The audacious moment that changed this debut author's life

Sydney Morning Herald

3 days ago

It's the ultimate aspiring novelist's fantasy: a finished manuscript languishes in a desk drawer for years before its author decides, what the hell, I'll give it a crack, sending it out to an agent – and within weeks the book is snapped up, even fought over by different publishers.
If it had happened in a film, you might scoff. But New Zealander Jennifer Trevelyan is living this very dream.
Trevelyan had written several novels, and stuck them all in a drawer while working in other jobs. But eventually, she decided to try her luck with her favourite one. Incredibly, it was not only bought by one of the world's most renowned agents, it became the centre of an international bidding war, and was optioned for a film adaptation before it was even printed.
The 50-year-old started writing the atmospheric A Beautiful Family, part-thriller and part coming-of-age story, a decade ago, fitting in writing before work while her husband and kids slept, sneaking off to a cafe where she would write before heading to her real job.
Trevelyan agrees her overnight success is a fantasy scenario, although 'perhaps not the 10 years part', she says over Zoom from her home in Wellington.
A former wedding photographer, Trevelyan also worked in children's publishing, but it wasn't until she completed a master's of creative writing at Wellington's Victoria University that she decided to revisit her manuscripts.
The draft for what became A Beautiful Family was, she says, the favourite of the pile she's stashed away.
'I couldn't face reading it again,' she says, 'but I knew it was the best thing I had done. I had got to this point where I was just going around and not necessarily improving it. I was just sick of the sight of it. So I thought I would take a step back, a little bit.'
Then she stepped back a lot. 'I intended to put in the drawer for maybe three months, and it's somehow turned into three years.'
Perhaps things might not have panned out the same way had she not waited.
When she decided to try her luck with it, she audaciously sent it to one of the world's most famous literary agents. Felicity Blunt, who works at Curtis Brown in London, is arguably one of the world's most respected literary agents, with a stable of clients that includes Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, Ann Patchett and Jilly Cooper. Blunt is also the sister of actor Emily Blunt, and is also married to actor Stanley Tucci.
Did Trevelyan just reach a point where she thought, why the hell not?
'Absolutely! But also, I don't think I quite realised how clever she was,' she says. 'I knew she had these movie star connections, but I hadn't actually looked at her list and I didn't realise the calibre of some of the people that she represents. I think if I'd known that, I might have been a bit intimidated.'
Blunt had described online what she was looking for in prospective manuscripts, and Trevelyan thought that sounded like the book she'd squirrelled away.
'She was talking about being transported to another place on the other side of the world, and she said she loved Daphne du Maurier - and I love Daphne du Maurier, so I thought, why not?'
Why not indeed. Blunt snapped up A Beautiful Family and there was promptly a bidding war. It was, Trevelyan says, 'mind-blowing'.
Blunt told her to prepare herself for interviews with interested publishers, and Trevelyan worried about what they would ask her, how she should research for these – only to be told that it was she who would be doing the 'interviewing'.
'I sort of freaked out at every step! I think being suddenly put on to the stage and being given the main role in your dream production ... I just got stage fright, I think.'
Told from the perspective of 10-year-old Alix, A Beautiful Family takes place in 1985, over the course of a summer holiday on the Kapiti coast on New Zealand's north island. Alix is at a rented beach house with her family, but both her parents are unusually distracted and her sister Vanessa, now 15, no longer wants to go to the beach with her; she's more interested in partying with older teens and meeting boys.
Then Alix meets Kahu, a boy her own age who tells her about the mystery of a young girl who went missing from the area a couple of years earlier, and whose body has never been found. Their search for the girl's body gives the pair a focus for the long summer days, between swimming and lying on the beach. It also takes Alix's mind off what's going on at home – she's not oblivious to the arguments and silences between her parents. And then there's the creepy man in the beach house behind them.
Trevelyan drew on memories of her own childhood holidays along the same coastline. 'We had big extended family holidays, and it was running around with my cousins,' she says.
And one year, there was even a weird man next door. 'We had a summer where my father booked a very basic beach house and while we still had a great time, it had a sort of slightly funny vibe,' she says. 'I loved it, but there was a house next door that sort of overlooked our one. And there was a man staying there, who was quite creepy.'
That became her starting point.
'He wasn't creepy towards me, but he was towards the older women,' she says. 'He'd be … watching the older women.'
To say much more about the book's creepy character would give away the story's plot.
Trevelyan initially wrote the book from an adult's perspective looking back, but using a 10-year-old's voice offered a different point of view, and way into the story.
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'It did pose some problems – there are some restrictions on areas you can't really go into. For example, I knew I couldn't have a complicated police investigation,' she says. 'But it also created this bubble of just this holiday. And I was trying to capture that thing when you're an adult, and you look back on your childhood, and you … don't know if your memories are true or if you've made them up.'
Imbued with 1980s nostalgia – Walkmans, Split Enz, the type of mobile phone-free childhood boredom that simply doesn't exist any more – and an evocative sense of place, it's not surprising A Beautiful Family was optioned for a film. New Zealand filmmakers Niki Caro (Whale Rider) and Finola Dwyer (Brooklyn) are on board to adapt the novel.
Trevelyan is thrilled, and happy the story won't be transplanted into an American setting. 'The setting was super important to me. I'm so excited to see it.'
She's already working on her next novel, and can now call herself a full-time author, thankful she doesn't have to go back to photographing weddings, a gig she fell into after studying photography.
'I was a bit shy and couldn't really see it panning out, but deep down, I really did want to be a writer.'