Research is one of my favourite stages of crafting a story. For Fed to Red Birds I did taxidermy workshops, took online Icelandic lessons, pored over the paintings of Breughel and Dûrer, translated fortune-telling cards from a Reykjavik flea market, visited Cabinets of Curiosities in Russia and Melbourne, watched online auctions of Victorian mourning jewellery, and followed aurora forecasts on my phone each week. For one scene in my book where a character praises a young goth band in Reykjavik, I tried to teach myself bass to their songs. 

I’ve never been one to do things by halves. 

For a writer, sometimes it’s difficult to tell when a line of interest has climbed out of a story and become something stronger, more salient, wrapping itself around your ankle and tugging for attention. My bookshelves bear witness to this. I have, over the course of my life, deep-dived into the following: Riot Grrrl punk, the Black Death plague, the Berlin Wall, the Romanov royal family, Sid and Nancy, Finnish mythology, voodoo, Elvis, Flemish architecture, cowboys, Lady Jane Grey, the Bruxellois dialect of Belgium, Gothic history, vintage circus posters, Brigitte Bardot, New Orleans cuisine, Duran Duran and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I recently moved house and from a book of medieval history, out slipped pages and pages of my teenage handwriting detailing the family tree of the Plantagenet royals, century by century. 

There’s a fine line between passion and obsession, and I haven’t always known which side to stand on. But I can’t write any other way. If I’m not enthralled by my subject, how could a reader be? I wrote about Afi’s book for so long, the original Fed to Red Birds, that I felt a sense of grief that it didn’t actually exist. And just between us, I did pull a page from my notebook and place it gently, reverentially, in my mouth, and swallow. 

I wanted to explore the hold obsession can have on people, and the dark place in the mind it occupies, especially when compulsion blooms from it. I suffered dreadfully from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as a child. I counted, fretted, and closed my eyes in the car in case I paired number plates incorrectly and caused my whole family to perish. That’s an extraordinary pressure for a child. The menace and melancholy followed me, at times, into adulthood too. 

But I’ve learned, for the most part, to keep it contained within the pages of a book. I can pour this passion into a character like Elva, who wants to release the hold her grandfather’s book has on her, yet at the same time worries her hands will feel so empty without it. Her mouth, too. 

Her fixation on Iceland, though… well, I understand that, I really do. And I suspect it’ll be one obsession that neither of us ever really manages to let go of.