by Betty-Jo Tilley
Trust Her is Flynn Berry’s sequel to Northern Spy, the riveting story of Tessa Daly, who is unwittingly drawn into a centuries old conflict when she learns her beloved sister Marian has been an IRA terrorist for seven years. Northern Spy ends with the sisters having faked their own deaths and relocated to Dublin with the help of Belfast police.
In the opening pages of Trust Her, Tessa and Marian are beginning to feel life getting back to normal. With new identities and new jobs, at least in daylight, they now worry mainly about their kids -- Tessa’s four-year-old Finn and Marian’s baby Saoirse -- but only in the way most mothers do. Until Tessa is rear-ended and abducted on an afternoon drive for a swim. She is shackled, interrogated, and threatened with the murder of her cousins in the north. She knows she should have seen this coming, but dwelling on it won’t get her out of the fine mess she’s in.
Betty-Jo Tilley spoke with Berry for Kelp about choice and consequence, class rivalry, and colonialism. Berry shared her obsession with Irish slang and culture, the universal lure of family secrets, and the strength and fragility of trust. They talked about the shame and satisfaction of motherhood, and why women make such bloody damned good spies.
[KELP JOURNAL] Being born, raised, and educated in the U.S. isn’t your typical training ground for a novelist whose work is set in the U.K. and Ireland. How did your fascination with all things Irish come about? And has it changed since you first started basing stories there?
[FLYNN BERRY] Maybe it’s my Irish ancestry? Or just that I really love the landscape of Ireland, the greenery, the cliffs, the water, the caves. I’m also really drawn to the kind of dictionary of modern Irish and Northern Irish and the way people speak, the phrases they use, and the humor, and I find a real poetry in that. I think what changed over time was when I first started writing, I was worried if I would be able to get the accent right, and the little things, the brand of formula you might buy, or what you might order from a menu for breakfast.
[KJ] The atmospheric intensity of your scenes, and the lyricism of your landscapes really convey a love of Ireland. As you researched, what else inspired you? And what surprised you?
[FB] Hmm, well, I think as a reader, I read a lot for landscape and atmosphere. So it's something that I care about quite a bit when I'm working on a book. I went to Dublin and Belfast, and I spoke with a counterterrorism police officer and former IRA members, and security journalists and producers at the BBC, and really kind of lived in my characters’ shoes for that time, and had very long conversations with people affected by sectarian violence in some way or another. One thing that continues to amaze me about being a researcher is that if you e-mail someone out of the blue and you say something along the lines of, I think your job is really interesting and really complicated and I want to be sure that I get it right, it’s astonishing how many people will give you access to their day-to-day kind of rhythm, and what it's like to be at the Irish Parliament, or a detective in Belfast. That was a joy, to feel they were giving me such a different perspective on what I was writing about, (and) an incredible amount of texture that I wouldn't have otherwise known.
[KJ] Aside from page-turning suspense, Trust Her is actually a deep dive into Irish slang. My favorite is “Christ on a bike.”
[FB] Yes, there are so many I really love. “Catch yourself on,” which means get ahold of yourself, or you’re being ridiculous, and, “you've lost the run of yourself,” which sort of means the same thing, like you've lost track of reason.
[FB] I didn't set out to write a sequel. I started about seven other projects, and the characters kept kind of morphing into Tessa, or matching her in some way. I also felt this yearning for her, her voice, and her world. It felt like a breakup before I was ready to say goodbye. Normally when you finish a book, you're kind of ready, and there’s a release, like you are no longer telling the story. I kept waiting for that to happen and it kept not happening. So just to get it out my system, I wrote a scene where Tessa was driving through a wheat field and there's a collision. And then I wanted to find out what she would do next, and where she would go. I kept writing, and I wanted this story to have its own fully satisfying narrative arc that you could encounter without having to read the first book. It also was fun to draw in things that happened in the first book, or complicate situations or characters that occurred and twist them (to) reveal something new.
[KJ] When a police detective interrogates Tessa about her sister, he asks, “Do you trust her?” You’re exploring the tension between trust and betrayal here, right? And how well, or not, we can ever know the people we love?
[FB] I think especially in a sibling relationship, (when) you’re not living in the same house anymore, it feels like there are kind of hinterlands of that person's experience that you’re not privy to, and you won't necessarily know, even if you are very close. I was curious about, especially for someone who has been involved in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, what does it mean to go from living your life on this kind of razor's edge, where you’re fighting for freedom, you’re fighting colonialism, you have these comrades in arms. Obviously, that's the romantic version of it, and it could also be tedious, or unpleasant. But your life had a clear purpose if you were in an active service unit. And what is it like to return from a conflict? Whether a journalist, or someone victimized doing it, or someone active in the conflict itself? That felt like it had a lot of potential for the story and for the Narrative.
[KJ] You get lots of digs in about class distinction and feminism, and the shame women sometimes feel about career vs motherhood, that one has to choose between the two or do neither well. How deliberate is this?
[FB] I think it all tends to come from the character. When I think about Tessa, she is someone very aware of inequality and unfairness, and bullying, and that is true on a plot level when she's faced with someone like an IRA leader, or a bully of a police officer. It’s also true for her living in a city like Dublin, where there's a sense of powerlessness that you can't build a home for a family unless you're making quite a bit of money. So if she could make the rent, and why she can never buy a house, and how expensive milk has gotten, all felt like things she would be worrying about.
[KJ] I love that your very strong female characters are also vulnerable, and your super smart women sometimes make really poor choices, particularly when it comes to lovers!
[FB] Yeah, I love the sense that you can be logical in some aspects of your life and then you will be completely foolish in other ways and that is true from watching my friends, and everyone I've grown up alongside. It’s interesting to see how kind of heedless people can be when they are infatuated, and I find that exciting as a writer to explore those moments when someone is kind of, against their better judgment, beginning to have feelings for someone else.
[KJ] When Tessa pulls out the underwire from her bra, we know she’ll use it as a weapon if she has to. Both Northern Spy and Trust Her have terrifically exciting and uniquely feminine espionage moves. Do women make better spies than men?
[FB] I think there’s kind of an invisibility that mothers have. I read a news article a few years ago about MI5, the security spy service in the UK, trying actively to recruit on a forum for moms. And the responses within the community were hilarious because there's all these women talking about how they could rob a bank, and if they had a stroller, nobody would notice them. I never want to sensationalize violence, or make it, I'm not sure how to describe it, cartoonish I guess, but at the same time, my characters often get cornered in a way, and then I'm sort of sitting back and watching if they're going to talk their way, or fight their way out, and it feels sort of like it's up to them how they get out of the situation that I have kind of cruelly put them in.
[KJ] Is it intentional that your characters are so often in conflict with their “normal” lives, with day-to-day activities upended by disruptions, even chaos?
[FB] I like stories where there's quite a bit of ordinary domestic life. I like reading other people’s to do lists. If someone left their shopping list in the cart at the grocery store, I’m really drawn to think who they were planning for based on what they were buying. The kind of invisible moments at home with small kids, or the fact that someone might be living this very high stakes life as an informer, or trying to subvert the IRA, but still has to go to work, or book a dentist appointment, or take the trash out at night, and all of those ordinary responsibilities don't disappear to make way for the drama. As an adult myself, something that constantly surprises me, (is) that there is never a kind of pause around the crisis in which you are left free to deal with it, right? And so that feels like something I need to kind of work out in writing.
[KJ] The characters in all your novels spend a lot of time discovering and unraveling family secrets. Is this an obsession of yours?
[FB] I think any family, if you go back far enough, will have revelations in store, and those can be big, and very dramatic. Or they can be minor, but still enough to shift whatever perception you had.
[KJ] You’ve shared that you write your first draft in longhand. And you use some very particular tools that keep you in the story as you write?
[FB] I recommend to anyone to try writing in longhand, because it does kind of get rid of whatever part of you thinks your writing has to be perfect, that it has to be polished right away. Which I think if I'm typing in a draft.
[FB] (laughs) Nooooooooooo. Because if I smell it, it's a memento from that particular time of writing the book.
[KJ] In appreciation of writers who helped you when you were working on your first book, you recently posted a very generous offer to read first chapters. When I saw I was one of almost 70 responses, I thought, “She’ll never do this again!”
[FB] (laughs) I sort of did it on a whim. I posted on Instagram that I would read anyone's first chapter who wanted to send it to me, who wanted feedback. My friends were like, it's the Internet, you will get people who are not kind, and this is something you should protect yourself from, which hadn't occurred to me. But then every single phone call was wonderful, and it was really energizing to be talking to all these writers and to have that camaraderie because everyone had the same kind of questions over and over again that they were grappling with, and it made me feel connected, and that felt really joyful and kind of galvanizing, and fun. So yeah, I would love to do it again.
[FB] Yeah, I think a lot of times when you're starting off, it's hard to give yourself permission to take it seriously, to find the time, and to think that it will ever become anything. And one thing that I think about a lot is that, for the vast majority of the time people are writing books, they're hoping someone will buy it at the end of the day, and that's true whether it's your first book or you know, your fifth.
[FB] I would like to give what I read for myself, which tends to be a kind of camaraderie and companionship, that there’s something I can connect with, and with characters’ thoughts that I've had, that I didn't know other people have. When I've had moments of extreme difficulty in my life, I've always wanted to read. There's something about being able to turn to the book and know that you can enter this world, and experience something new, or wait while the things around you are resolving themselves.
[FB] I am working on a novel set in the UK. And I think that's all I can say about it right now, because I haven't even told my editor anything else. I like to keep an idea really close, until I have finished the first draft and then I can open it up and get feedback.
[FB] (laughs) The songs! I was kind of listening to playlists while I was writing, and then one would come on, and I’d think, oh yes! This is the mood for this scene! It was a good moment.
FLYNN BERRY has written four thrillers in eight years. Her Under the Harrow, the Edgar Award winning best first novel by an American, explores a woman confronted by her sister’s grisly murder, and the shocking secrets that emerge as the crime unfolds. The most notorious unsolved murder in British royal history inspired Berry’s A Double Life, about a daughter’s obsession with her accused father’s disappearance, and secrets discovered decades later. Berry’s Northern Spy was named one of the top ten thrillers of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post. A Reese’s Book Club selection, it has been optioned for film by Netflix. Berry is a Michener Center for Writers graduate and a recipient of a Yaddo fellowship. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages.
BETTY-JO TILLEY met Flynn Berry in 2018, in a monthly book club facilitated at the time by Berry. When Northern Spy was published in 2021, Tilley conducted her first author interview for Coachella Review. She loves Flynn Berry’s writing, though as a result, feels both compelled and afraid to visit Ireland. This is her third interview for Kelp. She graduated in June 2023 from the University of California at Riverside’s Low Residency MFA Program in creative writing, fiction and nonfiction. She is also an essayist and is working on her first novel, a marital noir.
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