Writing in first-person multi-narrative

A number of years ago, the friend of a friend killed themselves. Even though I’d never met the person who died, their death had a huge impact on my life.

My friend chose me as the person to lean on, to share this bad news with. But as they started to process what had happened and move on from the event, I found myself lagging behind, unable to do the same.

It made me realise that something doesn’t have to be at the centre of your life to affect you: that you can be thrown of guard by something because you interpret it differently from everyone else.

I wondered if, as someone who had faced their own mortality, and who struggled with being alive after the fact, I felt I could relate more closely to someone willing to end their life.

And it is this connection with people we don’t know or events that have nothing to do with us that I’ve tried to capture in my writing.

In The Second Cup, although it’s Faye’s ex-boyfriend who is dead, it’s actually Beth who struggles the hardest with the news. Why? Because his death mirrors a recurring nightmare she used to have.

On one level, Beth can’t help but feel that he’s “stolen” her death — and so feels bereft. She’s also aware that it could have so easily have been her. The only way to capture her inner turmoil was going to be to write from a first-person perspective.

But to highlight how different Beth’s reaction was compared to her friends — including Faye whose ex-boyfriend it was who died — I realised I needed to write the other chapters from the perspectives of the other characters.

I hope the multi-narrative approach helps those who have never suffered from any mental health issues understand what it’s like to not be able to trust your own mind.

As well being told from the point of view of different characters, my novel also has different threads and ideas that weave in and out of the main plot. The idea behind this approach was to increase the feeling of being unsettled in the reader.

A suicide is not an easy event to recover from and I wanted to make sure the book echoed some of that discomfort. By my own admission, The Second Cup is not an easy read.

But it’s not easy on purpose.