Cassie McCullough

It's called The Beautiful Fall and an older classic and much loved book by Jessica Anderson, Tirralira by the River.

So I'm Kate Evans.

I'm Cassie McCullough.

See you next time.

This is an ABC podcast.

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

It's a real treat, even though I am halfway across the world.

At the outset, I wanted to centre Nell, and she is a girl whose body is speckled with birthmarks.

And she lives in the small village that you alluded to, picking violets.

And for her, you know, it's quite a contradiction.

On the one hand, she feels this safety in this village that knows her and this fear of what's outside it.

But she also has this sort of secret longing for a bigger life, a more expansive life that she can't really acknowledge to herself.

So

It was really important to me that she was the protagonist of the novel.

But I actually began writing from her perspective.

But as the story developed, it became too about Jasper the showman and his brother Toby.

Yeah, it was quite fascinating.

I just felt like those perspectives were really important to, you know, the sense of power and ownership, which you find in this fascinating, spectacular circus world that I felt like I couldn't quite achieve just with Nell's perspective, even though she is the centre of the book.

Yes, it did.

When I was researching the novel, there were just so many cases of exploitation and the sense of people being treated like commodities or objects, as well as, of course, empowerment, which I'm sure we'll talk about later.