A while ago now, I fell deeply in love with the Before series of films: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013) starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, directed by Richard Linklater.
If you haven’t seen them, the films follow the spark and evolution of a relationship between a couple - Jesse and Celine - who meet on a train (in Sunrise) and decide to spend a night in Vienna walking and talking the night away. They meet again in Paris after 9 years apart (in Sunset), and then, (in Midnight) we pick up with them 9 years later on holiday in Greece after they’ve had two children together. The actors and the characters age in real time, and the films were an amazing collaboration between the actors and the director, with the actors helping to write their own dialogue. And dialogue is what the films are really about - hours of conversations between Jesse and Celine about life and love, time, self-discovery, age, loss, and parenting as the couple gets to know and love each other.
The films largely break the “show don’t tell rule”, and yet remain - to me, and thousands of others - hugely interesting, all those conversations brimming with subtext and crackling with attraction, vulnerability and emotion. Humour too.
Here’s a link for you to get a taste of all three films. I thoroughly recommend you watch them if you haven’t already.
So what has the Before trilogy got to do with Closest Kept? Well, when I set out to write a novel about the shifting relationships between two couples, I had the kind of subtext and emotions of those long conversations between Jesse and Celine in my mind. I wanted to try and see if, here and there, I could create something similar - to allow the reader to really get an insight into the dynamic between the friends and lovers as well as to get to know the individual characters. I was unsure, when I started working with a developmental editor, whether these long scenes of dialogue would make it into the finished novel, or whether I’d be asked to cut them down.
So much about the novel deepened and changed during the developmental editing process - it was a painful, but extremely worthwhile experience which I’ve spoken about before. The novel is certainly very much stronger than it was before all the changes. But, hurrah, those two long scenes of conversations between Lily, Inga, Matt and Alex that were so close to my heart survived pretty much intact.
You can read them - and the rest of the novel - from publication day on 6th May.
