House of Windows (31 page)

A British-American citizen of Italian heritage, Alexia is an editor, teacher and writing consultant. After studying psychology then educational technology at Cambridge, she moved to New York to work on a Tony award-winning Broadway show before completing a PhD and teaching qualification. In between, she worked as a West End script-critic, box-office manager for a music festival and executive editor of a human rights journal.

The Bone Dragon

How would you say
House of Windows
is different to
The Bone Dragon
?

With
The Bone Dragon
, we are inside Evie’s head: her thoughts and feelings form the core of the book. Places are imbued with interest through being filtered through her eyes and, often, imagination: nothing is ‘fact’ – it is all Evie’s version of the truth. In
House of Windows
, I couldn’t be inside Nick’s head to tell the story because, unlike Evie, he isn’t emotionally articulate: I could make his inner world clearer to the reader from the outside. Using the third person also let me show how different characters bring their own ‘truth’ to a situation that, viewed objectively by the reader, isn’t quite what any of them think it is.

The Bone Dragon
is challenging and demands a lot of readers.
House of Windows
is a gentler book in many ways. It’s a book where hope and happiness are sometimes simple and heart-warming: in
The Bone Dragon
everything is tinged with ifs and buts. I love both types of book as a reader and as a writer: different situations call for different books, as do different issues. There are so many stories in my head and I just want to tell them, whether they’re YA contemporary or adult historical or fantasy or …

Your writing relies on subtext, leaving a lot to the reader’s imagination. Why?

It’s really important to me not to take control of the reader’s imagination, especially regarding moral issues and what the characters look like. When writers dictate to readers, they rob them of the chance to make a book their own by reading creatively. I know that’s not to everyone’s taste, but it’s very much to mine as a reader
and
writer. Readers bring a lot to the table: I want to leave room for them to do so.

I believe passionately that books should capture the diversity of real people in the real world. In a film, what you see and hear is fixed: if diversity is not built in, the viewer cannot add it. In a book, this is not the case: unless the author specifies that all the characters are white or straight or physically healthy (or makes this evident through implication) then it is up to the reader. I would rather urge readers to make their own inner worlds as diverse as the outer one than dictate how they should people their imagination.

You studied at Cambridge – was the book based on your experiences? Did you play any pranks?

Nick’s story isn’t mine, but his feelings about Cambridge mirror my own, especially in terms of how beautiful it is and how that is always a source of happiness – though not always sufficient
for
happiness. Cambridge is beautiful in the way that all the best fairytales are: full of wonder, magic, and cruelty. As for pranks … that would be telling – but I have bridge-hopped!