The market has been unfair to Rebecca Barrow. I’ve said it, I’ll keep saying it. I’ll fight you in the parking lot about it. We debuted the same year, her with a contemporary novel, YOU DON’T KNOW ME, BUT I KNOW YOU. It received a starred review from that bitch Kirkus, who said “[Barrow] steadily resists cliché and tired tropes all the way to the novel’s deeply felt, unflinching conclusion. This compelling, closely observed debut charts its appealing characters’ difficult journey with clarity and honesty.” And she’s only continued to turn out books that live up to that kind of praise. Books that nobody seems to talk about. I want to hear more about them dammit!
Her newest book is a thriller, AND DON’T LOOK BACK. I started reading it this spring, right around the time I wrote the essay YOU ARE ALL SO FUCKING BORING and it was like an oasis in the desert. Within the first few pages, I was like thank god, this has a voice! It is not boring in the least! I felt like I could finally relax in the capable hands of a talented storyteller.
Let me also just fangirl about her in general. Her style is always envious. Her Instagram makes me feel like she’s my friend that says the real shit and I suddenly realize life is kind of absurd and it’s okay. It’s refreshing and the work is excellent. I need more of this industry to pay attention! Someone alert the tik-tok girlies!
(While building this, for some reason no indie bookstore websites were loading for me so I used Amazon as placeholders to ensure there would be buy links, so if I can’t make it back here to change them out, consider finding an indie to buy from!)
Lemon: What I always want to know, because I'm a nosy bitch about logistics, is how you write. I feel like you've been a full-time student the last few years and that's definitely creatively draining. What does writing look like for you? What are the privileges and sacrifices that make it work?
Rebecca: I wish I could explain how I make it work. I actually don’t know because it actually doesn’t work and I live beyond my means with no real plans for the future. So I guess that’s how it works! Actually, no, I’m very lucky to have a safety net which is my parents. I know that I could move back in with them at the drop of a hat, like I did only a couple years ago, when I had a complete breakdown! Life’s so fun etc. But I have no one depending on me and no real responsibilities outside of myself so that’s a huge pressure others deal with that I just don’t have to.
I remember before I went to university I told another writer about it and they were like “it’s going to be really hard” and I was like “I’m sure it will be fine” but it was actually really hard? What the fuck? It’s not so much about time to write, because I was a humanities student and had minimal contact hours, but holy shit I didn’t have the brain space a lot of the time. I really regret not, like, socialising more but I always had deadlines on my mind. Like I couldn’t go to a lot of those introductory get-to-know-people things because I had to run off somewhere to finish the draft that was due in a week, or copyedits, or the proposal for my next book that I need to sell so I can continue living beyond my means!!! And of course when you’re a student, the university thinks that’s all you’re doing—as if people aren’t having to work at the same time because hello, this is life. I’m just glad to be out from under it all and free to once again only have book deadlines, not essay deadlines.
Lemon: We debuted the same year, in 2017, and the industry has changed so much since then. Yet, you've continued to publish and sort of carve out space for yourself in this industry. How do you feel about your career? How has your publishing experience been?
Rebecca: I feel bad about my career but doesn’t everyone? I wish I was more successful. I wish more people paid attention to me (we are all looking for validation, right?) I feel frustrated that I’m writing better books now but it feels even harder to get anyone to pay attention to them. I hate that I earnestly wish for someone to make my book go viral on tiktok because blowing up somehow on social media (which is really just another form of word-of-mouth marketing but all of publishing has apparently agreed to pretend it’s something New and Different) seems to be the only way to achieve success if you don’t have a publisher doing The Big Deal Thing behind you. I enjoy the idea that to other people it looks like I’ve carved out my own space and I wish it were intentional but I think it has just been a series of lucky breaks. I don’t love ascribing too much to luck because I think as authors we are encouraged to downplay our achievements and spout this line of “I’m so lucky just to be here” but I do also understand how timing and other elements play into things. Would I have gotten the Archie book I wrote if my first agent hadn’t left the industry and so I was at a different agency who fielded that request? Shit like that, you know?
I find the industry itself to be utterly exhausting. I am a different person to the one who debuted in 2017 and was so excited and thought I was about to be this STAR! I thought people were going to LOVE my first book because I had written exactly what people were asking for! It was Important! LOVE ME! Now I understand you can never give the industry what it wants, because publishing does not know what it wants. Or it wants you, but a little bit different—it wants your book, but a little bit happier, or twistier, or more complicated, or less complicated, or can you add a romance, or another character that people can relate more to, or take out some of the more depressing parts, or actually milk the depressing parts for everything you can get?
Lemon: I have a whole essay in me somewhere about gaining perspective on that debut hopeful feeling of “I’m going to be a star!”. What has been your high/low moment in writing (actual writing or publishing, doesn't matter).
Rebecca: My high publishing moment absolutely has to be getting that email that my first book sold. There is no feeling that has even touched that. Which is so depressing, because it’s all downhill from there! I don’t mean to be, like, self-deprecating and negative but very genuinely, that’s the last moment before you get thrown into Published Author land and learn how shitty things can be. Every good moment after that has never felt like a good moment, but a relieving one—like I’ve been trying to claw my way up from being a disappointment since my first book released and now anything good that happens is more of an “okay, I got a good review, this will show my publisher I’m not a waste of space” feeling. “Thank god they bought another book, now I can keep living my life for another year or two.”
My low moment is like, every book release. Or maybe the runup to it, when I start to realise that all the little dreams and hopes I had are not happening—no book club pick, no starred reviews, no IndieNext and on and on. Sometimes those things have happened for me! Very grateful etc that they have happened! But in general I set my hopes too high every time and then I have to deal with the internal fallout. I feel like this a very self pitying low moment and also I’m really bitter so here are a couple of external ones: when my first publisher didn’t want to buy my option book because of “soft sales” but they dragged the process out for months anyway. When this IP book that was supposed to happen suddenly wasn’t happening and I had really made some big life choices based on it happening lmao don’t do things like that!!
Just to prove I can be positive a high actual writing moment is this verse novel I wrote that I think is really special and I wrote it for no reason so it belongs just to me still! Mine!
Lemon: AND DON'T LOOK BACK (and really, all your work) has such a strong, distinct voice. It's also a great thriller. What made you want to write a thriller and how do you cultivate or have confidence in that voice, especially in the era of an aesthetic novel?
Rebecca: I always loved reading thrillers but I genuinely thought I couldn’t write like that. Even when I first started working on BAD THINGS HAPPEN HERE which is I guess my first thriller, even though it’s more a mystery than a thriller but whatever, marketing—when I first came up with it, it was a contemporary with a little bit of a mystery plot. Then it became more and more mystery and then I became a very spiteful being and started being like “I’m writing whatever I want, fine, you don’t like my nice girls then I will write some not-nice girls” and they keep getting less and less nice. Those verse girls, they are the worst. Anyway, I also have this thing where I can’t write things that don’t feel right or authentic to me (unless someone is paying me to write IP because that’s a different game). I don’t think it is the smartest thing right now to be writing thrillers—I think we are probably swinging out of that and into other trends, but I didn’t start writing thrillers for the trend so I’m just going to stay here. I kind of put myself in the “I write thrillers” category in the way Kara Thomas and Stephanie Kuehn write thrillers—because we like it, because we want to, not because publishing wants it. This is just me saying I really want to be like Kara Thomas and Stephanie Kuehn, actually.
Lemon: Back in 2018, you talked about how you were able to publish in the US, despite being a UK author, because of the US publishing push for diversity where the UK publishing scene has really fallen down on cultivating diverse art. Has that changed at all for you in the last several years?
Rebecca: I think it has gotten better in the UK, but I don’t know any statistics off the top of my head. But I think there has been a conscious push and there are a lot of newer publishers and awards and all those sorts of things that are very consciously cultivating a more diverse arena. BAD THINGS was my first book to get a UK publisher, but when we first went on sub with it in 2019 it got nothing but kind of harsh rejections. It was only two years later when it actually sold but I think those two years represented a lot of change. Of course how much can publishing really change if it continues to be centred in the most expensive cities on the planet with low salaries etc etc. But we can hope.
Lemon: We don't know each other like that, but our parasocial relationship over the last fiveish years has left me with a lot of respect--for your work, for your mindset, for your style! When people think of radical, I think they imagine people who are very loud, very in your face, and to me, I think you're one of the most radical authors in the YA space. You're just doing it. How do you do this? This may be more of a comment than a question please feel free to riff on the subject I want to know!
Rebecca: I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time, is the honest answer. I want to do the work I want to do, and nothing but that. I don’t want to be on social media trying to cultivate an author brand. I want to post a selfie from the beach for the four people I know will like it. I really struggle with living my life for myself versus for everyone else in existence who I think are watching me and judging me at every moment, even when I am ALONE. I used to try really hard to make my life look really good on social media and I used to really use it to make myself feel better, which only works for a minute or two. I want to be nice to other people but only because I actually like them and think they’re nice, too, not because I think they are an important person in publishing and being friendly with them would make other people think I’m important. Is any of this making any sense? I used to post all the time when I felt like shit so that I could get some sweet engagement and tell myself that meant I was worth something. I used to mine my own struggles for content because I thought if I wrote about it in a newsletter, then someone else would go “wow she is so brave and honest and special” and tell everyone else about it and then everyone would clap for me. But I don’t want people to read or buy my books because they feel bad for me, or even because they like me—I want them to read my books because the writing is good and that’s enough. I feel now that I have this focus: I know what I want to write, I know how I want to write it, and I want to put any energy I have into making things, not into making other things in order to promote the thing I actually care about.
Lemon: Honestly, that whole answer just inspired and encouraged me. Thank you.
We both love Kacey Musgraves, and you're the only person who truly understood and enabled me into purchasing that limited edition slow burn cigarette lighter that still sits on my shelf, lol. What's your favorite Kacey song?
Rebecca: Nothing delights me more than knowing we both have that lighter, I feel very justified in my pursuit of silly trinkets. Of course I am that person who cannot pick a single favourite, so: It Is What It Is, and Slow Burn, and Dime Store Cowgirl, and There Is A Light and also her version of Mama’s Broken Heart that you can only listen to via youtube or the shitty video you took when you saw it live, if you were lucky enough.
Lemon: Usually I ask people about their trash tastes, but you are very open about your love for fun trash in your newsletter, Bimbo Watch, so I'm going to go a different route and ask what your most pretentious tastes.
Rebecca: Oh it’s ABSOLUTELY me and film noir, me and Hollywood history, me and femme fatales. Honestly is there anything more pretentious than being like “well I really think Scarface (1932) is far superior to Pacino’s Scarface”? No, but I will say it, and I’m also right.
Lemon: On Death Row, what's your last meal?
Rebecca: Has to be fish and chips. Actually I would pick a battered sausage over fish but then again I am dying so why not both?
Lemon: What are some of your hobbies outside of writing?
Rebecca: I like to crochet sometimes, embroider sometimes, play a lot of old games on my switch, and mostly just lie horizontal and scroll tiktok until I pass out!!
Buy AND DON’T LOOK BACK here, it comes out tomorrow!