The Joys of Binge Reading

This week on The Joys of Binge Reading. Internationally published Kiwi author, Fiona Sussman. And The Doctor’s Wife, a psychological thriller of a close friendship shattered by illness and unexpected death. Nothing in Stan Andino’s unremarkable life could prepare him for the day he discovered his wife in the living room naked except for a black apron, bleaching out of stain in the carpet that only she can see.

Hi there. I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and on Binge Reading today Fiona talks about writing a story where a group of close friends discover the unexpected about themselves and one another after one of them is diagnosed with severe brain cancer.

For Fiona, who was a doctor before becoming a full-time author, it’s her first foray into bringing her experience as a medical practitioner to her fiction.

This week’s Giveaway – win a paperback

And as our Giveaway this week, we’ve got a paperback copy of The Doctor’s Wife, which is a finalist in New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh Mystery Awards to be decided later this month.

Enter the draw to win a copy of The Doctor’s Wife here

https://the-joys-of-binge-reading.ck.page/de8c1c9777

ENTER DRAW TO WIN A COPY OF THE DOCTOR’S WIFE Links to books mentioned in the episode

Ngaio Marsh Mystery Awards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngaio_Marsh_Awards

Ngaio Marsh; https://www.ngaiomarsh.org/ngaio-marsh

Agatha Christie: https://www.agathachristie.com/

Dorothy Sayers: https://www.sayers.org.uk/

Marjorie Allingham: https://www.margeryallinghamcrime.com/biography/

Nadine Gordimer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadine_Gordimer

Athol Fugard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athol_Fugard

Alan Paton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Paton

Geraldine Brooks: https://geraldinebrooks.com/

Kate Greenville: https://kategrenville.com.au/

Elizabeth Strout: https://www.elizabethstrout.com/

Helen Garner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Garner

Graeme Macrae Burnet, This Bloody Project, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Macrae_Burnet

Malla Nunn, A Beautiful Place to Die, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malla_Nunn

Fiona Kidman, This Mortal Boy, https://fionakidman.com/

And remember if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for friends to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

Introducing Kiwi author Fiona Sussman

You’ll find Fiona at:

Website: www.fionasussman.co.nz

(Fiona has suspended her social media for the time being to focus on her writing)

Fiona Sussman – The Doctor’s Wife – shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Mystery Awards

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Fiona. Hello there, Fiona, and welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you with us.

Fiona Sussman: Hi, Jenny. It’s a real treat to be on the Joys of Binge Reading. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Jenny Wheeler: Now, it is an international show, but you’re just across a few streets from me. it’s wonderful to be able to talk to a local resident today for a change. We’re talking about The Doctor’s Wife, which is your fourth novel. Often crime novels – and this is categorized as a crime novel, although it’s really, as you’ve said, a domestic thriller – it doesn’t start with a death or a murder or a crime exactly.

It starts with simmering tension between normal middle class couple and then quickly followed by a husband coming home and finding his wife doing something very unusual.

She is naked except for a black apron. She’s madly scrubbing at the carpet at an invisible stain that nobody but her can see.

And this is a very dramatic way to introduce the fact that this woman is suffering from a serious illness. Tell us about the opening.

A tense dinner quickly escalates

Fiona Sussman: Yes, Jenny. I guess I was very mindful of the fact that this was a domestic thriller I was writing, so I wanted to escalate the tension fairly early on. The book does open in a regular setting for friends out to dinner that I think many readers will be able to identify with.

There are just hints of possibly all not being quite right. Stan has noticed a few changes in his wife of late, but his friend Austin in private reassures him that in fact, these are probably just likely due to his wife going through menopause. And so the readers fears are possibly allayed at that point.

And then we see Stan arriving home the following day, to this frightening, somewhat terrifying scene, his wife completely naked, acting in this rather bizarre way, scrubbing, bleaching the lounge carpet.

And his whole world tips on its axis, really. What I was really wanting to convey was the terror of finding someone you think, you know really well doing something inexplicable that you don’t really have a reason, reason for why they’re doing it.

And, this, in many ways, ushers in a theme that runs throughout the book of characters behaving in ways that you don’t expect them to. And Carmen’s cancer is, yes, I guess is what you would normally find would be the body in the opening scene. This is a frightening scene, but in a different way.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and she is diagnosed quite soon after that with brain cancer. You’ve said that it was partly inspired by a fascination that you have with how changes in the brain can affect identity.

And certainly this diagnosis – I know that not all diagnosis of brain cancer will result in this kind of series of events – but it certainly does set the tone for a lot of the action that happens afterwards.

Tell us a bit about that fascination with brain and identity.

Examining personal fears in writing

Fiona Sussman: Jenny, I think, reflecting back, often one looks as to what the genesis of a story is, because obviously one’s subconscious works in the background and I think that this novel grew out of a fear or sort of preoccupation I have with losing my own mind. I do have quite a bad memory.

I think I’ve over the time found myself taking that story to its completion. I’ve always been aware of how the brain houses the very essence of who we are and that, physically a person’s body may undergo quite significant change.

Someone might have a limb amputated or they may have their gallbladder removed or be burnt in a fire.

And yes, that would impact on and traumatize them, but the very essence, their personality would largely remain unchanged.

Whereas the converse is that someone may look identical for all intents and purposes, but some sort of disease process within the brain is actually altering who they are. And so that’s a fascination I have had over the years.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. I read somewhere that you consider this to be in a sense, your first crime novel, but you won an award with your second book. The Last Time We Spoke in the Ngaio Marsh Mystery Awards in New Zealand, which are coming up again in another six weeks as we speak.

The Doctor’s Wife is a shortlisted for the awards again this year, but you won that a couple of years ago. And I just wondered how you see in your mind the difference between a mystery and a crime novel.

The Last Time We Spoke – an award winner

Fiona Sussman: Yes. I think, initially when my earlier book, The Last Time We Spoke, won the Ngaio Marsh, I was delighted, but actually baffled.

I thought, oh, gosh, no, I’ve written a social justice novel. I hadn’t conceived of it as a crime novel. That really was more a measure of my limited understanding of what fell under the banner of crime fiction.

And tas a result of that award, I got invited to go over to Bloody Scotland, which is this incredible crime writing festival held in Stirling.

And it was there that I discovered the amazing breadth of writing that does fall under the genre. You’ve got your cozy murder mysteries and your police procedurals and your psychological thrillers all the way to your more literary crime.

I realized at that point that my book, The Last Time We Spoke fell into the more literary crime aspect of crime fiction, where it was using crime as a prism to really explore issues in society.

I came home so buoyed by the warmth which had been embraced there that I set myself the challenge of writing for myself what I considered a more traditional crime novel.

And so The Doctor’s Wife is… Yes, it’s that domestic thriller. It’s a whodunit. And we have Detective Ramesh Bandara and Hilary Stark who come on board to solve the mystery.

And from that point of view, they both fall under the banner of crime fiction, but are quite different in the approach I had to go about in writing them.

Writing a ‘whodunit’ required change of process

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, and you also have commented that you approached them when you were writing them in quite different ways. Could you expand a little on what that difference was?

Fiona Sussman: Yes. With The Doctor’s Wife being a whodunit, so normally I’m not a planner. I tend to sit down and I something will move me viscerally, and that’s often the emotional impetus for a novel. Then I write into it with a rough sense of where the novel’s going.

But with The Doctor’s Wife, a whodunit, I had to have a very clear sense of who the villain was, and so I had to begin at the end and almost dismantle the story backwards, a bit like reverse engineering to make sure all the clues added up.

There was still flexibility. I found that as my characters filled their skin, they sometimes wanted to take the story in slightly different directions, but I had to be far more structured because this was going to be a whodunit.

Jenny Wheeler: Austin is one of that group of four friends that we’re talking about. He’s a family GP, and at the beginning, he reassures Stan that there’s nothing wrong with his wife. You yourself worked as a GP and this, I gather, is the first book you’ve really allowed that background to infiltrate in any way.

Tell us a bit about that and about the switch from. GP to writing.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Writing about medicine as a former doctor

Fiona Sussman: Yes Jenny, probably first and foremost, I should say, I am a doctor and I am a doctor’s wife, and this is not at all about my life.

But yes, it’s quite interesting because I’ve raised medical issues in my short story writing before, but never in a novel. When I sat down to write The Doctor’s Wife, I had a quiet chuckle to myself because I realized that there was going to be this medical backdrop.

And I thought, oh, at long last, Fiona, you’re tying together these two disparate professions. But for me, what was really satisfying about writing this book was that I could navigate the territory. It was familiar territory.

The jargon and the terminology were familiar, but I think more than it drawing on any specifics of my past work as a GP, it was rather tapping into an understanding of human nature that practicing medicine afforded me.

When people are unwell, they’re often at their most raw and honest. And for me, it was always a huge privilege. I was very humbled to journey alongside people at such a time.

You really are privy to human nature at its most raw. I hope that as I was creating these characters, I was importing that understanding from my medical background, more than anything else.

I did still need to go on and do some research. I had to speak to various specialists, but as I say, it was quite refreshing to be writing something and be able to navigate the territory with ease.

Jenny Wheeler: Do you miss anything about medicine yourself at all?

Medicine gave way to creative urge

Fiona Sussman: Oh, very much. It was a very hard decision when I made the decision to step away from it for a while. I really have come full circle.

In a nutshell, I grew up in a publisher’s home and really fell in love with the written word at a very early age and was all set to do something with words.

I don’t know if I knew I would become a writer, but I had certainly written my first play for Brownies at the age of seven, but then my final year of school, I was all ready to go on and do a Bachelor of Arts.

My father was diagnosed with stomach cancer and we had such a superb GP looking after us. He was just a remarkable human being. And so after I completed my Bachelor of Arts, I thought actually I want to go on and pursue a career in medicine, which I loved really from the day I began studying it.

I am quite a perfectionist and for me it was a vocation really. I had to give it my all. And when we moved to New Zealand and I had a young family… I had completed my medical studies here in New Zealand, but when a young family came along, I felt quite conflicted because I wanted to give my all to being a mom as well as my career.

And at the same time, I had been missing a creative outlet for so long. I’d been reading medical journals, science papers…

And so when my family were young, I decided to take a year out and write a book. And one year became two, and that became 20.

But I have certainly missed medicine very much along the way. I have appeased some of that by helping my husband establish a charitable surgical service, but I haven’t really practiced clinically now for almost 20 years.

Poised, mysterious character with key role

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting just getting back to The Doctor’s Wife. I did notice one thing. There are these four key characters really, apart from the police who also have quite a role in it, but two married couples, Austin and Tibbie and Stan and Carmen. Now, Tibbie is a key character as well.

Every chapter in the book is prefaced by a name and that chapter is mainly just devoted to telling the story in, from the point of view of that character, including the two police officers.

But after I’d finished it, I suddenly realized. Tibbie, who is a key character. I don’t think she’s got any scene herself, does she?

I went back and looked and I couldn’t find one. And then I asked myself, I wondered why you left her silent rather than giving her a voice.

Fiona Sussman: It’s very interesting question, Jenny. Firstly, she actually does have, there is one chapter devoted to her when she arranges the dinner party for Carmen and Stan to come and the young boys are the waiters. And she’s trying to recreate this monthly dinner out when Carmen can’t go out to a restaurant because she’s so unwell.

So there is, but you’re quite right. Compared to all the other characters, she only gets that small chance to give us an insight into the workings of how she views the world.

She is a very poised, contained character. And in fact, we discover over time that she also has held on to some secrets.

There are some people one meets that one can never quite… there’s always a little element of mystery around them and one can never quite know what’s going on in her head.

I wanted people to have a sense of who she was. And we do also realize who she is from how she behaves. Through her interactions with others. But we only do have that sight glimpse into her head in that one chapter.

So yes, you’re quite right.

Ngaio Mystery Awards finalist for second time

Jenny Wheeler: And yes, that is true. There are people who can remain a mystery, even if you get to know them really quite well, they don’t reveal much of themselves. So yeah, that’s very good point.

As we’ve mentioned, The Doctor’s Wife has been shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Awards this year. These have become really well respected, the mystery awards in New Zealand.

You’ve already won it once before. Tell us a bit about Ngaio Marsh for people who have never really heard the name before.

Fiona Sussman: Dame Ngaio Marsh was one of what we call the queen of crime writing. One of the four woman who were amazing crime writers during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. We’re talking about Agatha Christie Dorothy Sayers, and Marjorie Ellingham. Along with Ngaio Marsh. She was one of those wrote in that era.

And I think she wrote in excess of 30 detective novels. She grew up in Christchurch. And so hence the writing award is named after her.

The awards began were the idea of a former lawyer and journalist Craig Sisterson, who currently lives in the UK, and he is a great fan of crime fiction He noticed we had no awards in New Zealand to recognize great crime writing, unlike all around the rest of the world where it’s a genre that is respected and nurtured.

So Craig really took it upon himself in 2010 to launch these awards and he has done just an incredible amount of work in championing New Zealand crime writing.

I think crime writers were often considered the poorer cousin of literary fiction, and he has just done so much to bring New Zealand crime writing to the attention of the rest of the world.

And so the Ngaio Marsh Crime Awards was his baby. It is judged internationally and it has just grown, I believe, from strength to strength.

A social justice novel about home invasion

Jenny Wheeler: The Last Time We Spoke, which was the one that won the award in, was it 2017… you saw it as a social justice novel at the time, but it was based on the idea of a home invasion and it’s long term consequences for everyone involved. And I wondered about the inspiration behind that book.

Did it relate to current affairs in New Zealand at the time? Or how did you get excited about that idea?

Fiona Sussman: Yes. There were a spate of quite brutal home invasions here in the nineties that caught my attention. They were covered relentlessly in the media. Something that stood out was the youth of the perpetrators, some in their early teens. And they’d be covered relentlessly in the media and then often the story would suddenly be dropped – abruptly – to make way for the next sensational bit of news.

And I remember at the time not being able to move on so quickly from each of these stories. I realized that they had left their impact and very early on I had a lot of questions. Like how could someone who’d possibly been a victim of such a crime, maybe lost someone in the crime, how would they go on to navigate a meaningful life there afterwards.

But also, what had happened in a youngster’s life to see them set on a path to murder at the age of 13 or 14,

And very early on, I had these two voices in my head, one of a middle aged farmer’s wife and one of a young gang prospecting teen. The book opens with a very brutal home invasion that sees their worlds collide.

And then we follow in the aftermath. The trajectory of each of their lives until they once again coincide with some surprising consequences.

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Fiona Sussman – Kiwi Domestic Thriller