The Heart of All of Us: A Guest Post by Evie Wyld
A ghost haunts his girlfriend’s apartment and pieces together the secrets of their fraught relationship in this sharp and tender novel from the author of All the Birds, Singing. Read on for an exclusive essay from Evie Wyld on writing The Echoes.
Hardcover $28.00
The Echoes: A Novel
The Echoes: A Novel
By Evie Wyld
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.00
From the award-winning novelist, a ravishing new novel set between London and rural Australia, both a love story and a ghost story
From the award-winning novelist, a ravishing new novel set between London and rural Australia, both a love story and a ghost story
Writing The Echoes started in the first couple of weeks of lockdown in the UK. Something about being forced to slow down, stay in the same space with the same person, felt to me emblematic of what it would be like to haunt a place. My husband and I used to live in a top floor flat in London, which was about two hundred years old, and was haunted by a ghost neither of us believed in but both experienced. We heard things, we saw things, we felt things. We even had dreams in which foul smells would wake us up. The atmosphere in that flat was hard to live with, and we’d just had a baby which perhaps explains everything (including the smells). Unlike in horror movies where the woman says to the man, ‘Our home is haunted and we have to leave,’ and the man calls her a mad woman and insists they stay, my husband and I were in agreement and we left, moved in with my mother, and immediately were free of the feelings we’d been having there. We put the property on the market and I went back often to take photographs – I was convinced that when I looked at the photographs I would see her there – we knew somehow the ghost was a woman. I knew what she looked like – taller than a person could logically be, stern. But even though I go through those photographs often, I’ve never found her there. Our haunting was something that I really wanted to write about, but in thinking about what a ghost could be the fear bled out of it, and the idea that if the essence of a person was left behind it would be pretty funny if it was all of the annoying things about them. As I said, I started this novel at the beginning of lockdown when my husband was roaming about our new flat playing the banjo while I was trying to write, so it felt quite natural to kill him off in fiction. Something I’m interested in is the truthful portrayal of relationships – what makes a good one or a bad one, I’m fascinated that some readings of The Echoes see Max as a terrible person that Hannah should have left long before he died. I see love and intimate relationships as imperfect things – human beings change and develop constantly and yet one of the things that people are accused of when a relationship ends is that they changed, as though that is a terrible and selfish thing to do, when it is at the heart of all of us.
