Hypertext Magazine asked Sara Davis, author of The Scapegoat, “What was your favorite part of this book to write?”
By Sara Davis
My favorite parts of the book from a writing perspective (and also a reading perspective probably) are definitely the ones that describe the book that the protagonist is reading, which is a Swedish detective novel/Nordic Noir-type situation. I love books where a character is reading a book; I just find it very endearing for some reason. Also, the main character of my novel is a pretty unlikeable guy, an unpleasant loner who tends towards misogyny and violence, so it was nice to give him some time to just be cozy and curl up with a book—there is a scene where he reads his book in bed while eating some stale gingersnaps that he found in his cabinet which I really enjoyed writing; I definitely find it relatable and hope that readers will too. Snacks are very important to me and I think that as an activity it’s really hard to beat lying down, eating a snack, and reading a good book.
It took me around eight years to write this book and it had a really different plot at the beginning (I probably threw away 95% of what I wrote in the first two years) but the detective novel that the character is reading has always been there and some of the lines about him reading it have survived since 2011 when I started it.
It’s also kind of an inside joke to myself, because I love reading detective novels (Nordic and non-Nordic; I love Dorothy Sayers, Tana French, and Hazel Holt (who wrote this really great “cozy mystery” series about an amateur sleuth named Mrs. Mallory)) and always wish I could write one myself. However, whenever I start writing one I feel like the plot hits a dead-end really quickly and I can’t quite bring myself to write scenes of say, an autopsy, or to try and capture the way that policemen or people investigating a crime actually talk; I lose interest in recreating these things in a realistic way.
At the same time, it’s a genre that’s so close to my heart, and I feel like the readership for mystery is very dedicated and also attuned to the conventions of the genre, so it was really fun for me to play around with different things that are so familiar to mystery readers (the detective who is divorced, the lull in the action before the killer is revealed.) Writing my actual novel was so extremely difficult, but the book-within-a-book was a joy and respite. Chapter Two ends with the narrator getting into bed and reading his mystery, and the sentence that describes it is probably my favorite line in the book: “It seems that every detective novel I read now features this policeman, whose nationality varies, but who is dependably bitter and divorced, opera his soul’s only worldly solace.”
Sara Davis, the daughter of two Stanford immunologists, grew up in Palo Alto, California, and received her BA and MFA at Columbia University. She has taught creative writing in New York City and Detroit. She has been awarded residencies from Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Ragdale. She lives in Shanghai, China.