"When I wrote this book, when I wrote "The Girl who Drink the Moon"
I was thinking a lot about the problem of false narrative and, and the way in which
we can use stories to pull people together, or we can use stories to drive people apart.
You see this happening sort of again and again in human history.
I didn't I did not know when I wrote the book that it would become so very relevant now.
First of all, I one of the things that we all need to do when when we are given a narrative for
how things, how something happened right? Is to be able to step back and analyze.
Who's telling the story? What's being what's being added and what's being left out?
And one of the things that I tell kids is because they've all had this experience,
I tell them, you know, imagine imagine the time when you're in the kitchen, and
you're in the kitchen with a brother or sister, and the the pitcher of lemonade
gets knocked onto the floor, and your mother walks in and she sees the facts right?
She sees the pitcher on the floor. She sees lemonade everywhere. She sees it's really sticky.
She sees two kids and she says, "What did you do" to you.
And she blames you, and she could what has done what she has
done is that she has created a narrative. So first, second, third.
First you did some terrible thing, and now the the pitchers on the ground.
And and her narrative is justified by the facts that she sees. That narrative may be true or may be false.
And of course, I tell kids this and they're like, "Oh my gosh that happened to me just four days ago."
And so I think that that is a that is an experience that a lot of us have
in which we have all been, we've all fallen prey to being cast in the, as the villain
in a in a narrative that may not be actually true, or at least it may not be the whole truth, right?
And so I think I think that one of the things that I tried to do with this book is I
tried to show that these narratives about this witch in the woods
they're all based on true facts, right. And the facts as they as they understand them.
But all of them have had a narrative that casts those facts into a Sinister light.
And and if if they can see that happening in real time,
to be able to see how the narrative is telling them one thing,
but they already know that this other thing is true, then then perhaps that can help
then that can help my readers to have that same kind of skepticism and that same kind of
push back on a dominant narrative. Like is that is that really how those facts are?
Is that really the light that these are are in? Or is there is there another side
to this three-dimensional object that I need to I need to go around the entire thing
to be able to understand the story as it actually happened. Not just as it's being told to me.
That is something that I wrestle with a little bit in the book as well,
because in the in the character of Zan, you know, Zan has her own false narrative as well, right?
You know that she goes and she rescues babies in the woods, and why are the babies
left in the woods reasons, right? And she does not push on that, and so she is actually also
guilty, and she comes to realize that as well. That that her that she comes
that she comes to realize her own culpability. That I mean how many, you know,
decades and centuries of terrible sorrow and misery that she did have the
the power to circumvent and to end, but but didn't because she couldn't
see beyond the limits of the narrative that she was telling herself, right?
And so I mean even the you know, the the "good character" she's limited to, and
even the good character by is is also guilty of the sin of omission.
We're guilty not only of what we do, but what we fail to do as well. And she failed.
So I think that that none of us are, none of us get to sort of like pat ourselves
on the back too much, because all of us have our blind spots, and
all of us have just the stuff that we don't see."