Joe Heap on why he wrote a love story between two women
It’s the question that comes up most often about my book, The Rules of Seeing – why did you decide to write a love story between two women? It’s a fair question. I am a straight man. We are living at a time where, quite rightly, people are questioning who has the right to tell certain stories, what counts as appropriation, and what counts as ‘authentic’.
For me, the answer to the question starts with not one book but two. I had an idea for a novel in which a blind person learns to see as an adult. I had an idea for another book in which someone is trapped in an abusive relationship. I had main characters sketched out for both these books – Jillian ‘Nova’ Safinova for the first and Kate Tomassi for the second. But as much as I loved the characters, neither of the book ideas seemed to have enough story to sustain an 80-thousand-word novel.
It was only when I thought of combining the two stories – and making it a love story between Kate and Nova – that I felt I had a book worth writing. So I had a choice. I could change the gender of one of my characters and write another heterosexual romance. Or I could keep the characters as they were, as I had grown to love them, and step out of my comfort zone.
There were several practical reasons for me choosing the second option. But the bigger reason, the more truthful one, is that I wanted to. I wanted to write a positive, hopeful story about women who love women. Despite the darkness of our times, I’ve seen so many positive things arising from the optimism and campaigning of the LGBT community, like the historic votes in Ireland and Australia. I wanted to write something which celebrated that optimism.
If The Rules of Seeing stands for anything, it is that love is love, without exceptions or limitations imposed by someone else. We are all familiar with that ‘someone else’, either at a political or a personal level. In my novel, that other person takes the form of Kate’s husband. That person is always wrong. Love can be startling, it can be inconvenient, but it can never be wrong.
Whether I have written a good book is not for me to say. But I will always be happy that I was able to introduce Kate and Nova, and that some people took them into their hearts.
Originally published at harpercollins.co.uk