AUTHOR INTERVIEW: GABRIELLE WILLIAMS

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: GABRIELLE WILLIAMS

Gabrielle Williams is a Melbourne author who wrote a delicious book called Beatle Meets Destiny, which I reviewed last month.

Gabrielle feels like she has teenagers over at her house all the time, so she decided to use them for material while they used her food, drinks and couch space. She lives in Melbourne and works in advertising (but don't hold that against her).

As I said in my review, Beatle Meets Destiny was hilarious, shocking, beautiful - one of the major highlights was the fact that she managed to weave such likeable characters with unlikeable traits, although, as she said in the Readings interview (more about that below):

Beatle is a very endearing character, despite the fact that he is cheating on his girlfriend. He’s not a bad guy – just a bit inexperienced and confused. Was it difficult for you to get this balance right?

I think Beatle is gorgeous. Kind of like my dream boyfriend – except for the cheating on his girlfriend part (that, and the fact that he’s eighteen and I’m … a fair bit older). But I think you’re right; he gets himself in a mess mainly because he’s confused and inexperienced. If he just tried a little bit of honesty, things wouldn’t go so horribly pear-shaped. But he’s trying, in his own funny way, not to hurt Cilla. Maybe that’s why he’s endearing – his heart’s in the right place, even if his lips aren’t!

Just a gorgeous book.

I had it recommended to me long before I *finally* read it. You will love it!

Also if you're interested, I found this fantastic little interview with Gabrielle at Readings, and also another interview/review on Australian Women Online.


Gabrielle recently answered the following questions for Literary Life:

1. What can readers expect from Beatle Meets Destiny?

You might be surprised to hear I find that a very tricky question to answer. If I talk it up, it sounds like I’m being boastful, but if I talk it down no-one will want to read it! Maybe it’s best if I tell you what other people have said about Beatle Meets Destiny, and that way you get a good idea of what to expect, without me sounding like a self-important prat. There’s a website called Good Reads, and if you go on there you’ll find some reviews which have all been pretty positive. A guy called Andrew gave it a five star rating and said, ‘There is so much to love about this book’; a girl called Lanna Nguyen also gave it five stars and said, ‘I thought this was a really good book, read it in 4 hours’; and a girl called Jess rated it three stars and said, ‘Great debut for a new voice in Australian literature. The climax was funny with a Much Ado About Nothing-like shenanigans’. So hopefully your readers can expect a funny read with a climax that reaches Shakespearean proportions!!!

2. What was the significance of having The Beatles name references? Were The Beatles specifically chosen or could it have been any band?

I thought it would be quite funny and burdensome if you had a famous person’s name: it seemed to say alot about your parents and also open up lots of opportunities for comedy. I don’t think any other band would have worked for my story quite as well as The Beatles. The only comparable band would perhaps be the Rolling Stones, but to have a main character called Mick Jagger seems to stretch the boundaries of believability for some reason, whereas to have a main character called John Lennon seems kind of normal with only a twinge of weirdness. I think characters’ names are so important when you’re writing a book, I can get quite hung up on it until I find exactly the right name for each of them. Then, when I find the name, I seem to find my story as well.

3. A lot of the issues in the novel are paramount to teenagers: what was your research for the novel like?

The research I did was mainly accidental and happened in my kitchen. I’ve got three kids, and two of them were teenagers at the time that I was working on ‘Beatle Meets Destiny’. I suppose I just noticed things with them and their friends and maybe sometimes I might have eavesdropped into their conversations when they didn’t know I was listening. Okay, I eavesdropped alot, I admit it. But I also remember quite clearly some of the issues from when I was a teenager, and while it’s different these days, there are still plenty of things that are the same.

4. How did you think of the idea to insert the twins interviews every so often?

I’m not sure where that came from. I just liked the idea of throwing in these random stories, and then at the end of the book when the reader has decided all these twin stories have no relevance whatsoever, you find out exactly how they all fit in to the story. I also quite liked the idea of throwing in random stories - almost like ad breaks in a tv show - to break the rhythm and surprise the reader a little.

5. Clearly a lot of thought went into the final major scenes (at Destiny's house) - the action and drama was fantastic but never once did you loose the reader's attention or make it seem unbelievable, which is an extremely hard feat. How difficult was it to write? Did you always envision everything to explode at once?

The final major scenes did take a while to write. I wrote version after version, with my editor screaming out ‘more chaos more chaos’ after each edit until she was satisfied that it was well and truly calamitous. I wouldn’t have been half as cruel to Beatle as she made me! But I love that it all comes to a head, that so many people are there to witness his humiliation, and that there was no way around it but for him to tell Destiny the entire truth (even if he managed to lie to everyone else who was there).


Thank you, Gabrielle!
For more information, you can check Penguin's site
and my review of Beatle Meets Destiny.