Over the years these stories went through multiple iterations, and I eventually decided to connect them by making the diplomat’s wife of “Hati-Hati” an adult version of the backpacking preteen in “Malta” and “Women and Children First”, who is basically a fictionalisation of my 11-year-old self. Meanwhile, I was procrastinating from another project by playing around with ideas about girls and young women in Perth – a location that seemed more and more surreal, after Melbourne’s lockdowns made travelling back there an impossibility.

In 2022, after I was finally able to return to WA, these writings crystallised into West Girls. I devoted the rest of the year to filling in the gaps. It was a wonderful year, as I finally left the call centre job that supported me through my first three books and just wrote (and enjoyed life without a headset) for six months. 

I had my doubts that West Girls was even a book until it became a typeset PDF with cover art and a looming publication date. As a novelist who typically works to a plan, this kind of piecemeal, disorderly writing felt almost illegitimate to me. Instead of bursting into tears when I completed the manuscript, I sort of just sent it off to my editor with a shrug, like, “here, see if this seems like a book to you”. It was a strangely impersonal ending to a project that, in many ways, is super-personal.

If anything,West Girls has shown me that I don’t have a formula. Every book is its own beast. Every fragment has the potential to become something greater. The process [of writing] is still full of surprises.