Emily Spurr Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

A conversation with Emily Spurr, author of A Million Things, heartfelt debut following fifty-five days in the life of ten-year-old Rae, who must look after herself and her dog when her mother disappears.

How would you describe A Million Things?

It's a hopeful novel, I think. It's about grief, resilience, vulnerability and the importance of connection and community. It deals with quite dark subject matter, there's no escaping that, but at its heart it's a hopeful novel.

A Million Things follows fifty-five days in the life of ten-year-old Rae, who has to look after herself and her dog when her mother disappears. What inspired this idea?

The idea of the story came from my own life, though I'd like to emphasize that Rae's story is not my story, I am not Rae. But for a long period of my life, most of my twenties, in fact, I suffered from mental illness and the associated depression and anxiety that went along with that. It was a dark and traumatic time for me and those who loved me. I still have nightmares about that time and I wake from them panicked and feeling sick. It was after one of these dreams, as I stood in the shower washing the night out of my hair, that I considered what would have happened if I'd had a child in all that chaos and trauma. What would their life have been like? Could they have survived that? What sort of person would you need to be to survive that? And Rae was born, her voice speaking to her absent mum...