Alex Ritany

Alex Ritany is a lifelong reader and writer. When they’re not at the keyboard, you can find them hosting tabletop game night, working on illustrations, or at their other keyboard composing music. Ritany’s love of art, music, and the western Canadian landscape regularly spills into their writing, which tends to feature complex friendships, twisty romances, and explorations of queerness.

They live in Calgary with their roommate, cat, and dice collection. Dead Girls Don’t Say Sorry is Ritany's debut novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I love titles that leave readers asking a question, and Dead Girls Don’t Say Sorry does that marvellously. We know why dead girls don’t say sorry—hard to say sorry if you’re dead, after all, unless we’re dipping toes in a whole different genre—so the other half of it shouts: What does this dead girl have to say sorry for?

That’s the question Dead Girls is asking. What awful thing did Julia do that Nora is haunted by as she processes her own grief and survivor’s guilt?

Another core facet of this story is about healing without closure. When we were bouncing title ideas around, two other options were Dead Girls Can’t Say Sorry and Dead Girls Won’t Say Sorry, both of which speak to the frustration of trying to move on without ever understanding why someone treated you poorly.

Don’t, can’t, won’t—regardless, Nora has a lot to process, and I think the title does a wonderful job of priming readers to be asking the right questions.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage reader self would be delighted that we’re writing at all. At that point we’d given up on most things, including that childhood dream of being an author, so it would be deeply encouraging to know that I’m now writing what we’ve always loved to read.

I don’t think my teenage reader self would be shocked about the contents of the story, though I imagine they’d be startled we were ever brave enough to open up about what we experienced with our own friendships (even if Dead Girls is a totally different story than ours was).

Nora’s story is such an emotional rollercoaster, I know my past self would be so touched to see us reflected on the page, even if they acted like they were too cool to cry over a made up story. (Spoiler: they weren’t.)

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Most often when I start a novel, the ending is solidly set in stone. With Dead Girls, I knew exactly where the story was going—to tell a story in two timelines, you almost have to know all of the details of the “past” timeline in order to let it influence the “present”—and I meticulously planned each chapter before starting.

Of all of my novels, I stuck mostly closely to the outline with Dead Girls, because the web of it is so complex that I knew I’d get lost without it. What goes where? How do the themes of each moment in the story affect the chapters before and after it?

That being said, I often leave the beginnings of my novels for last. Openings tell you so much about a story, and it’s a lot easier to be precise when you know where you’re headed.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I always find a piece of myself in my narrators, even when I don’t mean to. Once, my agent asked me, “You always write yourself in, don’t you?”

Yes. Even in my most ‘different’ narrators, I’ll always go back and find I base a part of them off of a part of me. They almost always get my sense of humour, and there are some fundamentals on how I see the world that stay consistent from character to character. Sometimes I have to dig a little to find where I am in a narrator, but in the case of Nora, I’m everywhere.

Throughout both timelines, Nora is simultaneously a little too optimistic about people and bewildered about them, traits I would absolutely use to describe myself through the ages. Why wouldn’t people mean what they say? Why wouldn’t I trust the people who have had my back? Her journey of discovering betrayal strongly echoes my own, and I see my teenage self most clearly in her voice out of all of my characters.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

In terms of media, music always plays a huge role in how a book lands out of my head. I make playlists for every novel, and they help me set tone and find the specific spot in my brain where that story lives. I’d be lost during edits without music.

More importantly, though, I think that the nature of Dead Girls shows exactly how much the people around me influence what I write. I haven’t directly written somebody from real life into a book since I was about fourteen (you know who you are, and I appreciate you), but I love trying to capture little bits and pieces of my friends and acquaintances in what I’m writing.

Nobody in Dead Girls is a one-to-one of anyone I’ve ever met—where’s the fun in that?—and Julia especially in all her nasty glory is the most made-up of all of the characters, so the aspect I take home with me to write about is always the same: how did that person make me feel? How do they interact with a room? How do they make other people feel? It’s always a lot of fun to dissect, and even more fun to put on the page.

Visit Alex Ritany's website.

--Marshal Zeringue