The idea for my new novel Missing, came after reading a police advisory about missing people posts on Facebook. It really stuck with me, and I knew I would use it in a book one day. It warned people not to blindly share missing person posts, because they may not be real. I admit I had naively never considered this possibility. This was long before fake news was even a thing, when I think it’s fair to say that most of us believed what we read on Facebook. The warning explained how some of the missing posts, particularly about children, were potentially from an estranged parent who was using the poster as a way of finding out where their child and former partner were living. In a domestic abuse situation where the mother has had to run away from her home and seek refuge, it could expose their whereabouts and prove fatal.
I coupled this situation with a story I’d read in a magazine at the hairdressers (pre-Covid by a few years) about two girls staying in a B&B. One of them woke up in the night to a man standing at the end of their bed! Add to the mix everything that’s been coming out in the last few years via the #MeToo movement, Laura Bates’ book Men Who Hate Women and the shocking case of Emily Hunt, who wrote about her experience in her book, We Need To Talk. All of this informed the story I wanted to create about the shame and silence of victims and that age old question, Why didn’t they come forward sooner?, which I feel is loaded with accusation and lack of understanding of what it’s really like to be traumatised by violence.
Only this week, in the wake of the Brand documentary, a serving army officer came forward on social media to share her experience as a teenager. What happened to her struck me as horribly similar to my main character, Ellie. She said she was posting it to address this very question. She explained how she wasn’t believed by the police or her family and was even blamed for what had happened to her.
This was a hard novel to write in many ways, but I believe fiction is a safe space to explore frightening situations and from the early reviews, this story seems to be resonating with readers.
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Get your copy here: https://mybook.to/missingsocial