Cassie McCullough

Teenage me, I think I was very boring.

And then I I opened Nights at the Circus and it just Sophie Fevers sitting after, you know, talking to the journalist.

She just sprung off the page, you know, just how she she soars.

She takes up space that she is just so physically sort of almost grotesque, but present.

I realised just how fun that.

reading could be.

And so that really was a wonderful text, as well as the fact that, you know, it explores themes which I sort of touch on in the book as well, you know, the idea of illusion and truth, where the whole book, you know, is about this journalist Walser's, his attempt to kind of pin down whether she really was birthed from an egg and is a Cockney virgin, or if this is just something which she has fabricated.

And so I really love that it plays with the idea of, yeah, truth and falsehood.

I would say that there was an incredible book, which I came across, by Amanda LeDuc called Disfigured on Fairy Tales, Disability and Making Space.

Obviously, you know, I was as an able-bodied person.

I was writing about, you know, people with disabilities and disfigurements.

And I was really extremely keen that the novel that I told and the representation of Nell was as...

you know, that someone who had a disability or a disfigurement felt adequately represented by her, and that I wasn't writing a harmful narrative out of ignorance, which just really would have been the absolute worst possible thing and was, you know, the thing which really kept me up at night.

But her book is absolutely magnificent.

It looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, and it shows how they influence our expectations and behaviour and

She has cerebral palsy, I should add, and she includes her own medical notes and her experience growing up surrounded by stories about able-bodied princesses and how that impacted her own opinion of herself and how others received her as well.

I really cannot express just how much I learned from this book.

really realizing the importance of stories and how damaging they can be and how damaging they continue to be.

And, you know, in Circus of Wonders, I introduced, as I say, a storytelling element where even Nell, she reads lots of fairy tales.

And at the beginning, they kind of trouble her, the sense of, you know, the little mermaid who has her tail chopped off or Hans, my hedgehog, who is magically transformed.