Cassie McCullough

You know, this is an incredibly important part of disability history.

And it felt like, as you say, Queen Victoria was this huge fan.

She was known as the freak fancier.

And yet, over time, we've sort of viewed this kind of Victorian sort of focus on commercialisation of people as sort of distasteful.

And so it's kind of been lost to time and it's been eroded.

And so I felt like it was an incredibly important part of history that it was important to tell people

both sides of it, whether that was the empowerment that we might know more from The Greatest Showman, which focuses on sort of the more glamorous side of things.

But that to me was far from the complete story.

And so I felt like it was important to balance it with, yeah, an account of the exploitation too.

But as I kind of, I suppose I worked through all of these

Questions and Doubts, it became a book about storytelling, which I suppose sort of appropriation is almost uniquely suited to the circus.

The question of appropriation, the question of who tells whose story, because showmen spun all sorts of fanciful narratives about their stories.

performers you know whether that was you know someone was hatched from an egg or someone was a leopard girl or someone you know someone with ectrodactyly um which is where their fingers are fused you know where they were known as lobster people because their mother fainted at this exceptionally large catch of the day or something like that so there are just so many narratives um all the time being spun about people within you know within this performing arena and so

Yeah, as I say, it became a book about who tells Nell's story and how she feels to have her story kind of taken away from her to be reinvented as Nell, the Queen of the Moon and Stars.

Yes.

So I have an extreme fondness for the characters within the circus, particularly Stella.

And I suppose the book became really a celebration of female friendship.

And all of the performers, you know, they have different routes into this circus.

And they also have different responses to it, because I wanted to kind of show the range of

how different people would have responded in different ways.