myriad of things a woman is expected to do with her time, her energy, her body, her mind. I wanted to say: let’s imagine that it’s possible, for a moment, to peel back those layers of expectation, see them for what they are, and ask women what they want.
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There’s a strong sense of community and secrecy in The Grapevine. How do you think the dynamics of a suburban neighbourhood influence the events of the story?
Gossip features heavily in The Grapevine. Much of the plot is moved along by who speaks to whom, what is said and what is withheld, whose voice gets heard and whose doesn’t, what is overheard, and what is misinterpreted. I’m interested in the ways in which language is generative, not just descriptive. It doesn’t just portray reality, it creates it, including the power structures that infuse all of our relationships and communities. This becomes apparent in who arouses suspicion and who doesn’t among the neighbours. The potency of language is also present in an unlikely friendship between two women from different backgrounds who talk and truly see each other. Their talking opens up spaces for them to occupy that neither previously thought possible.
When I’m plotting a story, I track shifts in dynamics as carefully as I do events, and these two elements continually and recursively feed into each other.
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What are your three favourite crime or thriller novels?
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Little Deaths by Emma Flint
