Author Nadia Mikail on the writing of her wonderful second novel, A Flood of Memories . . .
It’s super hard to follow your first book up. This is something everyone told me. My first book, The Cats We Meet Along the Way, was written rushed and claustrophobic, missing my family during the first COVID quarantine; fear of the uncertain future spurred me to finish the whole thing in two weeks and send it into Guppy Books’ Open Submissions competition for unagented writers. I was longlisted, shortlisted, published (!!!), and Cats did better than I expected with readers, seeming to strike a chord that reminded them of home.
I wrote another draft soon after Cats came out, a contemplative magical realist bildungsroman. That one underwent a couple of revisions and never came out quite right, so my editor Bella Pearson and I shelved it. Then I graduated uni and went out into the wide cold working world, trying my best to find a job and a visa in a job market that couldn’t have felt less welcoming. I wrote a romcom about a boyband, which I was proud of but ultimately decided to shelve for the time being for fear of censorship back home.
A Flood of Memories
I sat for my Solicitors Qualification Exams, sobbing every second and assuring everyone I was going to fail it. I wrote a new draft while waiting for results – feeling pretty uninspired but like I needed to publish something – that never went far, the worry in real life spiking into the draft and making it feel just as aimless. I passed my exams. Through the joy that spring, the memory came back to me, one slow hour before sunset, a rare occasion when it was raining heavily. Not what I have come to know as grey fake rain–the wind catching you up miserably in it–but real rain, like during monsoon season in Malaysia, thunder roaring and the sky absolutely pouring, leaving you soaking and gasping in it.
It was a vivid, sensory memory. In it I was eight and watching the river slowly burst its banks and curiously come for the kampung. When you’re eight, things that happen to you still feel so big, even though you’re feeling much older now, much older than all those tiny seven year olds in the class below. Things feel so big, and the river comes for you and you have no idea what’s going to happen – to your house, to your fractured family, to your future. The feeling of rain in my hair, seeing that brown water rise… I wrote the first scene of A Flood of Memories based on that memory. I wrote the rest around it. When I sent it to Bella, she said this was my next book.
Just – Keep – Writing
I don’t have any lessons learned from this, no special advice I feel qualified to impart. Sometimes writing something good is just hard and takes years and the sudden right draft can come to you through luck and if you just – keep – writing.
And even when I was writing Flood I was still struggling: this time not what I was going to publish next, but how to handle the heavy themes in the book. Flood is about a girl coming back home to confront her painful past and how it’s affected her much more than she realises. It deals with topics like abuse, alcoholism, grief, and anxiety. So I felt like I wanted to be so careful about every sentence. I wanted to handle the themes with kid gloves and make sure they were written about as responsibly as possible for readers.
Authenticity
When I first started writing it, I made sure every sentence was as distant from the trauma that happened to my protagonist as possible. I made sure her memories were indirect and framed in abstract language. I overdid it to the point that Bella pointed out that my protagonist felt so far removed from her own story that a reader would have trouble knowing what it was even about. She was right.
I went away and worked on it as authentically as I could, even when at times I had to painfully scrabble to unearth aching memories of my own. In the final manuscript I can honestly say I have trusted the reader to take on a set of complex truths about the realities of abuse and trauma, and have enough empathy and intelligence to know that they can all be true at the same time.
I was in uni when Cats came out. I am four years older now and working a grown-up 9 to 5 and paying rent. I’m a real-life lawyer! I have one more cat. I miss my sister just as much as I did in university. I have gotten older and not much wiser and I know some parts of my writing career are going to be just as hard as the process leading up to the second book was, but I look forward to them because it’ll mean I am still writing, that I can keep writing. What can I say? Those who write will know what I mean when I say: sometimes it feels like it’s all we can do.
(c) Nadia Mikail
About A Flood of Memories by Nadia Mikail:
It’s raining in Sarawak, Malaysia – a lot – and Leila, now living in Kuala Lumpar, must go home to help her Mak before the floods become serious. But she hasn’t been home since the death of her father – and she’s not quite ready to confront what’s waiting for her there. Life with Pak was complicated.
But Arthur is in Sarawak, the boy she’s thought about ever since they first met at school – Arthur, who offers her support, care and love, but at a cost perhaps too great for Leila.
As the floodwaters rise and her family and home become threatened, can Leila confront the enormity of her own past in order to move forwards properly in her present? A beguiling and meaningful novel which explores the fine line between care and control, between love and abuse in families, and shows that it is possible to move on to a brighter future.
Order your copy of A Flood of Memories online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
