Bublitz, now 46, moved to Melbourne when she was 18, where she stayed until her early 40s. After spending a decade working at recruitment company Seek, she decided in 2015 to quit and move to New York.
Leave the Girls Behind
“I had grand plans of going and writing the novel while I was there,” she says. “I’d never had time, which seemed to me the one thing that was preventing me from writing anything. And it turns out, it’s not time, it’s a whole bunch of things combined.”
Describing that time as her “method era”, Bublitz wandered around New York, at times loving it, feeling like she was in a movie, and at others, feeling extreme loneliness.
Thankfully, at a certain point, the characters came to her, fully formed. “It is this miraculous thing that I’d heard other writers talk about, where Alice Lee just pretty much came and sat down next to me. I was in a little studio apartment in New York and she was just there, and I just knew who she was. I knew her name, I knew where she’d come from, and I knew her voice straight away. What I didn’t know was that I was going to tell the story from her perspective – that took me a little bit longer,” she says.
As an aspiring writer, Bublitz had been researching the craft. She recalls one tip that said, “If you want to kill your book, have a dead narrator – nobody wants to read that”.
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“I knew that didn’t feel right,” she says. “[Because] no one was waiting for it, I was able to discard that advice without consequence, and the only thing I was losing was time and my savings, which weren’t going to last long anyway.”
Turns out, people do indeed read books with a dead girl’s narration. Before You Knew My Name has sold 150,000 copies in Australasia and won a swag of awards, including general fiction book of the year in the Australian Book Industry Awards and best debut in the Sisters in Crime Davitt Awards.
Reviewing it in The Observer, Michael Robotham wrote: “It has been labelled a crime novel but it is so much more – weaving feminism, philosophy, romance, politics and domestic abuse … It has echoes of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones.”
Growing up, Bublitz had a vivid imagination. “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve entertained myself with telling stories and constant conversations in my head … sometimes I would just invent people and set them off on adventures and listen to what they had to say. I definitely was a kid who was considered odd at times.”
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Even as a child, she was aware of victim blaming. The murder of 21-year-old Grace Millane on a Tinder date in New Zealand infuriates her, along with the media’s preoccupation with Millane having gone home alone with a stranger. Of course she did, says Bublitz, and she should have been able to assume she was safe. It’s an idea that informs both her novels. Her second, Leave the Girls Behind, was published in October.
“It’s all grounded in reality, even though it’s heightened reality because obviously, my characters are going through things that are … a larger version of life than hopefully most of us ever do.”
Currently working on her third book – she calls it a trinity rather than a trilogy – Bublitz sounds genuinely amazed by her success. “[It’s] something that I conceptually understand, the sales figures and the awards, but it’s still something I feel quite distant from,” she says.
“I’m not sure if that’s a character flaw in me. Occasionally, I’ll have a moment where I realise, holy shit, this is really like the dream’s come true, but most of the time, I’m just a little bit confused about how it happened.”
Leave the Girls Behind (Allen & Unwin) is out now.
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