Sarah Easter Collins

Sarah Easter Collins is a writer and artist. A mother to a wonderful son, she has worked extensively in the field of education, teaching art in the UK, Botswana, Thailand, and Malawi. Collins now lives on Exmoor with her husband and dogs, where she loves running and wild swimming. She is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course.

Collins's debut novel is Things Don’t Break On Their Own.

My Q&A with the author:

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

As a title, Things Don’t Break On Their Own implies the involvement of outside forces: things can break, and more significantly, so can people, but none of that happens by itself, and this is certainly a true reflection of the nature of the story. A reader will discover two distinct families in Things Don’t Break On Their Own. Laika and Willa’s family is all about appearances, to the point that they are obsessed with not having any of their cracks showing, whereas in Robyn’s family, everything can always be fixed, mended, saved for later and made better. They are loud, messy and their cracks are visible and worn with love.

When a bowl breaks at Robyn’s house, her father shows the two girls how they can use the Japanese art of Kintsugi to mend it. I love the idea behind Kintsugi, that something can be made more beautiful by the very act of mending it. Robyn comes from a family where things break all the time, but vitally things – and people – are treasured. So healing is a big theme of the novel, and something I hope my reader will take away from the story.

What's in a name?

In Things Don’t Break On Their Own I named the missing sister Laika, after the little Russian stray dog that became the first dog in space. That is explained in the book as her having been born on the anniversary of the day that Laika, the dog, was shot up into space, but what I wanted to convey by using that name, was the idea that we, as people, are somehow capable of holding completely contradictory information in our heads: that we can know the truth of something, especially something unpalatable, and yet we sometimes present that information, even to ourselves as well as outwardly, as somehow being acceptable. If you google images of the name Laika you will find plenty of cartoon images depicting a little smiling, seemingly happy dog apparently flying a rocket. You can even buy little plastic rockets for your children with a little dog inside, and for me, that is a fundamental reworking of the truth of the treatment meted out to a living, sentient creature in the name of science.

So in terms of exploring that theme in terms of my story, from the outside, the Martenwood family may look like they have it all. But what is presented to the outside world, and the reality of their lives inside that family unit, are two different things. With the notable exception of Laika, they are all aware that they are maintaining a fiction to the outside world.

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

I didn’t have a huge amount of confidence as a youngster, my teenage self would be blown away to know that I’m published at all. But I always loved to write.

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

I had the opening scenes with Robyn’s family written down for a long time. Those characters came to me in a way that felt fully realised but for a long time but I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I knew I wanted somebody to go missing in the story, and at first I thought it was going to be Robyn’s brother, and that’s where I got stuck, because – and this is obvious to me now – he was never, under any circumstances – going to go missing from that family. But then I went to a dinner party where one man (loud, wealthy, self-important) dominated the entire meal, and I suddenly realised that the missing child would not from Robyn’s family at all, but from another family altogether (i.e., that man’s family!) and suddenly I had a whole story. I was writing so fast from that point on that I was finding it almost impossible to sleep.

The very last scene also felt very ‘complete’ to me too and is almost exactly as it was originally written, but I should say that throughout the editing process, a lot of other things changed. I had some great editors.

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

I think I probably ‘occupy’ all of the first-person characters as I write them, so there are elements of me in Robyn, Willa and Laika. My characters begin to feel very real to me. Putting them through hard things can, without exaggeration, honestly make me weep.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Definitely music! I had a Spotify playlist which I made as I was writing the story. It included any songs I had referred in the text but also music which felt to me like ‘theme tunes’ for certain of the characters: for instance, "More Milk" by Penguin Café captured Robyn’s upbeat personality for me, and "Sometimes" by Goldmund, Willa’s hesitance and uncertainty.

I spent a lot of time on a boat as a child, and the night-time scenes at Robyn’s family home undoubtedly grew out of my memories of that time. As a family we spent many nights moored somewhere out on the water, together but isolated from the rest of the world. Our only source of entertainment was each other, and we would spend our evenings playing cards, talking and watching the stars. So all that is missing from those scenes is the hiss of a gas lamp, and the rhythmic sound of rigging tapping against a mast.

Visit Sarah Easter Collins's website.

The Page 69 Test: Things Don't Break on Their Own.

--Marshal Zeringue