Life Complicated by Motion: A Guest Post by Rachel Joyce

Four estranged siblings, one dead father, a mystery that needs solving and a family that needs healing. With these powers combined, The Homemade God is a rewarding read full of hope and human connection. Read on for an exclusive essay from Rachel Joyce on writing The Homemade God.

Many years ago my father died in France and I went with my two sisters to fetch his body home. We found ourselves in a completely different landscape, and I don’t just mean physically. There was endless paperwork to be filed. There was daily queuing at a cash point because for some reason, the funeral company would only accept cash, and none of us could take out more than our daily allowance. There was choosing the coffin in a foreign language – in fact there was everything in a foreign language. (It turns out school French does not cover My Day at the Morgue.) There was the heat – it was incredibly hot that summer. The kind of heat that makes you feel unhinged. But most of all I remember that disjointed, anarchic feeling of nothing being the same. It wasn’t simply the absence of my father that we were coming to terms with. It was the sense that a spoke in the wheel of what we knew had been removed and everything was destabilised. As if my middle sister might want my role as the oldest, or I might become the youngest, or my youngest might reject both of us. Everything I thought that I knew about my sisters was thrown into question, and – as a consequence – everything I knew about myself was too.

We survived that time. We remained close – though curiously we rarely talk about what happened. But it was with these thoughts that I came to write The Homemade God. On one level it is about four adult siblings whose lives are turned upside down when their artist father marries a young woman he barely knows and then drowns in suspicious circumstances in an Italian lake. But on another deeper level, it is an exploration of the complex sibling dynamics that don’t get talked about – those subterranean fractures that exist beneath the surface.

I wrote from the point of view of each of the Kemp siblings as they began to respond to the unfolding events in ways that felt new to them, dangerous and out of bounds. I probed for the differences in their voices and their ways of negotiating with the world. I discovered their hidden grievances. But the character I could never find was the young woman who sets the whole story alight – the new young stepmother. I’d set up a scene in which she was supposed to come for dinner and she simply wouldn’t turn up. My take on her kept fluctuating. Was she a grifter? A porn star? What was her game? I was as in the dark about her as the siblings. And then it dawned on me that this was interesting – like not meeting Rachel in My Cousin Rachel until at least 70 pages in. When a character doesn’t enter the story until half way though, a lot of our opinions have been formed on what we have heard, and on the basis of our own experience and prejudices. She becomes a creation of the reader as much as the writer.

Because ultimately The Homemade God is a story about this kind of projection and double meaning – the myths we tell ourselves, the judgements we make based on patterns that are old and even out of date. It is for this reason that it is set on the shores of one of the least known and most beautiful Italian lakes, Lake Orta, with its waters that are always changing colour, and an island set in the middle like a stone crown. Looking in its waters, the siblings don’t simply see a reflection. They see life complicated by motion, multi-faceted. They finally see the full depths of who they are.