It felt more electric, more relevant that anything I’d been writing. Then this angry, brutally sarcastic, confined voice came to me in the most random way, when I was drifting to sleep one night, and it was a revelation. I had previously been writing thinly veiled portraits of myself, and that felt uninspired. Where did the idea for Jacob Higgins come from?ĮR The character of Jacob Higgins came to me out of nowhere. JP The mentally unstable American adolescent male is a richly mined vein in literature, but primarily by male authors. I mean, no one I know would set out to hurt someone else, but if you turn a blind eye to some kind of abuse or injustice that’s going on around you, is that just as bad as inflicting it? That’s the question that I wanted to investigate with the end. I think that’s a more ethically troubling place for most of us. But I still wanted to explore the really dark parts of his character-not necessarily his capacity for cruelty, but whether or not he was willing to stand by while someone else did something terrible. He doesn’t actively hope for or revel in other people’s suffering. It’s probably clear from pretty early on that while Jacob is very angry and emotionally bruised, he’s not a sadist. Did you as a writer also feel this conflict? Was there a responsibility to end the book positively?Įmma Rathbone I wanted to end the book in a way that felt true to Jacob. Jack Palmer The central challenge that Jacob seems to face in the novel is that of responsibility versus destruction. Whereas Pierre places Vernon on a grand scale and tackles the ‘big’ questions, the smaller scale of Rathbone’s book means the novel is touching, and ultimately heart-warming. Pierre’s Booker-prize winning Vernon God Little, featuring similarly messed-up teenage boys and their realization of empowerment. The Patterns of Paper Monsters has a similar topic to D.B.C. Jacob has to choose between his impulse for havoc and a burgeoning sense of responsibility. She calms Jacob and stands diametrically opposed to the disturbing influence of David, a sly, broody maniac with fantasies of destruction for the JDC. This ennui is alleviated by the arrival of Andrea, a ‘perfect quivering cupful’ of a girl. The simple story follows Jacob Higgins, convicted of violent crime, to the Midland County Juvenile Detention Center, where instead of fun and frolics, he discovers utter tedium. Some of these are brilliant (a rape victim who comes to talk is ‘a pillaged field with a guest pass’), some a little wayward, much like the character of her adolescent protagonist. Its diaristic, ADHD chapters feature, like, a firestorm of oddly apt teenage similes. In fact, she chooses a character her polar opposite: male, violent and disinterested. Emma Rathbone’s debut novel, The Patterns of Paper Monsters, is not autobiographical.
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