Pictures: Rossella Laeng, The Virtue.
When Jacqueline Bublitz’s debut novel Before You Knew My Name hit the shelves in 2021, it was the perfect read for a nation immersed in Covid lockdowns. It was also a surprise – the award-winning international bestseller placing Jacqueline as one of our top authors.
“I’m in the most privileged position,” says Jacqueline, 47, who has just released her second novel. “I love my job. I love what I get to do.
“How could I have anticipated this because it’s bonkers. It’s actually madness that this happened,” she laughs.
Completing her second novel, Leave the Girls Behind, has required that Jacqueline work full-time as a writer, something she never thought would happen.
“There’s a line in the musical Wicked, which I reference in the book. It also happens to be coming out as a movie roughly at the same time as my book. Glinda, the good witch, who has all of her dreams come true, says, ‘It is, I admit, the tiniest bit unlike I anticipated.’ I tell myself that all the time because how could I have ever anticipated this life?”
Leave the Girls Behind is another taut suspense thriller with the main character, Ruth-Ann Baker, searching for a serial killer. Her search takes her into citizen detective online rooms and travelling from New York to New Zealand.
To research the book, Jacqueline signed up to many of the online chat rooms attempting to solve crimes around the world, which was scary but also exhilarating for her.
“There’s all sorts of theories about why women in particular love true crime. I think we like to face our deepest fears and realise that we’re okay on the other side of it,” she explains.
“I have also always had a latent desire to be a detective like Laura Holt in Remington Steele. As an eight-year-old, I had the hat that she wears. A few years ago, before all this took off, I looked into getting a private eye licence.”
Jacqueline ignored the fact that she can’t drive.
“It’s fine, I’d just be the bicycle detective!” she says. “So now I just do it in my fantasy world and when I’m writing books.”
Jacqueline has just returned from a writer’s retreat in Greece on the island of Patmos. The retreat had Wild author and podcast host Cheryl Strayed as one of the tutors.
“It was such a spontaneous thing,” she recalls. “I was already flying into New York to go to Cape Cod to research my third book. Then I saw that Cheryl would be at this retreat and I remembered reading her book Tiny Beautiful Things when I was in New York in 2015. I would go to Central Park, read it and weep over the mess of my life.
“I thought, ‘What are the chances that it lines up with the non-refundable flight that I’ve got to New York,’ and it lined up so perfectly. It gave me two days to get from New York to Athens to the ferry out to Patmos.”
Jacqueline filled out the application form, got accepted and felt the whole thing was very much meant to happen.
Over 11 days, Jacqueline learned a lot about writing but also about discipline.
“We would have a salon with somebody like Cheryl and they would talk to us about craft. Then they would set us some prompts to choose from and we’d have a small amount of time to write. In my case though, it was a panicked amount of time,” says Jacqueline.
“Then they would go around and tap a few people on the shoulder to stand up and read it out aloud to the whole group. About 95 percent would want to share and I’d be in the five percent that would be like, ‘I need to sit on this.’ Actually, I can’t even read my own handwriting!”
She says the retreat made her more disciplined, which helps in her line of work, especially as she will soon be needing to deliver drafts of her third book.
“I also needed to get away for a little bit to do a reset,” she tells. “There were lots of sprints to get Leave the Girls Behind ready. I actually ended up doing the final edits while I was on Patmos because unlike my last book, I had the UK, US, Australia and New Zealand all coming out simultaneously, so I had to check the edits for all three versions.”
Jacqueline is well into her third novel but has another project in mind – to write a musical.
“That’s so far down the track but when I do that musical, all aspects of my life will come together. I will be the happiest person ever.”
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